Beware the Golden Age of Cat-Sized Sheep

There’s a story the historian Fiona Watson once told us undergrads at Stirling that has lodged itself permanently in my mind: in medieval Scotland, sheep were tiny. Think less “woolly cloud with legs” and more “slightly disgruntled house cat who says ‘baa’.”

It’s a glorious image. You can picture medieval crofters trying to shear them with what were essentially oversized nail scissors, or chasing them around the croft like confused, fluffy footballs. And you can imagine the nostalgia that would spring up centuries later:

“Back in my day, our sheep were wee, nimble, noble creatures. A proper sheep! Not these hulking wool-beasts you see now.”

It’s funny because, of course, no one actually remembers this. The sheep themselves have long since been “improved” through centuries of human intervention, selective breeding, and economic priorities. What began as nature adapted to circumstance ended up as nature adapted to commerce. And then, predictably, we forgot we’d ever intervened at all.

So what?

The Myth of the Golden Age

There’s a temptation in modern society to reach for a Golden Age. A time when everything was simpler, purer, sturdier. When the nation was more noble. When life made sense. When everyone supposedly knew their place. It’s a comforting fable, in the same way imagining a field of cat-sized sheep is comforting: delightful, improbable, and totally disconnected from the complexities of reality.

The problem isn’t the yearning. Yearning is human.

The problem is the editing.

These backward-looking visions rarely remember the whole picture. It’s nostalgia with the contrast turned up, the shadows blurred, and all the inconvenient bits cropped out.

The sunlit British Empire without the exploitation.

The idyllic 1950s without the inequality.

The “simpler times” that were only simple if you were the right gender, class, or colour.

Selective Memory Is Not Harmless

When we forget that the present was shaped by thousands of deliberate choices, accidents, power struggles, and human interventions, we start telling ourselves stories about “returning” to things that never existed. And that is how we end up with policies chasing ghosts.

Worse, these ghost-chasing projects often demand we undo social progress to recreate an imagined past, usually one that only ever served a narrow slice of society.

It’s the political equivalent of deciding we should shrink all sheep back down to medieval size because it looks cute in an illuminated manuscript.

Cat-Sized Sheep as a Public Service Warning

So here’s my modest proposal:

Whenever someone says “we need to get back to how things used to be,” imagine a person in a suit solemnly proposing the National Sheep Shrinkage Strategy.

Think of the press conference:

“Our ancestors enjoyed a golden age of compact sheep. We have the technology. We can return.”

Meanwhile scientists in the background panic quietly and look for the exit.

The past is interesting. It’s rich. It’s textured. It’s full of things we’ve lost and things we’re better off without. But it is not a blueprint, and it’s certainly not a map.

If we’re going to build the future, we should do it with the humility of knowing the past was as complicated, unfair, messy, ingenious, and accidental as the present.

And maybe, just maybe, with the joy of knowing that once upon a time, some of Scotland’s sheep were the size of cats.

Because that is delightful.

And completely unrepeatable.

And exactly the kind of reminder we need that the past is stranger, and less idealised, than any chat about a Golden Age.