The ages, plainly stated
Lamb is any sheep under a year old. Hogget sits between one and two years. Mutton is older than two. Those are the trade definitions, and they are more useful than anything printed on a supermarket label, where the word 'lamb' tends to cover a wide and sometimes misleading range.
Each age brings a different character to the plate. Lamb is mild, with fine-grained flesh and a fat that melts without asserting itself. Hogget deepens that profile — the flavour has had time to develop, but the meat remains tender enough to roast without drama. Mutton is something else entirely: rich, almost gamey in the best sense, with fat that carries real flavour but demands low, slow heat to give its best.
Why 'spring lamb' is complicated
Spring lamb is largely a marketing season rather than a precise description. Most British lambs are born in spring, which means they spend the following months growing. New-season British lamb therefore peaks from summer onwards — by autumn the season is well under way, and much of what you buy through winter into early spring is still last year's crop.
The Easter trade is a separate, smaller thing. Early lamb for the Easter table tends to come from breeds that lamb earlier or from imported stock, and it is typically lighter and younger than the main-season animal. 'British spring lamb' and 'Easter lamb' are not the same conversation.
The hogget and mutton revival
For a generation or two, mutton was unfashionable — associated with school-dinner stews and off-putting smells. Hogget barely had a name most shoppers recognised. What shifted things is a combination of chefs willing to put hogget on restaurant menus and smallholders who keep older animals and want to sell them honestly.
The argument for hogget is straightforward: more flavour than young lamb, with almost none of the extra effort that mutton requires. A hogget shoulder roasts much as a lamb shoulder would, but what comes off the bone has a depth that a four-month-old lamb cannot match. For anyone who finds commercial lamb a little bland, hogget is the obvious next step.
Mutton rewards those prepared to treat it on its own terms. A long braise, a slow-cooked curry, a whole leg given several hours in a low oven — these formats suit it well. Fat that seems heavy when mutton is cooked quickly becomes a basting agent over a long cook, producing a complexity that younger meat cannot approach.
What the animal ate, and where it lived
Age is only part of the flavour story. Salt-marsh lamb, grazed on coastal grassland flooded periodically by the sea, carries a faint mineral note that comes directly from the plants — sea purslane, samphire, marsh grasses — the animal has spent its life eating. It is not a brined flavour; it is subtler than that, a savouriness running through the fat as much as the muscle. (See our Gower piece for more on salt-marsh grazing, if published.)
Heather-grazed hill sheep tell a different version of the same story. The rougher, more aromatic grazing of upland moorland produces meat with a firmer texture and a slightly wilder character than lowland breeds reared on improved pasture. Neither is superior in the abstract — they are different, and knowing the provenance is part of knowing what you are buying. A label that states where the animal grazed is more informative than one that simply reads 'British lamb'.
A good independent butcher should be able to tell you both the breed and the farm. If they can, that knowledge is worth using.
How to approach buying each one
Lamb is the most widely available — forgiving to cook and at its freshest in late summer and autumn, despite what the Easter marketing suggests. Hogget is harder to find but worth asking for; an independent butcher or a direct-from-farm box scheme is usually the best route. Mutton is rarer still in conventional retail, but the same sources that stock hogget will often carry it.
If you are buying direct from a farm or smallholder, they will often use these terms precisely and with some pride. The language of hogget and mutton, once the preserve of the trade, has become a marker of producers who take the quality of older animals seriously.
