09/23/2026
The history of these great dogs featured. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Bw6yDivR2/
π Very nearly every Border collie alive today traces back to one dog born in a Border farmyard in 1893.
Old H**p 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 H**p was the result he had hardly dared hope for.
What made H**p extraordinary was what he did not do. Sheepdogs of the day worked loud and close, barking and running the sheep hard. H**p 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. H**p 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 π΄σ §σ ’σ ³σ £σ ΄σ Ώ.
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 H**p.
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 H**p 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.
