At this time of year, our garden is encircled by cows grazing. Every weekday morning someone has to remember to shut the gate when we leave the house.
Some of the cows would just love to come into our garden and eat flowers and berry bushes, even though they have a couple of meadows full of vegetable matter all to themselves (there are only about twenty of them grazing on this hillside):
Anyway, this morning there was one cow opposite the gate, hiding behind a tree. She was standing there waiting for me to forget to shut the gate (it has happened from time to time).
They’re big for dairy cattle. I don’t know why they don’t just push it over.
When I came home she’d been joined by some of her friends.
A Bad Guide 
“encircled” sounds so much gentler than “surrounded”.
Yes. Funny, I started off with surrounded. I changed it because they aren’t tanks,.
We used to get the odd influx of cattle into our garden when I was a boy. They were making a bolt for it, to avoid being driven into the slaughterhouse. Yours look more tranquil.
Do they have many dairy cattle in Scotland? I think of them all being highland beef cattle, but I don’t really know.
Yes. The local beef cattle were Belted Galloways; the local dairy cattle (which predominated) were Ayrshires. Ayrshire stirks are on the lively side: they caused me to loup-the-dyke more than once.
I like the look of the Belted Galloways. I think ours are Ayrshires, though we have some Friesians too.
Stirk = heifer
Loup-the-dyke = leap the wall
OED on stirk: “The mod. application varies in different localities. In the midland counties generally the word denotes only the female; in Scotland it is chiefly applied to the male; in northern England and Lincolnshire it is applied to either sex, often with defining word as bull-stirk, cow-, heifer-, or quey-stirk.”
Our stirks were males. No “on the udder hand” jokes, please.
So, lovely stampeding cattle now, AJP?
These large beauties have beggared my today’s poor sparrow from Vilnius.
(Will it be caribou or elephants next with you, one wonders?)
Your cows look like plain NRF to me. The breed was developed in the mid-20th century by selecting animals from many local indigenous breeds. Norwegian WP says that some Holstein and Ayrshire genes were added to the pool.
In recent years a movement to revive the less efficient but often more hardy local breeds, e.g. Telemarkskyr, has gained some ground.
Norwegian WP says that some Holstein …
Strangely, only the nynorsk version says Holstein.