Bos primigenius in Britain: or, why do fairy cows have red ears?

Folklore, April, 2002 by Jessica Hemming

One definite possibility is that the fairy nature of these cattle was an exclusively Irish construct. There is no consistently red-eared white breed in Ireland now, nor is there any historical (as opposed to literary) evidence that there ever was. A. T. Lucas closes his book on ancient Irish cattle with the hypothesis that this breed was either known only from the tales of travellers who had seen them in Britain, or that if they had ever existed in Ireland itself, "their magical appearance in Irish literature can only be explained as a folk memory which had passed into folklore" (Lucas 1989, 245). By this logic, they would seem to be Otherworldly because neither composers of the tales nor their audiences would ever have seen any such beasts. However, there is no reason why there could not have been export of some red-eared white British stock to Ireland during the early medieval period. The animals would still presumably have been special, as they would have been exotic--and probably expensive--imports. There is some (albeit not conclusive) evidence that Ireland did have red-eared white cattle. The modern Irish hornless breed known as the Moylie is typically "red-brown with white faces, and a continuous white stripe along their backs, or almost entirely white with red ears and muzzles" (Bell 1985, 7). Moylie enthusiasts claim that they are an ancient breed, although, like most such claims of breed societies, this is probably impossible to verify. The first issue of the Royal Dublin Society Historical Studies in Irish Agriculture is a book on ancient Irish cattle breeds by Patrick Curran, who states that red-eared white cattle were known in Ireland until at least the 1820s. He cites the journal of a nineteenth-century Kilkenny farmer named O' Sullivan (McGrath 1936) in which these animals are among the breeds at the Callan fair (Curran 1990, 18). I have looked at this journal and could not find this reference, but as it is in three volumes without an index I could well have missed it. Even if it is there, it does not necessarily prove a long ancestry in Ireland, as they could have come straight from Britain (not from Chillingham, according to the Association, but from one of the now defunct herds elsewhere).

Conclusion

Whether there was, or was not, breeding stock in Ireland in the Middle Ages, it seems that the red-eared white coloration has always been unusual and has required careful selection. The cattle were probably never particularly numerous anywhere, and may have been especially scarce in Ireland where all the early accounts connecting them with the Otherworld come from. This rarity, combined with the general sacred associations of the colour white, could have been enough to make the cattle seem magical. This assumption would have been reinforced if the herds were the private preserve of religious houses or noble families. Alternatively, if they were already feral in the Middle Ages, their peripheral relationship to civilisation could have given them a kind of liminal status: being cattle, they were not quite wild beasts; but being feral, they were not tame either. Or perhaps it was not that the cattle were magical in themselves, but that the fairies were simply assumed to have the most expensive, exotic types known to mortals.