Feral goats have had some bad press but in Galloway they are part of the mountains — and they produce fabulous meat, reports Patrick Laurie
Credit: Duncan Ireland
Galloway is famous for its goats. Some of the old herds have been living wild since the days of Robert the Bruce and, while they can’t be classified as truly native, it’s hard to ignore centuries of freedom and independence. It’s not uncommon to find goats on the loneliest hilltops during the summer months and I’m often cheered by the jolly sound of their bleating in steep, desolate mountain places between Newton Stewart and Carsphairn.
The Galloway Hills have some excellent place names to describe steep cliffs and treacherous mountain passes. When I was a teenager, I found an immaculately preserved billy goat’s skeleton in a lonely spot called Nick o’ the Dungeon. Ignoring the horrible smell, I pulled off the skull and brought it home on my back.
After a couple of years to weather in the rain, it came indoors and I wrote “Nick o’ the Dungeon” on its forehead to mark its point of origin. The horns hang on the wall like a satanic altar and it has sometimes been a useful incentive to enforce good behaviour among visiting children: “Finish your vegetables, or I’ll have to send for Nick.”
Most traditional writers and sportsmen thought of these goats as wild, but modern conservationists and foresters describe them as feral. The word carries negative connotations of dirtiness, danger and brutality. We have a strong population of wild boar in Galloway but whenever a cull is required, they are described as feral pigs by the authorities. It’s easier to endorse the killing of a feral animal because the assumption is that it is causing a problem. That logic sits badly with goats, which have been living wild for 700 years, but there’s no denying that they are treated as an irritant or obstacle.
DWINDLING
The 20th century has not looked kindly upon wild goats in Britain. In his excellent 1972 book Wild Goats of Great Britain and Ireland, G Kenneth Whitehead described a number of herds across the UK. Many upland herds were exterminated in large numbers following World War II. They continued to dwindle and there’s now only a handful of herds that can be traced back to the days before sheep became commercially dominant.
There are plenty of goats in Galloway but their range has drastically contracted to a few localised areas, particularly in the vast massif around Cairnsmore of Fleet and out along the Rhinns of Ke
