The Drovers

Mid Wales could raise cattle and could not eat them. England had cities that could. Between those two facts sits the drove trade, which was the largest industry this county had before the railways and left more marks on the ground than anything except farming itself.

How it worked

Cattle were bought at Welsh fairs through the summer, gathered into herds of several hundred, and walked east. Welsh Blacks mostly, small and hardy and able to put on weight on poor grazing. Sheep, pigs and geese went too, though cattle were the money.

They were shod for it. A cow takes eight small iron plates, two to a hoof, because a cloven hoof needs a pair. Shoeing a herd was a day's work for several smiths and the plates turn up in fields along the routes.

They moved perhaps twelve to fifteen miles a day. Faster and the animals lost condition, which was the whole point of the exercise. The journey from mid Wales to the London markets at Barnet and Smithfield took around three weeks.

The routes

Drove roads avoided towns and turnpikes, because both charged. They kept to the high ground where possible, which was drier underfoot, gave grazing at the roadside and avoided enclosed farmland.

That is why they are still legible. A drove road on open hill is a broad green way, often forty or fifty yards wide where the herd could spread, with no engineering and no ditches. Where it drops into a valley it becomes a deep sunken lane worn by centuries of hooves.

The Abergwesyn pass, running west from Llanwrtyd towards Tregaron, is the clearest surviving example in Wales and is now a mountain road. The Kerry Ridgeway in the north of the county runs east into Shropshire along the watershed. Routes converged on the border crossings at Kington, Bishop's Castle and Hereford.

Look for tall Scots pines standing in groups on the hill. These are widely said to have been planted to mark drovers' stopping places, being the only conifer visible at a distance in a landscape of broadleaves.

The money

Drovers carried cash, which in an economy with almost no banking made them the closest thing rural Wales had to a financial system. They took payment in England and settled debts in Wales, collected rents on behalf of landowners, and issued notes.

That became banking properly. The Bank of the Black Ox at Llandovery, founded by the drover David Jones in 1799, issued its own notes with a black bull on them and lasted until Lloyds absorbed it in 1909. Several other Welsh banks began the same way.

The drovers also carried news, letters and gossip in both directions, which is a difficult thing to evidence but which contemporaries commented on constantly.

Regulation and reputation

Droving was licensed from 1563. A drover had to be over thirty, married, a householder, and licensed at quarter sessions — conditions designed to ensure that a man trusted with other people's cattle and other people's money had something to lose.

Their reputation was accordingly mixed. Contemporary opinion held them either as indispensable men of business or as rough characters who drank and gambled the proceeds, and both views appear in the same parish records.

The end

The railways killed it, quickly. Once cattle could go to Birmingham by train in a day rather than by hoof in three weeks, and arrive heavier rather than lighter, there was no argument. The trade collapsed through the 1860s and 1870s and was effectively finished by 1900.

What survives is the routes, the inns, and a set of place names. Any farm or ruin called Dolau, Gwesty, or Halfway; any isolated pub in a place that makes no modern sense; any wide green track running along a watershed towards England.