English

Noun

sheeprun ‎(plural sheepruns)

1. (Britain, New Zealand, Australia) A sheep farm.
   • 1900, William Bulfin, Tales of the Pampas, quoted in 2003, Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity, 63,

     Over the richest sheepruns in the province of Buenos Ayres you may gallop during every hour of the summer without crossing a single rood of land that is not owned by some son of the Emerald Isle.

   • 1910, Catherine Helen Spence, Jeanne Young (posthumous completion), Catherine Helen Spence: An Autobiography, 2004, page 26,

     It had surprised him when he travelled overland to Adelaide to see from Willunga 30 miles of enclosed and cultivated farms, and it surprised me to see sheepruns close to Melbourne.

   • 1978, Juliet Astley (Norah Lofts), Copsi Castle, page 67,

     Here was she, cancelling her visit to the sheeprun, that part of Sheppey Lea of which she was most proud since it had been reclaimed literally from a waste of near-derelict land, all bracken and gorse and coarse grass.

   • 1979, Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England, page 169,

     When contemporaries complained that the extension of sheepruns left a trail of deserted villages they were commenting on the enclosures of the previous century, but later complaints bear witness to a more profound upheaval.

   • 1993, Eric Richards, Margins of the Industrial Revolution, Patrick O′Brien, Roland Quinault (editors), The Industrial Revolution and British Society, page 221,

     The irony was that many of the Scottish Highlanders found themselves manning sheepruns in the antipodes having been eliminated from their own economy by precisely the same forces that had caused the Highland clearances.

See also

• running of the sheep