The dogs you see competing at Soldier Hollow are Border Collies—widely regarded as the finest herding dogs in the world. While dogs resembling today’s Border Collies worked alongside farmers as far back as the first century B.C., every modern Border Collie can trace its lineage to a single dog: Old Hemp.

Old Hemp was bred by Adam Telfer, a shepherd at Wark on Tweed, out of a quiet, sensitive black and tan bitch called Meg and a bold rough coated dog called Roy. Telfer said afterwards that he had deliberately put together two opposites, Roy’s power with Meg’s care, and that Hemp was the result he had hardly dared hope for.

What made Hemp extraordinary was what he did not do. Sheepdogs of the day worked loud and close, barking and running the sheep hard. Hemp worked in silence. He dropped low, fixed the sheep with a stare, and moved them with the pressure of his attention rather than with his teeth. They called it the eye, and nobody had seen it done quite like that before.

He started trialling at a year old and was effectively never beaten. And because he was so far ahead of the field, every shepherd in the Borders wanted a pup by him. Hemp sired a very large number of litters before he died in 1901, and modern pedigree work traces the overwhelming majority of working Border collies back to that one dog 

Think about what that means for the hill farms our families came off. The dog lying flat in the wet grass beside your great grandfather, that he swore at and fed scraps to and would not have sold for a month’s wages, was almost certainly descended from Hemp.

Telfer knew exactly what he had done. He had set out to breed the two halves of the perfect sheepdog and he had managed it, and Hemp needed almost no teaching. More than a century later, every trial field in the world is still working to a standard one Border shepherd set on purpose.

Old Hemp’s influence on the breed is unparalleled. Between 1906 and 1951, every winner of the International Sheepdog Championship—twenty-nine dogs in all—was descended from him. The standards for the breed’s working ability were later formalized by the International Sheep Dog Society, based largely on these bloodlines.

In the late 1800s, as sheep were imported from Scotland to North America, Border Collies arrived alongside them. Before barbed wire fencing, vast open ranges required dogs capable of managing large flocks over long distances. One skilled rancher and one exceptional dog could control a thousand sheep. The effectiveness of these dogs led American ranchers to request more from Britain, cementing the Border Collie’s role in North American ranching.

Renowned for intelligence, agility, stamina, and an innate ability to work livestock, the Border Collie remains indispensable on farms and ranches today. Never bred for appearance, the breed is defined—now as always—by its working ability. (Courtesy The Scottish Bloodline FB page)