The biggest drop was in Skye, Lochalsh and Lochaber, down by more than 8 per cent in the past eight years. The decline was over 7 per cent in Orkney, the Western Isles and Argyll, and more than 6 per cent in the north-west Highlands. These falls were twice the decline for Scotland as a whole. The downward trend has been in evidence for some time.

Is the long love affair between the Highlander and sheep coming to an end? Are we really in danger of losing the ubiquity of this familiar shaggy icon? Will motoring on single-track roads north of the Highland Line no longer be a slalom course around indifferent sheep? Will the sight of a peat-begrimed Blackface become a rare occurrence to be promised on wildlife tour brochures?

This is hardly likely to happen soon. Sheep production is still the most common farming activity in Scotland. About one third of our farms have some interest in it and there are around five million woolly inhabitants of the country, one each.

I don't know how many people in the Highlands would be pleased to see fewer sheep around, but the news of the falling sheep numbers reminded me of what I had heard in my courses on ecology and conservation in the 1960s.

This is summed up in a statement in a book published in 1945 called "Crofting Agriculture" by Frank Fraser Darling, a guru of environmentalists. In the chapter entitled "The crofter's sheep", he wrote "...my personal opinion is that sheep have been the curse of the West Highlands — sheep and hoodie crows".

Fraser Darling and his co-author J. Morton Boyd expanded on this theme in their classic work "The Highlands and Islands" in 1964. Sheep were bad because their coming had been part and parcel of the clearances and because they degraded the natural vegetation, preventing the regeneration of woodland and overgrazing the grass. Shepherds and flockmasters made things worse with muirburn.

The conventional wisdom back then — and, in some quarters, it may still be so — was that sheep farming meant slow destruction of the natural environment and cattle rearing was not nearly so bad.

Two hundred years of sheep farming, however, have granted the Blackface and the Cheviot rights of residence and the present decline is causing concern. The reasons for the fall are economic, the result of the dynamic interplay of lamb prices, rising costs, rural incomes deriving more and more from non-agricultural sources, and the threat from crazy EU regulations.

At the big annual sale of Cheviot lambs at Lairg in the middle of August, the largest event of its kind, the prices rose a bit on the previous year's — up by an average of £4 per head.

That was welcome but at the same time it was noticed that the total number of lambs sold was considerably lower than it had been some decades earlier. Some crofts and farms now have no sheep and have become forestry plantations.

It will probably be little comfort to Highland crofters to learn that the same thing is happening in other parts of Europe, where overall sheep production has fallen by 20 per cent in the last 15 years. Back in May, the Scottish Crofting Foundation welcomed a report on the EU sheep industry by an Irish MEP that called on the European Commission to act to reverse the decline.

The measures proposed included payments for sheep retention, support for traditional breeds and the abandonment of the proposal to introduce electronic tagging of the animals, a scheme dismissed as "ill thought out, illogical and unworkable".

At the end of last week a conference took place in Limoges in France to consider the issues facing sheep farming. The pre-meeting blurb spoke of the significant benefits of the industry "crucial to the continuing viability of the economic fabric in many difficult geographical areas".

Whether the commission will heed any sensible advice coming their way remains to be seen but sheep farmers in the Highlands will be hoping that they do.

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