Products include: meat, wool, sheepskins and products derived from Manx Loaghtan.
The Manx Loaghtan is all we have left of a small primitive breed of mountain sheep which probably covered the hills of the Isle Of Man in their thousands until the eighteenth century.
Loghtan or Loaghtan is the Manx word for the "moorit" colour of the fleece. It may be derived from the two Manx words Lugh (mouse) and Dhoan (brown) or from Lhost dhoan (burnt brown).
Clothing of Manx Loaghtan wool was highly prized and as the numbers of mountain sheep declined, there was an attempt to select for the Manx Loaghtan-coloured fleece. Today this is the only colour to survive.
The sheep can be two-horned or four-horned although there may be more horns, and it can be polled.
The Manx mountain sheep is part of a remarkable pattern of survival of prehistoric short-tailed breeds of sheep found in isolated parts of North-west Europe, where they were not replaced by more developed breeds.
There was only a handful of Loaghtans left by the 1950s but since then numbers have steadily improved. Flocks were established in England in the early 1970s. In 1974 there were 15 flocks and by 1988 there were 69.
