In the town of Llanidloes, Wales, you’ll find camping sites, guest houses, bistros and craft shops. What you won’t find is a strain of setter once known as the Llanidloes Welsh Setter, now extinct. The strain was already starting to fade away when Edward Laverack wrote his book, “The Setter,” in 1872, and while Laverack didn’t express his sentiments on the loss of this breed, he did describe them as “good, hardy and enduring…in their own country they cannot be beaten, being exactly what is required for the steep hill sides.”
These dogs were large and milk-white, or “chalk white,” as it was called in Wales, and sometime appeared with a lemon patch over an eye. The breed had a coat as “curly as the jacket of a Cotswold sheep,” but not just curly, but hard textured and “as unlike a modern fashionable setter as it is possible to imagine.” These dogs had longer heads, proportionally speaking, and were not as refined as, say, the English Setter, but they were smart, “handy,” and excelled at close work on woodcock and snipe.
Early descriptions of a breed long gone help today’s breeder understand their own breed better when it may have figured in their breed’s ancestry. Llanidloes Welsh Setters were thought to have been used to enhance the Curly Coated Retriever (certainly the Llanidloes’ coat description sounds familiar with regards to the Curly Coat), and it’s possible that the Llanidloes factored into the distant background of some of today’s setters, as well.
David Hancock wrote in, “Bird Dogs – Losses and Gain”: One of the sadnesses in gundogs lies in the loss of old breeds, either through a lack of recognition or simply indifference to their fate. The English Water Spaniel once featured in the Kennel Club Stud Book, but is now lost to us. A number of distinct forms of setter were never perpetuated. The milk-white, curly-coated Llanidloes Setter would have provided a most distinctive element in our list of native setter breeds, had it survived.”
Image: Early Curly-Coated Retriever & Flat-Coated Retriever Dogs Antique original chromolithograph from 1881 is available at AntiquePrintEmporium