Highland Cattle: Attribution: © Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0 |
For company, you’d have a large herd of long horned cattle: unpredictable, dangerous beasts. Most nights, you would sleep on the ground beside them.
At journey’s end, having sold the cattle, you’d earn
extra money by working at the local harvest before walking all the way home
again. You would do this year after year, in hot sunshine, clouds of midges and pouring rain.
To us, with our comfortable, mostly indolent lives,
this seems almost unbelievable, but it’s simply a description of the droving
trade which went on for centuries. Highland regions, such as the Welsh and
Scottish mountains, were best suited to pastoral farming, but to make a decent
profit the beasts had to be brought to market in more prosperous regions, where
higher prices were paid for meat.
No railways existed until the 1830s. There were no
road vehicles capable of transporting large numbers of cattle, and no useable
roads for such vehicles in any case. A huge amount of freight transport went by
sea and river, but the task of transporting several hundred unhappy steers by
small boats was expensive and difficult. And once landed, the cattle were still
a long way from the best markets.
The simplest solution was to walk the beasts to market,
step by step. Pigs, sheep and geese were also droved, with the geese fitted with sturdy boots for the journey by dipping their feet in tar.
I researched the droving trade for my book, The Drover’s Dogs. My knowledge is
slanted towards the Scottish trade, especially the journey from the Hebridean island of Mull in the west, to Lowland
Scotland’s great ‘Tryst’ or cattle market in Falkirk in the east. (‘Tryst’ means ‘meeting
place’ and, at the cattle trysts, sellers and buyers from all over Scotland met
to do business.)
The drover's road from Mull to Falkirk, from The Drover's Dogs |
A ‘drover’ could mean a herdsman who walked alongside
the cattle with his dog and perhaps owned a couple of the driven beasts to a
wealthy man whose main business was droving. Quite often, like Lachlan in my book,
they were crofters themselves who would be driving their own beasts to market and earned extra income by adding some of their neighbour’s cattle to their drove.
The drover might buy his neighbours cattle outright,
or he might simply promise to sell the cattle at the best price he could, and
pass on the money to the crofter, minus an agreed cut.
In about May of each year, a drover would start enquiring among his neighbours: Who wanted to send beasts to market and how many? Roughly around June, the drovers began herding the cattle together in one place. A man might gather together a large herd, and
had to remember who the owners of them all were, and what agreement
he'd made with them. Later, he'd have to remember how much the beasts
sold for. Some drovers
could read and write. Many were illiterate and probably used
tally-sticks to
help them keep account. They also, undoubtedly, developed accurate and
sharp
memories.
Highlanders didn’t have a good reputation throughout
most of the period and drovers were reputed to be lazy, drunken, dirty and
stupid. They were called lazy because they often slept late at their ‘stances,’
the overnight camping places chosen for the water, shelter and
grazing they provided. Drovers were seen sitting over their fires, eating
breakfast and chatting until mid-morning. And even once started, they dawdled
along.
This wasn’t laziness. Hurried cattle lost weight and
became less valuable. People who called the drovers ‘lazy’ had obviously never
considered the hardness and danger of the drover’s life. To come from Mull, the
cattle were first driven to Grass Point on Loch Spelve and loaded on to boats
which carried them across the strait to the island of Kerrera. The cattle were
unwilling. Drovers could be gored,
trampled or crushed.
After disembarking on Kerrera, the cattle were driven
the length of the island and then swum across the narrow stretch of sea to the
mainland at Oban. Many men stripped off and swam with the cattle: another
dangerous enterprise.
Once the mainland was gained, they walked the cattle
up into hills and crossed Loch Awe and the sea loch, Loch Fyne. They were still
only half-way. They had to skirt Loch Lomond, journey along the shores of Loch
Katrine and even then there were miles to walk before they reached Falkirk.
This is a lot easier to write down and read than it was to do it in 1800 or earlier!
In earlier centuries, the cattle might have to be
defended against robbers, though this was less likely in 1800, when my story is
set. The drovers’ diet for this arduous
journey was mostly oats, onions and whisky. I imagine they made what later became known as 'Waterloo porridge' because the soldiers before Waterloo were forbidden a fire to make a hot meal. Dry oats were mixed into cold water. The onions were probably eaten as we would eat an apple. For a little more protein, they
might open one of the bullock’s neck veins and mix the blood into their porridge
So the accusation of laziness doesn’t stand, but drovers were
certainly dirty, at least while droving, since they slept rough or in the notoriously unsavoury inns of
the Highlands. There was probably also some substance to the accusation of
drunkenness. If I had to live like that, I would make the most of the whisky too.
But stupid? Many reasons probably underlay this
insult. The drovers were usually considered illiterate, uneducated
farm-hands. They were also Highlanders too, and Highlanders, in 1715 and 1745 had
risen in rebellion against the English state. The last Jacobite
uprising had taken place a mere 55 years before my story is set: within living memory.
The Highlanders first language was Gaelic and they were mostly Catholic, so they were divided by language, culture and religion from the English and from Lowland Scots who, at best, considered Highlanders to be ‘noble savages.’ At worst, they thought them
a lower form of life: stupid, dishonest and dangerous.
The Highlanders first language was Gaelic and they were mostly Catholic, so they were divided by language, culture and religion from the English and from Lowland Scots who, at best, considered Highlanders to be ‘noble savages.’ At worst, they thought them
a lower form of life: stupid, dishonest and dangerous.
But a successful drover needed a sharp intelligence. Success
depended on bringing the cattle to market in good condition and perhaps even
better fed on grazing along the way than they had started. To manage this, a
drover needed not only expert knowledge of cattle but a weather eye and
close acquaintance with every stance along the way. Would the tracks ahead be muddy and impassable: was it worth
taking another way? Was it worth hurrying the cattle a little to reach the next
stance before another drove who might leave nothing to graze?
He had to be able to manage men, and have a phenomenal
memory for places, people and the deals he’d made. Even if illiterate, he
likely had great quickness with numbers. I'm reminded of an Italian
woman I once knew who was illiterate in both English and Italian, but to assume from this that she was stupid would have been a big mistake. She understood numbers, prices and weights very well, adding up, subtracting and dividing long lists of numbers with a speed and accuracy that made me dizzy. Lord help anyone who tried to short-change her. I imagine that, from long practice, the drovers had the same facility. In short, to be sure of finding a fool at a drovers' stance, you had to take one with you.
woman I once knew who was illiterate in both English and Italian, but to assume from this that she was stupid would have been a big mistake. She understood numbers, prices and weights very well, adding up, subtracting and dividing long lists of numbers with a speed and accuracy that made me dizzy. Lord help anyone who tried to short-change her. I imagine that, from long practice, the drovers had the same facility. In short, to be sure of finding a fool at a drovers' stance, you had to take one with you.
Drovers were also honest, or as honest as any trader can be.
Most business at the time was
conducted on a handshake and a dishonest man would soon have had no
business at
all. Again, I offer a modern parallel. I have family connections with a
small
island where a great deal of business is still conducted on trust
because nearly all families are interconnected and everyone knows, or
knows of, everyone else.
Any incoming clever-clogs who try to take advantage of this trusting ‘naivety’ soon find that no locals will do any business with them at all. No credit is to be had. If they need an electrician, decorator, plumber etc, it's impossible to find one who isn't solidly booked up. Word has gone round. I imagine that any drover who tried to cheat the crofters would soon have found himself with no trade and no friends.
Any incoming clever-clogs who try to take advantage of this trusting ‘naivety’ soon find that no locals will do any business with them at all. No credit is to be had. If they need an electrician, decorator, plumber etc, it's impossible to find one who isn't solidly booked up. Word has gone round. I imagine that any drover who tried to cheat the crofters would soon have found himself with no trade and no friends.
Although probably as old as agriculture, the droving
trade prospered with the rise of urban living. Demand for meat grew with the
population and wealth of towns. Prices rose in those markets that supplied urban
areas and it was more profitable to undertake the arduous droves to those
markets than sell or barter your cattle more locally.
The real hey-day came in the 18th and early
19th Centuries. Towns continued to grow and wars in Europe meant a
steep rise in demand for beef from the Army and Navy.
A Welsh bank note |
Many of these banks, such as Llandovery’s Black Ox
Bank, took an ox or bull as their symbol, in honour of their connection with
the droving trade. The Welsh one, above, has a drawing of sheep.
The end of the droving trade was brought about mainly
by two things: peace and steam.
The Drover's Dogs by Susan Price |
And then came steam which ‘carried away the droving
trade.’ By the 1840s, railways had spread throughout west Scotland (and the rest of Britain.) Tracks
could extend to depots almost at the dock-sides. Cattle could be shipped in the
large holds of sturdy, iron steam-ships and then loaded into cattle trucks
which were dragged away by steam-train. Drovers arrived at market to find that all demand had
been satisfied by cattle who’d arrived more speedily by train.
The ancient droving trade had been a hard one, but it
had been one way a highland crofter could earn hard cash to pay his rent. Its
end pushed many crofters into hardship and emigration.
Susan Price is the Carnegie medal winning author of
The Ghost Drum and The Sterkarm Handshake.
The Drover’s Dogs is her first
entirely original self-published book.
1 comment:
Love reading about the background to these books - another fascinating blog!
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