From Orkney to Builth Wells
2011-09-07

Lleyn sheep breeders Michael and Martin Cursiter will be making a 1300 mile round trip from Orkney to sell twelve of their finest rams at the NSA Wales & Border Ram Sales at the Royal Welsh Showground this month.

Michael Curtiser

The sale is traditionally regarded as the biggest of its kind in Europe and this year will offer nearly 6,000 sheep from more than twenty breeds, but the sheep from the Laga Flock on the Orkney Isles will have travelled the furthest. The journey will begin at 8am on Saturday 17 September and involve a one and a half hour ferry crossing to Caithness, then an overnight stop at Carlisle before reaching Builth Wells on the Sunday afternoon.

Michael Cursiter says everything will be done to ensure that the rams have a comfortable journey.

The brothers are hoping to show them in the breed society sale late on the Sunday afternoon.

He says: “This is our first trip to the sale. We’ve got twenty-nine registered rams and 18 unregistered rams to sell this year and we want to get our name a bit more widely known.

“We had a promising bunch of ram lambs last year and so we thought we would try the Builth sale. It’s a standard we feel we can match as over the last four years we’ve had six top prices and five second top prices at Society sales.

“We’ve been warned though that it might be hard work. We’ll be new exhibitors and people like to buy from known exhibitors.”

Laga Farms first started breeding Lleyn sheep back in 1997 and now run 800 pedigree females. The breed is becoming more popular in Scotland and the Lleyns are known for their good lambing percentage, ease of lambing, and good mothering ability.

The Cursiters have worked hard to improve the skin and conformation of their flock. They also run a hundred commercial suckler cows, 30 pedigree Limousins and 5 pedigree shorthorns.

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