Counting Sheep

I received an email from the Wales tourism board (a country I must visit some day) that was pointing out less known reasons to visit. The first sentence jumped out at me for obvious reasons.

"You may already have heard about our three national parks, 641 castles and 11 million sheep throughout a country which is ideal for touring."

I forwarded it to Sean thinking he'd get a kick out of the random sheep statistic - which he did - and it led him on a search for more stats. Below are his quickly found findings:

• There are only 3 million PEOPLE who live in Wales! Almost 4 times as many sheep as people--which appears to be the largest imbalance of any nation of the region.
• In Ireland, they have 6 million people and 8 million sheep.
• In Scotland, there are 5 million people, and 9.5 million sheep.
• Also, UK overall has the most sheep of any EU member nation. Total UK sheep population was estimated to be 33.5 million as of 2007. With 22.5 million in non-England areas of the UK, that leaves 11 million sheep for a people population of 51 million in England proper.

In addition to wondering where they house and contain all these sheep, I'm also wondering how many yarn stores there are! Too few, I'm assuming, since when I was in Ireland there were none to be found.