Meet the sheep - and us!

There is always one pet lamb: Jessica with a newborn Southdown

Our Southdown duvets are a very rare commodity. In the first instance, of all the types of wool in the world, only Southdown wool really excels as a duvet filling.

This is because of the very dense nature of the wool which gives it a “cloud-like” bouncy texture. Yes, other wools are used in duvets – for example Merino and Texel but they simply don’t offer the same physical characteristics that give our duvets their wonderful feel and the resultant duvet has been described as “flat”.

Now the story gets even more interesting – only British Southdown wool is used in these duvets. New Zealand or French Southdown wool does not exhibit the same qualities we are looking for. But here’s the thing. We are a breeder of Southdowns and our farm is a member of the Southdown Sheep Society.

From this, we know that there are only about 1,800 pedigreed Southdown ewes currently living in the UK, one of which we proudly present here. You can see from her stubby legs, Southdowns are small sheep and their fleeces yield only 2-2.5kgs per shearing which is roughly equivalent to one animal per duvet per year.

So what we are saying is there is a severe limit to how many of these duvets can be manufactured annually and once they are sold, there are no more until the next year.

Meet Burt, one of our Southdown shearling lambs (born April 2010) captured here enjoying a summer afternoon at Scotland Farm. Wonder if she knows she is a little walking duvet?

We keep telling her how clever she is to grow such a wonderful fleece but she doesn’t pay much attention so we put it down to ladylike modesty. But the manufacturing process is also very special. We send our wool to a little village outside Milan in Italy where wool has been washed, scoured, processed and milled for more than 2,000 years.

All our research showed that this was the only place where our precious wool would be scoured to the optimal condition for our duvets. This little village is located at the foothills of the Italian Alps, sited so that for centuries the wool has been washed in the crystal clean water from the mountains.

The duvets are then made by a small co-operative syndicate, family businesses who have worked side by side over the generations. And then the finished products are finally shipped back to Scotland Farm, completing the circle and demonstrating a fully vertically integrated process from lambing, shepherding and shearing through to the manufacture of a totally natural product designed to give you a really good night’s sleep and one during which you will not lie awake counting sheep.