If rain and rainbows are characteristic of Harris, then so are the ubiquitous sheep. We had not gone there to photograph them, but in the end, I found myself doing a little project on them.

Wikipedia says there are under 2000 human inhabitants of Harris. I can't find the number for the sheep, but they must represent a large multiple of that: they are everywhere. Most of them are of the Scottish blackface breed; smaller numbers of black Hebridean sheep are there too.

The ewes roam free on the moors, hillsides and marshy areas, their farmers identified by splashes of colour painted on their backs, and by tags in their ears. The only rams we found were segregated in smaller fields, a bit like large pens.

The ewes have smaller horns than the rams. Ram horns curl out in spiral shapes, with bony interiors covered by wrinkled keratinous carapaces. For the most part, the ram's spirals curl away from the face, allowing uninterrupted vision. But in some cases, (as shown in the opening picture) the horns curl in front of the eyes, blocking, as far as I could tell, all forward vision. The farmers seem to cut some of the horns to restore vision. In rarer instances, the horns themselves look to grow so close into the face that they would grow into the jawline: the farmers had cut these back too.

The ewes show an insouciance towards vehicles traveling on the roads that borders on suicidal. Especially after dark on some of the narrower roads, drivers have to weave their way past ewes lying in the middle of the carriageway. However, they are less blasé about cars when they are within a roadside barrier. Some of the roads have steel safety barriers on each side which the sheep cannot (or generally do not) jump over. This does not stop them from making their way inside the barriers somehow to graze on the edge of the road. Panic sets into them when cars pass close by, and they cannot run straight off the road but are trapped by the barriers.

Farming sheep must come with quite an overhead on Harris. Quite aside from the remoteness, and the wide areas the sheep roam, there is clearly a death rate, and not just on the road. Phil climbed up and down the hillsides more than the rest of us, and found the remains of sheep skeletons surprisingly frequently: he has several in situ still life (still dead??) pictures of sheep bones. Nonetheless, Harris sheep provide wool and meat, as well as much needed jobs in the local economy.

OK, this is an eccentric post - pictures of sheep for crying out loud! - but you can no more convey the feeling of being on Harris by ignoring them than you can by ignoring the rain and rainbows.