White Heather

Despite stumbling across a small patch of white heather in the huge sweep of the shallow valley of the Lyne Water above the Baddingsgill Reservoir and taking a good sprig or two for luck I have come down with some kind of gastro thing. (I have vague childhood memories of traveller people coming to our door in rural Cambridgeshire in the 1960s offering to sharpen knives on a sort of upside down bicycle  and selling sprigs of white heather.)

I'd hoped to finally go to a Blipmeet but was thwarted.

Last night when I couldn't sleep I read what I could find on the Highland and Borders' drovers and the huge cattle fair (the Tryst - apparently derived from 'trust')held at Falkirk between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Cattle were bought by Highland and Island drovers from individual crofts and assembled into herds of around 100 and moved down to Falkirk or Crieff. Here they were sold on to other drovers who took them further south. The beasts were often fattened up on richer pastures in Northern England before continuing the long, slow journey down to London (and other urban centres).

A drover did about 10 miles a day and the cows were traditional Highland Black Cows - kyloes - what sounds like a smaller and tougher version of today's Highland cattle. They were called 'kyloes' because they were often swum across short stretches of sea - kyles (as in Kyle of Lochalsh). Demand grew after the Act of Union and was particularly high when the British Navy grew to huge numbers during the Napoleonic Wars. By the early-mid 19th century coastal steamers and then the railways killed off the droving tradition.

Devine argues that most trade in West Highland cattle in the mid 18th century was not in the hands of drovers but was rather secured through clan elites monopolising access to distant markets, given the absence of a commercial middle class as in Lowland Scotland. (He does make important distinctions between the pace and destructiveness of these changes in the West, East and Southern Highlands.)

Further, the massive movement and dislocation of the rural poor and renting smallholders from traditional townships into crofting communities and the fragmentation of landholding plots on tiny crofts meant that increasingly crofters had no agricultural surplus to sell and were tragically dependent on the sole crop of the recently introduced potato.

Indeed, the crofting system was designed to force crofters to take up other seasonal work - by-employments such as kelping which employed at very disadvantageous terms 25,000 - 40,000 people in the peak summer months on the Hebrides alone - rather than to provide a subsistence or surplus agricultural income.

In the south west Borders some large laird landholders also took advantage of the rise in demand for cattle from English markets after the Act of Union and this led to the clearance of small scale tenants from the land resulting in the Levellers Revolt of 1724.

A number of drovers went on to find success in the USA.

Apparently some drovers would send their dogs back on their own once they had reached their destination, having first paid for food stops for them along the road home.

You wonder with the huge numbers of cattle moving south over the summer months how sufficient fodder was found on the main droving roads. Perhaps this is why there were so many of them, to spread the weight of the herds feeding their way to lowland and ultimately English markets.

Apparently cattle were swum off the Isle of Skye across the treacherous currents where the Glen Elg (?) swing ferry now runs. I guess timing would have been crucial here, making sure the beasts arrived at the middle tide of neap tides.

There was also a big tryst at Dervaig on the Isle of Mull when cattle were brought - (by boat?) from outlying islands like Tiree and Coll and the northern peninsula of Ardnamurchan. 

The cattle proceeded to east of the island and a place called (aptly) Grass Point from where they were shipped to the island of Kerrera near Oban. They then were driven across the island from Barr nam Boc Bay to the eastern side and there shipped, towed or swum across the short 200m crossing to the mainland a mile south of Oban.

Its a fascinating story. I remember reading about Welsh drovers who also drove geese to market. They were walked through tar and sand or fine gravel to coat their webbed feet for the long journeys.

With the end of droving, which became hampered by Enclosure and the construction of such things as canals, and the various revolutions in agricultural production cattle were increasingly bred for specialist purposes and lost their ranginess to cover huge distances to faraway markets.

The droving roads seem to us, or at least me, a romantic link to a preindustrial society but Tom Devine argues that it was the Union with England and the greatly increased demand for Highland products, in particular but not only cattle, on the  back of British industrialisation in the last quarter of the 18th century, that spelt the deathknell for the clan system and patterns of preindustrial life in the Highlands and Islands.

Clan elite incomes grew, absenteeism increased and rent levels for land rose rapidly as did prices for cattle and sheep. (Rents in Skye trebled in 25 years and rose by ten times in Torridon. cattle prices rose fourfold in the 18th century. Scottish wool accounted for 10% of UK production in 1828, by the early 1840s that figure had risen to 25%.)

The Highlands were becoming an economic satellite to Lowland Scotland and industrial England.  And the drove roads were for a while a key infrastructure in facilitating that shift in economic and social relationship.

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) prices crashed for key Highland exports to the industrial south. Cattle prices halved and the market for kelp pretty much disappeared overnight.

These huge variations were presumably reflected in the traffic on the drove roads.

I had forgotten just how good Tom Devine is on the destruction of traditional communities in the west Highlands and Islands. His chapter nine, 'The Disintegration of Clanship' in The Scottish Nation:1700-2007 makes for devastating reading.