The Wansdyke & District Forums

Downland_George

<t>Well. I had not expected to matter to anybody at my time of life. I shall do it then, a few at a time, when the knees let me sit. Nan you can check me on the Cannings end, your people will have had their own names for the same tracks. Funny to think of it, two old fools three mile apart all our l...

Downland_George

<t>I will tell you a thing the young ones wont believe. When I was a boy you could still walk the droves the whole way and never touch a metalled road, off the down and down to the fairs, and the dust of it hung in the lanes an hour after the flock had gone by. There were drove roads wide as three o...

Downland_George

<t>Pat has the right of it. I spent sixty winters on the down and the still cold mornings were the ones worth getting up for, when you could see your own breath and the sheep stood in a huddle steaming like a kettle theirselves. Nan, your father and mine would have got on. Mine said much the same, t...

Downland_George

<t>Marlborough_Nan, you have given me a turn, in the best way. My own grandmother was from Etchilhampton, which is, what, three miles from the Cannings as the crow flies, and the droves out of that country all fed onto the one green road off the downs to the fairs. So your grandmother and mine, two ...

Downland_George

<t>If the younger members will indulge an old man, I should like to set down something of the droving while I still have it clear, for it is going out of memory and was never much written down. The droves are the green roads, the wide ones, far broader than any cart needed, and they are wide because...

Downland_George

<t>Another from my hobby-horse, forgive an old man. The great sheep fairs. Before the marts, the sheep changed hands at the hilltop fairs, held the same week every year for centuries, tens of thousands of sheep on a down for a few days and then gone, the turf cropped to nothing and the place empty a...

Downland_George

<t>Thank you Mr Trev, and yes, the high dry way, and free with it, that is exactly the heart of it. My grandfather called the turnpike the robbers' road and the drove the honest one. I shall enjoy this forum, I can see that already. It is good to find others who can look at a wide verge and see a th...

Downland_George

<t>As I am new here and this is my subject, I will set down a little on the droving roads, for they are written on this country if you know how to read them, and most folk walk them without knowing. Before the railways, the sheep and cattle were walked to market on the hoof, hundreds of miles some o...

The Wansdyke & District Forums

Search found 8 matches

The drove names

The old droving roads, and where the sheep went

The old sheep fairs - where were they held?

The droving roads and the green lanes