Our Heritage and Mission
At ShepherdExperience, we are passionate about preserving Ireland’s rural traditions. Since our inception, our mission has been to offer visitors an immersive thoughtful experience rooted in real work, generational knowledge and a deep training philosphy.
Visitors aren’t just watching dogs work, they are being brought into a living tradition with purpose and meaning. We aim to educate and inspire, showcasing the bond between shepherds and their dogs, and celebrating Ireland’s rich agricultural heritage.
Meet the Shepherds
Meet Our Team
Pat Molloy
Wicklow sheep farmer
Pat has a lifetime of experience in traditional Irish sheep farming and is passionate about passing down age-old techniques. Pat also works with the Irish movie industries and has performed many roles including shepherding for the TV series of The Vikings.
Paddy Fanning
Paddy is a world renowned sheepdog trainer who started out as a sheep farmer in Wicklow. Paddy grazes his sheep on the Wicklow Mountians for much of the year over the lakes in Glendalough Paddy regularly travels to Europe and North America to share his ideas with other passionate sheepdog trainers for the betterment of the working Border Collie
Three generations of our family have been sheep farming in Co. Wicklow going back as far as 1960. During this time farming has consisted of growing wheat and barley and then evolving into a mixture of grassland with a cattle and sheep enterprise.
Nowadays we only farm sheep and it is a mixture of lowland grazing and extensive hill grazing. The hill farming element consists of grazing our sheep for 9 months of the year in the Wicklow Mountains. Much of this groundis in the National Parks ground surrounding the picturesque Glendalough lakes. This terrain demands that using Border Collie sheepdogs as a way to manage our sheep. For example, early in July ever year, a group of us will go out on the mountain with 8 or 10 dogs. We will gather the sheep on 3000 acres using our dogs and bring the sheep into the pens for shearing.