Chillingham

What do Chillingham cattle look like?

The Chillingham is a small, white animal with upright horns carried by both sexes. Its ears are red, and colour may also appear on the muzzle, the feet and around the eyes. In most White Park cattle the ears are black; in cattle, black is dominant and red is not. Bulls weigh around 300 kg and cows about 280 kg, which is light for a British breed. The build is described as primitive, without the blocky beef shape of White Park cattle.

Where does the Chillingham come from?

A written mention of the herd survives from 1645. Some say the cattle have been at Chillingham for seven centuries or more; the Countess of Tankerville claimed that before the 13th century they ranged a forest stretching from the North Sea to the Clyde. In the 13th century the king licensed Chillingham Castle to be crenellated, and a drystone wall may have been raised then to pen the herd, at a time of worry about Scottish raiders. Publicity once presented the breed as close to the aurochs; today it is thought more likely that they descend from medieval farmed cattle shut inside the park. The idea of a direct aurochs line was already doubted in the 1800s.

What the Chillingham is known for

These cattle are not tamed in any way and behave like wild animals, which gives some idea of how ancestral wild cattle may have acted. Breeding goes on through the year. Bulls hold home ranges that overlap with those of other bulls and herd members, and they spar with their neighbours rather than defend a fixed patch. The herd is very noisy, with calls that ring round the park, especially when a bull senses that a cow is in season. Traditionally one king bull sired all calves until a challenger displaced him, often violently.

How the Chillingham is bred and kept

The herd is left to mate on its own. Bulls have been found with testicular hypoplasia, a condition that may point to poor male fertility. Blood-group work in Edinburgh in the early 1960s was the first genetic study, and it showed how homozygous the herd is, as long inbreeding would predict. The same pattern appears in microsatellites and single-nucleotide polymorphisms. Mitochondrial DNA puts the breed in the T3 sub-haplogroup shared by most European cattle, with a few rare variants whose meaning is not yet clear. There is little variation in genes linked with disease resistance.

What the Chillingham is kept for

The herd is kept for its own sake rather than for milk or meat. The Chillingham Wild Cattle Association was formed in 1939 and became a registered charity in 1963, with the aim of studying and protecting the animals. They graze the park, and since the sheep flock was removed the pasture has recovered. Visitors come to watch them, guided on foot by a warden. Because they are bovine, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease would mean culling, so health checks and biosecurity are treated as urgent matters.

The land and climate of the Chillingham

The park is wood pasture: grassland dotted with big oaks, which many visitors read as a medieval landscape even though most of the trees went in between the 1780s and the early 19th century. The truly old trees are alders along the stream, coppiced in the mid-1700s and now about 250 years old. Because the land has escaped intensive farming, it holds a wide range of plants and animals, among them red squirrels, foxes, badgers, roe and fallow deer, and around 55 kinds of bird. As of 2022 the cattle have 330 acres to roam, with woods and farmland beyond.

Who keeps the Chillingham

The herd is looked after by the Chillingham Wild Cattle Association, which bought the park in 2005 with money raised from supporters. Ownership has changed hands more than once. When Lord Tankerville died in 1971 the cattle were left to the association, and after the estate was sold in 1980 a Northumberland charitable trust bought the park with help from the Duke of Northumberland, leasing it back for 999 years. A resident warden cares for the ground and leads visitors out to find the cattle.

Custom and folk tradition

Over the years a large popular literature has gathered around the herd. A woodcut by Thomas Bewick became famous, and the historian Simon Schama wrote of it as an image of great power and a landmark of British natural history. Victorian writers often linked the cattle to Roman imports, a view that later genetic work has pushed back against, supporting older archaeological findings. The claim that the herd descends in an unbroken line from the aurochs was questioned as long ago as the 1800s.

Keeping Chillingham cattle

No individual is handled or tamed. In the past the cattle were fed hay in winter in a way that crowded them together; the present system keeps them more spread out, so the old close-quarters social studies no longer match what happens now. Health monitoring is taken seriously and biosecurity is a top priority, partly because foot-and-mouth disease would mean the whole herd being culled.

Related breeds and crosses

Chillingham is grouped with the old white park cattle. Chillingham bulls were used in White Park breeding early in the 20th century, and genetic work does show a likeness between the two, but nothing has come back into the Chillingham herd, which stayed pure. On historical grounds the Vaynol breed is probably the closest relative. Some kinship with Scandinavian cattle has also been suggested. The breed is smaller and more primitive in build than White Park cattle, which carry the classic British beef shape.

Numbers, conservation and the herd book

In the summer of 2022 the herd held 138 animals, with males and females in roughly equal numbers. In March 2015 it was about 100. Numbers once dropped very low: after the severe winter of 1946-47 only 13 beasts were left. A second, reserve herd of about 20 head lives on Crown Estate Scotland land near Fochabers in the north-east of Scotland. Since the sheep were taken off the park, summer grass has been plentiful and fertility and body weights have gone up.

Questions people ask about Chillingham

Good reading and sources

• Chillingham cattle on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data