The meat is awesome. Not like any other lamb or hogget; almost like venison. Lean and very very tasty.
Several family members who "don't like lamb" polish off any amount of Castlemilk Moorit.
The fleece is a tricky one. Like Manx, it can be very short, and like many primitives it can be a bit scurfy. But if you get some clean fleece with a reasonable staple length, it's very fine and very lovely. IMO
. Deb Robson showed us how to spin it directly from the comb (I have the little Louet ones) and it's a doddle and very pleasant to spin that way.
So far I have found the Castlemilks to be less flighty than Manxes or Shetlands. All my sheep are pretty tame, but some of the Shetlands, Shetland crosses and Manxes use stone walls like vertical roads
, and no fence will really hold them if they have a reason for being somewhere else. So far, none of the Castlemilks has jumped or climbed. (
I haven't jinxed that now...)
I can't yet talk about how they are for breeding. I tupped both my gimmers last year; one was geld and the other had a dead lamb. She was proper poorly so I didn't set another lamb onto her.
They'll both go to the tup again this year. Something tells me that Goldie isn't a breeder and will be geld again, but hopefully Whirly will manage to have a live lamb and rear it this time.
I think they are lovely, elegant sheep. They are bigger many of the other primitives, certainly than Shetlands, Manxes, etc. I am hoping that once I get them breeding they will be as capable of lambing and rearing a commercial cross lamb as a Shetland or Manx.
Pure bred offspring would need to be sold as breeders if good enough, or as meat; wethers won't fetch much at all in the ring. I got about 55kgs usable meat in total off four 30-month old wethers, which is about 2/3 the amount you'd get off a small commercial fat lamb.
Good fleece will sell, but as it can be short and they are not huge sheep, it won't make you rich! However, being primitives they don't need a lot of feeding, so if you have the ground and like the look of them grazing on it...