About us

As a family we have always loved dogs but have only just recently had the time to dedicate fully to our passion and so we got our affix ' Cruaghaire' and our family started to grow.

The Human Pack

Let me introduce you to the humans in our pack.


Susan	Erin	Aidan	Stuart

Both Stuart and I have an obsession with genealogy and have traced our family trees back to the early 1500's and what better breed than the noble german shepherd whose lineage can be traced back to approximately 4 dogs in the 1860's. With the help of the german breeders who critique every dog that is born and keep detailed logs and information on these dogs from whom we can learn a bit more about the dog we have today. The internet has proved a valuable tool in this search.

We are also huge science and Sci-Fi fans. I have an honors degree in chemistry and worked in a lab for 15 years so have a solid grounding in science although what was missing was my love of biology and genetics.

We finally applied for our own affix in 2007 and got it... CRUAGHAIRE which is an amalgamation of Cruach Ardrain which is the name of a mountain in the area I used to hillwalk as a child and the name always made me smile and aoghaire which is gaelic for shepherd so we merged the two and got our affix.

We have since been bitten by the 'show bug' and Both myself and Erin have been learning how to handle GSD's in the show ring.

Erin has been doing her junior handling now and she is loving it and we are hoping that she can one day do all the handling for us here.

We have been having such a great time and cant thank Joe White and Mandy McAteer enough for their patience and taking the time to train the pair of us.

The Canine Pack

Jade is a lovely long coat Black & Tan. Jade was a mix of german style show lines and the old fashioned style shepherds from the 1970's. She was a very strong looking bitch and we fell instantly in love. She is fantastic company although a bit of a stubborn so and so !!! She is the matriarch of our pack.

We wanted to add to our furry family but after many months of looking we couldn't find anything that suited our needs so we decided to take a litter from Jade. This gave us our first home bred Cruaghaire bitch, Tia.

We did however long for a bit more and we started going to the GSD breed shows and got bitten by the bug. Why not try our hand at showing - so the search began for a nice wee show pup we could train and show. This time we found Toni. Toni was bred by Linda Barclay from Korzwin and her mum is a champion and her dad is a huge big long coated lad who we fell in love with when we saw him a few months before. So she has a phenomenal pedigree and we are hoping to get ourselves all trained up and get into the show ring.

Then completely by accident we stumbled across another stunning lady from a show background - Roxy ! Unfortunately after a few shows it was more than obvious that showing just isn't Roxy's forte but she does love her obedience training and is very good at it.

In 2010 Germany introduced long coat classes into their regional events and this has now filtered into the UK show scene. Now we can combine our love of long coats with showing and so it begins ...

We have met some fantastic people over the years and made some amazing friends in our travels and are proud to say we keep in touch with all our puppy owners (so far !) and some have also became very good friends.

It has been a fantastic journey so far and long may it continue...

The History.

GSD's were prominent in my family for many, many years and this must be where my love for them came from - passed down though the generations. I fell in love with the noble german shepherd and then found out that my family had always had them around. I was never able to dedicate the time to them that they needed due to working full time so when I gave up my career to be a full time mum the hunt was on.

These pictures are of my great grandparents and their german shepherd 'Dante'

So put all this together and you get ...

Cruaghaire German Shepherds

Send mail to cruaghaire@hotmail.com with questions or comments about this web site. Copyright © 2007 Cruaghaire Kennels Last modified: 01/08/12

Send mail to cruaghaire@hotmail.com with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 2007 Cruaghaire Kennels
Last modified: 01/08/12