Highland cattle before the cameras came

Those youngsters with the shaggy coats can bring a tour to a halt quite effectively, and Highland cattle are usually on the wish list before we have travelled very far from Inverness. We find them, of course, but once the photographs are taken, there is rather more to discuss than their appearance. A few centuries ago, a family keeping cattle in the North Highlands needed them to provide milk, produce calves and help pay the rent. However appealing the animal might be, it had to earn its keep on land where there were not many other ways of making money.

Even the familiar rusty-red coat is only part of the story, because black was once much more common, particularly among the smaller cattle of the western islands. Queen Victoria is said to have helped make red cattle fashionable through her preference for them, although the breed still comes in several colours. Whichever colour you favour, keeping them involves a compromise that farmers will recognise. They can live outdoors and graze rough ground that offers little prospect of growing crops, but they take longer to mature than many commercial beef breeds. You may spend less on housing, but you wait longer for a return, and there is still the winter feeding to think about.

Finding enough grazing without sacrificing the family’s crops meant using land well beyond the house, and up in the hills above the Strath of Kildonan, I can point out traces of how people did that. Among the rough vegetation are greener patches associated with earlier settlement and grazing, including the summer shielings where women and girls took the livestock. Moving the animals uphill kept them away from crops nearer home, while the women milked the cows and made butter and cheese that would help feed the family beyond the summer. Look across those distances and you begin to appreciate how much work went into keeping a few cattle, long before anybody could think about selling one.

When an animal was ready for market, at least it could make the journey on its own four legs, although getting it there in good condition required somebody who knew what they were doing. Drovers took cattle south towards buyers whose money helped support families far back in the Highlands, so there was a great deal riding on those journeys. In the audio blogcast, we follow the cattle towards market and discover why, after all that work, some families also had to pay protection money simply to stop their animals being stolen.

To learn more, listen to the blogcast or book one of our North Coast Explorer private tours.