Northern European short-tailed sheep

These sheep are generally small and have characteristic short "fluke-shaped" tails, broad at the base and tapering to a hair-covered tip.

Some types moult naturally in spring, allowing their fleece to be rooed (plucked) rather than shorn.

Breeding is usually strongly seasonal, with lambs being born in spring or early summer.

By the Iron Age, these had been replaced throughout northern and western Europe by somewhat larger sheep, still short-tailed, but with a fleece of more uniform texture and variable in colour.

These displaced the short-tailed sheep in most areas, and by the early nineteenth century, short-tailed sheep remained only in remoter parts of the west and north, including Scandinavia, the area around the Baltic, Ireland, Cornwall, the Highlands of Scotland, and various islands.