On the hoof Drovers once walked their sheep across the mountains from mid-Wales to market in England. Jeremy Seal followed their tracks. Conde Nast Traveller, May 1998
'A stilton ploughman's?' exclaimed the barmaid at the Talbot Hotel in Tregaron, querying my arable-lands lunch order with an arched eyebrow. 'We call it a drover's here.'
Clearly, there were lessons in the language of lunch. In this case, what possible business could a ploughman have in these thoroughly unploughable upland parts? All you could do with the wild landscapes of Mid-Wales, as the barmaid's correction had firmly reminded me, was push livestock across them and hope for enough sustaining pasture along the way.
Which is what the drovers of Mid-Wales had done for centuries, leaving a commemorative rash of Drovers' Arms and Drovers' Tea Rooms from Brecon to Builth Wells, Llandovery to Llanwrtyd Wells. Remote Tregaron had once had twenty pubs and was renowned as a major assembly point for the droves. 'Not quite as big as London,' as a proud drover described the town in the 1850s.
I had arrived in my walking boots to hoof my own way along what remained of the old trails which the Welsh had taken for centuries, droving their black cattle and sheep, pigs and even specially shod geese across the mountains to the bustling markets and fairs at Hereford and on as far as London and Kent. Welsh droving struck me as an oddly unsung tradition; being commemorated by a pub lunch and by the names of the pubs which served them could not compare with America or Australia, where droving has long been established as the stock-in-trade of heroic pastoral legend, the rites-of-passage stuff of literature and cinema.
The Welsh are belatedly awakening to the tourism potential of their own, untold drovers' story. In Llandovery, where a bronze statue of a drover was unveiled in 1995, a first-ever Drovers' Festival was staged in September 1997 in anticipation of the 200th anniversary of the Black Ox bank, the original drovers' bank which was founded in the town in 1799. The BBC's period drama Drovers' Gold was screened in June 1997. There's even a Drovers Ale, which the Drovers Arms in Howey near Llandindrod Wells has been brewing since 1996.
For the moment, however, 'drover tourism' remains firmly in its infancy. Trail walkers should not expect twee drover signposts; nor should they necessarily expect even trails. Often, the old droving route has simply become a modern tarmac road. At other times, the routes are overgrown or disappear entirely. But the stretches where they do survive - as a grassy track, often sunken and lined by beech or hazel - should stir the most jaundiced walker's imagination.
Remember; you're following more than a lengthy road to market. Trunk road, trade route and telegraph road combined, the drove roads are best imagined as Britain's Silk Road. Returning drovers introduced the locals to unknown marvels like redcurrants from Kent, and were the first to bring news to these remote regions of everything from eighteenth-century opportunities in the New World to Bonaparte's defeat at Waterloo in 1815. Drovers, fed up at the habitual loss of their earnings to highwaymen, were responsible for the area's first banks.
The Talbot was scruffy, but it had a splendid droving pedigree. I ate my stilton drover's in the hotel's garden which gave onto paddocks where centuries of droves had
famously assembled. Now, the only sound was of local boys joshing with each other in Welsh as they hoofed a rugby ball across the town square.
Like the drovers, who would risk neither the wrath of God nor a fine from the local magistrate by working on the Sunday, I set off for England on a Monday morning. The road to Abergwesyn was a winding country lane which struggled along at four passing vehicles per hour. The road was hemmed by hedges of ash and hazel that were woven with wild honeysuckle. The verge was a bed of harebells. I climbed onto the Welsh desert, a remote and wild moorland landscape relieved by valleys where I dangled my feet in the streams and wandered among the ruins of old stone sheep pens.
It was a hot August afternoon. Clusters of orange rowan berries hung in a haze above the road. The Irfon River ran below me, sweetly burbling. I swam in a deep pool that had collected beneath a waterfall. Shady, silent beech trees led me towards the hamlet of Abergwesyn. On a telegraph post which doubled as the community noticeboard, the only item of business was a sign in English and Welsh reporting a black and white sheepdog which had gone missing. Almost inevitably, it seemed, the dog had one floppy ear.
At Abergwesyn, the tarmac followed the valley in a wide arc while the original drove route could still be made out labouring boldly up the hill ahead. I followed it through a plantation of pine trees and emerged onto a sunlit hilltop flanked by oak trees where jays called. Hares stood tall, then bolted at my approach. To the north, the hills plunged almost chasmically into a meandering river valley. The sun was still high when I fell into bed in the pub at Beulah, an unremarkable village with the curious distinction of lending its name to a breed of shape.
There were plenty of Beulah speckle-faceds on the next day's route, which ran south and west across the Eppynt, an imposing if desolate sweep of open moorland. This trail avoided the town of Builth Wells where the drovers would have been subject to several, scarcely affordable tolls. Buzzards floated on August thermals. The old drovers' inn here has recently been restored by the army as an exercise shelter. (Much of the Eppynt is now a military training area but a telephone call to the base at nearby Sennybridge should secure permission to cross it along the original droving route).
Beyond the Eppynt, I was beginning to recognise the tell-tale signs of one-time droving. There were the wide, grassy tracks that cut through the bracken; over the centuries, the tracks had been so trampled, muddied up and manured that the ferns had long since given way to neat swathes of emerald-green grass. On the hills high above the Wye, a cluster of Scots pines stood. It was said that the forebears of these distinctive trees were planted to advertise available droving accommodation along the way. Evidently, today's farmers had more modern concerns. All along the hilltops, they had planted their television aerials; long wires carried the improved reception to their farmsteads deep in dramatic valleys.
The next morning, as I crossed the river bridge just above Erwood, I saw Wye salmon roll and flash beneath me. The ancient drovers' ford lay a few yards downstream. It was here that a ferry had run when the river was in flood. For the next few miles, the drove road was thrillingly evident. It skirted a hillside but finally went to ground in an overgrown copse where no amount of rootling among the nettles could retrieve it. I was at Painscastle by lunchtime. But the village pub, the promisingly named Black Ox, had burned down several years before. A drowsy torpor had settled over the village, a former drove centre of considerable importance. I ate my sandwiches outside the Baptist chapel in a library hush.
On Clyro Hill, favoured eyrie of Victorian diarist Reverend Francis Kilvert, I looked out over the plateau profile of the Black Mountains to the south. A farmer, who was herding his April lambs with a few lazy fishtails of his tractor, stopped to talk. His name was Tom Williams. The lambs would be at the market at Hay-on-Wye first thing tomorrow morning, Tom told me. They would all be sold, he reckoned, by nine o'clock.
'I daresay they'll be slaughtered and on the hook by midday,' he added graphically.
'Quicker than it used to be then,' I reflected. I was following the drovers' road, I explained.
'You're just above it,' said Tom, whose father had farmed these fields before him. 'See the tarmac road? The gate that opens onto it, we've always called that Drovers,' he said as if by way of proof. 'Just follow the road. That's the old drovers' way. Will take you down to England.'
The contours were packing close as the hills fell away towards Herefordshire. Wheat fields shimmered in the sunshine. I was coming down towards ploughman's country. From here on, I mused, the droves would have moved into unfamiliar territory. The road led me to the village of Rhydspence which stood just above a bend in the Wye, right on the border. I cooled my tired feet in the stream where the border ran, thought of a reviving pint at the Rhydspence Inn, a renowned drovers' stop, and stepped across into England.
ENDS
FACT BOX.
The pubs along the drove routes tend towards the basic, but are extremely welcome at
the end of a long day's walk. Jeremy Seal stayed at the Talbot Hotel, Tregaron (01974 298208; £26 per person b&b); the Trout Inn, Beulah (01591 620235; £19 per person b&b); and at the comfortable Old Vicarage b&b, Erwood (01982 560680; £15 per person b&b).
Pubs with strong droving connections include the excellently run Drovers Arms, Howey, Llandindrod Wells (01597 822508;£18 per person bed and breakfast); the beautifully sited and attractive Rhydspence Inn, Rhydspence, Whitney-on-Wye (01497 831262; from £32.50 per person b&b); and the Kings Head Inn, Llandovery, the original premises of the Black Ox bank (01550 720393; from £30 per person b&b).
The Drovers' Tea Rooms, Builth Wells Tel 01982 552056
Sennybridge Army Field Training Centre; 01874 636361
Jeremy Seal's three-day walk is covered by Ordnance Survey's Pathfinder maps, numbers 990, 991, 1014, 1015 and 1016. Much shorter walks and essential background reading is available in The Drovers' Roads of Wales by Fay Godwin and Shirley Toulson, published by Whittet Books.
Guided walking holidays; the knowledgeable Bryan Jones at Dinefwr Treks, Llangammarch Wells (01591 610638) includes walks on the drovers' roads in his walking holiday itineraries.
'A stilton ploughman's?' exclaimed the barmaid at the Talbot Hotel in Tregaron, querying my arable-lands lunch order with an arched eyebrow. 'We call it a drover's here.'
Clearly, there were lessons in the language of lunch. In this case, what possible business could a ploughman have in these thoroughly unploughable upland parts? All you could do with the wild landscapes of Mid-Wales, as the barmaid's correction had firmly reminded me, was push livestock across them and hope for enough sustaining pasture along the way.
Which is what the drovers of Mid-Wales had done for centuries, leaving a commemorative rash of Drovers' Arms and Drovers' Tea Rooms from Brecon to Builth Wells, Llandovery to Llanwrtyd Wells. Remote Tregaron had once had twenty pubs and was renowned as a major assembly point for the droves. 'Not quite as big as London,' as a proud drover described the town in the 1850s.
I had arrived in my walking boots to hoof my own way along what remained of the old trails which the Welsh had taken for centuries, droving their black cattle and sheep, pigs and even specially shod geese across the mountains to the bustling markets and fairs at Hereford and on as far as London and Kent. Welsh droving struck me as an oddly unsung tradition; being commemorated by a pub lunch and by the names of the pubs which served them could not compare with America or Australia, where droving has long been established as the stock-in-trade of heroic pastoral legend, the rites-of-passage stuff of literature and cinema.
The Welsh are belatedly awakening to the tourism potential of their own, untold drovers' story. In Llandovery, where a bronze statue of a drover was unveiled in 1995, a first-ever Drovers' Festival was staged in September 1997 in anticipation of the 200th anniversary of the Black Ox bank, the original drovers' bank which was founded in the town in 1799. The BBC's period drama Drovers' Gold was screened in June 1997. There's even a Drovers Ale, which the Drovers Arms in Howey near Llandindrod Wells has been brewing since 1996.
For the moment, however, 'drover tourism' remains firmly in its infancy. Trail walkers should not expect twee drover signposts; nor should they necessarily expect even trails. Often, the old droving route has simply become a modern tarmac road. At other times, the routes are overgrown or disappear entirely. But the stretches where they do survive - as a grassy track, often sunken and lined by beech or hazel - should stir the most jaundiced walker's imagination.
Remember; you're following more than a lengthy road to market. Trunk road, trade route and telegraph road combined, the drove roads are best imagined as Britain's Silk Road. Returning drovers introduced the locals to unknown marvels like redcurrants from Kent, and were the first to bring news to these remote regions of everything from eighteenth-century opportunities in the New World to Bonaparte's defeat at Waterloo in 1815. Drovers, fed up at the habitual loss of their earnings to highwaymen, were responsible for the area's first banks.
The Talbot was scruffy, but it had a splendid droving pedigree. I ate my stilton drover's in the hotel's garden which gave onto paddocks where centuries of droves had
famously assembled. Now, the only sound was of local boys joshing with each other in Welsh as they hoofed a rugby ball across the town square.
Like the drovers, who would risk neither the wrath of God nor a fine from the local magistrate by working on the Sunday, I set off for England on a Monday morning. The road to Abergwesyn was a winding country lane which struggled along at four passing vehicles per hour. The road was hemmed by hedges of ash and hazel that were woven with wild honeysuckle. The verge was a bed of harebells. I climbed onto the Welsh desert, a remote and wild moorland landscape relieved by valleys where I dangled my feet in the streams and wandered among the ruins of old stone sheep pens.
It was a hot August afternoon. Clusters of orange rowan berries hung in a haze above the road. The Irfon River ran below me, sweetly burbling. I swam in a deep pool that had collected beneath a waterfall. Shady, silent beech trees led me towards the hamlet of Abergwesyn. On a telegraph post which doubled as the community noticeboard, the only item of business was a sign in English and Welsh reporting a black and white sheepdog which had gone missing. Almost inevitably, it seemed, the dog had one floppy ear.
At Abergwesyn, the tarmac followed the valley in a wide arc while the original drove route could still be made out labouring boldly up the hill ahead. I followed it through a plantation of pine trees and emerged onto a sunlit hilltop flanked by oak trees where jays called. Hares stood tall, then bolted at my approach. To the north, the hills plunged almost chasmically into a meandering river valley. The sun was still high when I fell into bed in the pub at Beulah, an unremarkable village with the curious distinction of lending its name to a breed of shape.
There were plenty of Beulah speckle-faceds on the next day's route, which ran south and west across the Eppynt, an imposing if desolate sweep of open moorland. This trail avoided the town of Builth Wells where the drovers would have been subject to several, scarcely affordable tolls. Buzzards floated on August thermals. The old drovers' inn here has recently been restored by the army as an exercise shelter. (Much of the Eppynt is now a military training area but a telephone call to the base at nearby Sennybridge should secure permission to cross it along the original droving route).
Beyond the Eppynt, I was beginning to recognise the tell-tale signs of one-time droving. There were the wide, grassy tracks that cut through the bracken; over the centuries, the tracks had been so trampled, muddied up and manured that the ferns had long since given way to neat swathes of emerald-green grass. On the hills high above the Wye, a cluster of Scots pines stood. It was said that the forebears of these distinctive trees were planted to advertise available droving accommodation along the way. Evidently, today's farmers had more modern concerns. All along the hilltops, they had planted their television aerials; long wires carried the improved reception to their farmsteads deep in dramatic valleys.
The next morning, as I crossed the river bridge just above Erwood, I saw Wye salmon roll and flash beneath me. The ancient drovers' ford lay a few yards downstream. It was here that a ferry had run when the river was in flood. For the next few miles, the drove road was thrillingly evident. It skirted a hillside but finally went to ground in an overgrown copse where no amount of rootling among the nettles could retrieve it. I was at Painscastle by lunchtime. But the village pub, the promisingly named Black Ox, had burned down several years before. A drowsy torpor had settled over the village, a former drove centre of considerable importance. I ate my sandwiches outside the Baptist chapel in a library hush.
On Clyro Hill, favoured eyrie of Victorian diarist Reverend Francis Kilvert, I looked out over the plateau profile of the Black Mountains to the south. A farmer, who was herding his April lambs with a few lazy fishtails of his tractor, stopped to talk. His name was Tom Williams. The lambs would be at the market at Hay-on-Wye first thing tomorrow morning, Tom told me. They would all be sold, he reckoned, by nine o'clock.
'I daresay they'll be slaughtered and on the hook by midday,' he added graphically.
'Quicker than it used to be then,' I reflected. I was following the drovers' road, I explained.
'You're just above it,' said Tom, whose father had farmed these fields before him. 'See the tarmac road? The gate that opens onto it, we've always called that Drovers,' he said as if by way of proof. 'Just follow the road. That's the old drovers' way. Will take you down to England.'
The contours were packing close as the hills fell away towards Herefordshire. Wheat fields shimmered in the sunshine. I was coming down towards ploughman's country. From here on, I mused, the droves would have moved into unfamiliar territory. The road led me to the village of Rhydspence which stood just above a bend in the Wye, right on the border. I cooled my tired feet in the stream where the border ran, thought of a reviving pint at the Rhydspence Inn, a renowned drovers' stop, and stepped across into England.
ENDS
FACT BOX.
The pubs along the drove routes tend towards the basic, but are extremely welcome at
the end of a long day's walk. Jeremy Seal stayed at the Talbot Hotel, Tregaron (01974 298208; £26 per person b&b); the Trout Inn, Beulah (01591 620235; £19 per person b&b); and at the comfortable Old Vicarage b&b, Erwood (01982 560680; £15 per person b&b).
Pubs with strong droving connections include the excellently run Drovers Arms, Howey, Llandindrod Wells (01597 822508;£18 per person bed and breakfast); the beautifully sited and attractive Rhydspence Inn, Rhydspence, Whitney-on-Wye (01497 831262; from £32.50 per person b&b); and the Kings Head Inn, Llandovery, the original premises of the Black Ox bank (01550 720393; from £30 per person b&b).
The Drovers' Tea Rooms, Builth Wells Tel 01982 552056
Sennybridge Army Field Training Centre; 01874 636361
Jeremy Seal's three-day walk is covered by Ordnance Survey's Pathfinder maps, numbers 990, 991, 1014, 1015 and 1016. Much shorter walks and essential background reading is available in The Drovers' Roads of Wales by Fay Godwin and Shirley Toulson, published by Whittet Books.
Guided walking holidays; the knowledgeable Bryan Jones at Dinefwr Treks, Llangammarch Wells (01591 610638) includes walks on the drovers' roads in his walking holiday itineraries.
