Basic HTML Version
3
City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
You can still identify an old drovers' roads at its start in
Wales by the way it is deeply set into the land, with high
walls of earth or hedging. Often there are sharp dog-leg
turns – a simple but effective design to protect man and
beast from severe weather. In contrast to the narrow
packhorse ways, drovers’ roads are often very much wider
than other roads, at least 40 feet and sometimes up to 90
feet wide, in order to accommodate large herds or flocks.
Today you can sometimes spot where an old drovers’ road
has been converted into a single carriageway metalled road
by the unusually wide verges. A traditional name for these
wide old drovers’ roads with pasture margins to keep the
cattle fed during the long walk is
Long Acre.
Sometimes
the road opens into enclosed fields for overnight stops.
These fields are labelled on old maps as
Little London
.
There were many inns and ale-houses along drovers’ roads
and it is believed that, in the absence of maps, sometimes
Welsh drovers planted fast growing and evergreen Scots
Pines to guide them to favoured inns and safe river
crossings. To avoid the tolls of the Turnpike Roads some
of the drovers’ roads and therefore the inns were quite
remote and the inns’ livelihoods disappeared with the
droving trade. You can still spot isolated houses with a
whacking great Scots Pine in the garden here and there.
Later the railway companies copied this trick and would
plant Scots Pines to lead people to stations built outside
towns due to the objections of local landowners.
The very wide High Street of Stockbridge in the Test
Valley reflects its old role as a drovers’ road. Stockbridge
grew up on the drovers’ trade, profiting by meeting the
needs of the drovers as they passed through. On the walls
of the Drovers House you can still see a painted sign on
the walls written in Welsh:
'GWAIR-TYMHERUS-PORFA-FLASUS-CWRW-
DA-A-GWAL-CYCURUS'
Seasoned hay, tasty pastures, good beer, comfortable beds.
Not all drovers could afford a warm bed, it is said that the
boys left to guard the cattle overnight were in the habit of
letting the beasts settle for an hour or two and then moving
them so that they could snuggle down in the warm spot left
behind - a trick repeated over and over on very cold nights.
to English dominance was gone and before long Wales was
conquered by Edward I. The heir apparent to the English
monarch has borne the title Prince of Wales ever since.
There were revolts of course, the last of any significance
led by Owain Glyndŵr in the early 1400s. After Welshman
Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth
the numbers of Welsh arriving in London began to grow
and it would be the King’s son, Henry VIII, who finally
brought the country of his ancestors fully into the Kingdom
of England. The Welsh managed to retain their language
and culture, an achievement that was significantly marked
and aided by the publication of the first Welsh translation
of the Bible by William Morgan in 1588.
The Welsh flourished in many aspects of London life,
in the law, the church and publishing and made some
remarkable and unique contributions to London life. Welsh
speaking Hugh Myddleton, son of well to do Denbighshire
folk and two of his brothers left their mark on the capital.
Robert was a wealthy glover, Thomas a City banker,
founding member of the East India Company, Lord Mayor
and MP, but it was Hugh who we remember today. Hugh
Myddleton made his money as a goldsmith becoming both
jeweller and friend to James I whose backing he gained for
the New River Company. This would pipe fresh water via
an artificial waterway cut from the River Lea and the
Amwell and Chadwell Springs in Hertfordshire all the way
to Clerkenwell and from there into the City of London.
The Drovers - Welsh Cowboys
In the centuries before refrigeration the only way to supply
the cities with fresh meat was to walk it there. Travelling
up to 15 miles a day Welsh drovers could reach all the
important cattle markets of London, Essex and Kent within
three weeks.
Drove
as a place name can be traced back to
the early 1200s with written records of cattle being driven
to London from Wales in the early 1300s but the trade may
have been far more ancient. Drovers’ roads from Wales
existed in some form in Romano-British times, probably
following ancient pre-Roman track ways. Long stretches
of the
Welsh Road
through the English Midlands coincide
with manorial or parish boundaries suggesting that the
drovers’ road is even older than the boundaries.