Christopher Somerville’s A-Z of walking: D

D is for Drovers — the hard men who once travelled the green roads of our land. Everywhere you follow the ancient tracks, through holloways in the south country downs or out along cobbled paths across the northern moors, you find signs of a vigorous commerce now vanished — a centuries-old traffic of hooves and boots. There’s a wayside water trough under Kinder Scout, a tethering ring in an Angus stone wall, a clump of pine trees to signify a grazing place for sheep along the Peddar’s Way, a heap of grass-smothered bricks at a crossing of tracks on the Hampshire downs where a wayside inn for the drovers once stood. They were tough-looking customers, these drovers, in their homespun coats and breeches, great felt hats and ragged beards. They soaped the soles of their stockings against blisters, wore brown paper next to their skin, and reckoned to cover 20 miles each day at a steady 2mph — which was all the flocks and herds they drove could manage. They tarred the feet of geese, put pigs in leather galoshes and nailed iron shoes to the hooves of cattle, all to get the beasts unharmed along hundreds of stony miles. They carried responsibility as naturally as their cattle switches, bringing the valuable animals safely to the fattening meadows and to market, banking or bearing back thousands of pounds, and distributing messages and parcels along the way. Every time I walk the old roads, especially on a freezing winter day or in a lashing rainstorm, I think of these hardy and dependable men and wonder what they would think of me — cosseted in Gore-Tex and high technology, mincing round the puddles, worrying about angsty stuff in that stupid 21st-century way. An uneasy reflection, and a salutary one.

• This entry was posted on: Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 10:48 am
• Filed under: Blogs, Walk Winter 2009
• Tags: Christopher Somerville, history
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