08/09/2026
This is why Finlay and co are so at home on the fells 😀😍
Scotland very nearly lost one of its own dogs, and almost nobody noticed at the time. 🐶
The bearded collie was never a show dog. It was a working animal of the hill farms and the drove roads, bred for a job that would break most breeds. Its coat is long, harsh on the outside and soft underneath, and it sheds rain the way a thatched roof does. That coat is not decoration. It is the reason the dog could stand out on an exposed hillside all day in horizontal Scottish rain and keep working.
And it worked differently from the crouching, staring collie most people picture. The beardie moved stock by presence and by voice, barking and bouncing and pushing, which is exactly what you need when you are shifting half wild sheep and cattle off open hill ground rather than penning them in a neat field. Drovers used them to move herds hundreds of miles to the trysts in the south. 💙
What happened next is what happened to so much of rural Scotland. The droving ended. Farms changed hands and changed methods. The border collie became the standard working dog everywhere. By the middle of the twentieth century the old hill beardie had thinned out to almost nothing.
The breed survived largely because of one woman. In 1944 Mrs Olive Willison of Bothiemurchus asked for a Shetland sheepdog puppy and was sent, by mistake, a bearded collie bitch. She fell for the dog completely, went looking for a mate, and found a beardie by chance on a beach. From that pair, and the handful of working dogs still left, the modern breed was rebuilt.
A mistake in a delivery saved a Scottish breed.
They are still classed as a vulnerable native breed today, with very few registered each year. The dog that walked the droves with our people is still, quietly, hanging on.
Some inheritances need somebody to notice them in time.
