About Us

Loved, owned and shown by Keith Taylor and Sheila Mackinnon.
The story begins way back in 1980.
When Sheila bought her first Dalmatian puppy called "Sammy" and joined the North of England Dalmatian Club (now a Committee member editing Carriage Dog Chronicle & writing up show results). Sammy was very much a family dog, alternating between her gran, who lived with Sheila at the time, and her parents who lived just around the corner. he was never very obedient but he used to go to classes, where on a good day he might even win something. He also enjoyed agility. The main problem with that was he wasn't obedient enough to do it off the lead, so Sheila herself was pretty damn fit in them days too! Sammy lived life to the full and enjoyed a ripe old age of 14 years 6 months.

I met Sheila in early 1988 and on New Year's Eve of that year I joined the family. Knowing Sammy already there were no problems on that score. Not long afterwards two Rottweiler came to stay, initially for a couple of weeks which turned into 8 years! Sadly the Rottweilers died in the same year as Sammy, and so we were dogless and bereft of canine company for a while. That is until we went to the NoEDC open show at Cleckheaton in the March of 1996 and fell in love all over again with Dalmatians. About this time we also joined the British Dalmatian Club. At that show someone introduced us to Penny Somerwill (now Mrs Penny Ward) who had a litter of pups at the time. We went to see them and of course the rest is a foregone conclusion - we got "Monty". Getting "Ike" some two years later just seemed the natural thing to do.