On one night in 1888, tens of thousands of English sheep fled their fields at once
by Ellsworth Toohey · Boing BoingIt was around 8 p.m. when, on a dark night in early November 1888, every sheep across roughly 200 square miles of Oxfordshire decided, all at once and for no apparent reason, to leave. Tens of thousands of them broke from their fields and pens and ran into the night. Farmers who went out the next morning found them miles from home, wedged into far-off field corners, jammed under hedges, and obviously terrified. Nobody saw what set them off, and nobody ever figured it out.
The episode is now called the Great Sheep Panic of 1888, and it remains one of the better Victorian unsolved mysteries. A piece in The Times on November 20 of that year ruled out the obvious culprit, noting that "malicious mischief was out of the question because a thousand men could not have frightened and released all these sheep." A second, smaller panic happened near Reading the following year, which only deepened the puzzle.
The weather that night was odd: pitch black, with intermittent lightning. In 1921, a writer in Nature pointed to that, plus the disposition of sheep, which the article called "notoriously timid and nervous animals." That covers individual sheep getting spooked. It does less to explain how thousands of separate flocks, miles apart, all bolted in the same hour.
The episode is preserved in a strange tone of calm Victorian record-keeping. The Times printing solemn dispatches about runaway sheep. Nature, decades later, gravely citing the temperament of the species. A 200-square-mile section of English farmland waking up to find every flock miles from home, and no agreed-upon reason in the 137 years since.
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