🐑 Balwen Welsh Mountain Sheep

The Balwen Welsh Mountain Sheep is a small, hardy breed with its roots in the beautiful Tywi Valley. Renowned for their resilience, they thrive with minimal supplementary feeding and are easy to manage, making them a practical choice for a wide range of keepers.

🌸 Ewes & Lambing

Excellent mothers: calm, attentive, and with abundant milk
Easy lambing with very few complications
Typically produce single lambs at their first lambing, with many going on to rear healthy twins under good conditions in subsequent seasons

🍖 Carcass Quality

Although small in size, the Balwen carcass is packed with flavour, making it an excellent addition to the freezer.

🧶 Wool

Graded: Soft/Medium
Medium-length staple: 5–7.5 cm
Versatile fibre suitable for a variety of traditional uses

🐑 The Balwen Welsh Mountain Sheep

The British Isles is home to many breeds of sheep — some introduced in recent years, while others have grazed these lands for centuries.

Among them, the Welsh Mountain Sheep serves as an umbrella term for several breeds native to Wales. Through generations of careful breeding and selection, these sheep have developed into distinct types — one of which is the Balwen Welsh Mountain Sheep.

🌿 Origin: The Balwen comes from a small area of Wales, the Tywi Valley.

❄️ Near Extinction: In the harsh winter of 1947, the breed was almost wiped out, with just one ram surviving.

📈 Recovery: Numbers slowly increased through the 1950s and 1960s, and by the 1970s, interest in the breed spread beyond the valley.

🏛️ Breed Society: In 1985, the Balwen Welsh Mountain Sheep Society was founded. While the population has continued to grow, the Balwen remains on the Rare Breeds Survival Trust’s Watchlist today.