Along the Old Hambleton Drove Road

Looking south along the old Hambleton Street drove road, the route from Yarm to York that stretches across the landscape. I have just cycled north along this track, though three hundred years ago I would have been met by an entirely different scene. Then, before the coming of the railways, the way would have been blocked by slow, heaving herds of cattle, most of them bred in the Scottish Highlands being driven south for the English markets. These were “kyloes,” small, long-horned beasts that might have begun their journey as far away as Inverness, one of the great collection points alongside Perth and Aberdeen. After the Union of 1603, Scotland sent vast numbers of these animals into England¹Relics of Drovers’ Roads in Yorkshire. “Dusty Feet” That Traversed the Roads from Scotland. Yorkshire Evening Post – Friday 25 March 1938 https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000273/19380325/145/0006.

Though some drovers took to the new turnpike roads, many stayed with the old hill tracks. Hambleton Street climbs through Scarth Nick after fording the River Tees, passes the old Chequers Inn, and rises steadily to the flat crown of Black Hambleton. From there the drove road follows the sharp edge of the Hambleton Hills, by the now-vanished Limekiln Inn, looking west across the Vale of Mowbray to the distant Pennines. A steep drop past the Kilburn White Horse brought the drovers into lower country, and York was within a day’s reach.

The traffic in kyloes came in a rush, and thankfully for the locals, lasted only a few summer weeks. The first herds crossed the Tees in June, and by harvest only a few stragglers remained. While it lasted, however, the scale was immense. A single drove might number from two hundred to two thousand cattle, with one man for every sixty or seventy beasts, each assisted by a pack of dogs. The noise, dust, and smell must have been overwhelming. Householders along the route often shut doors and windows tight against it.

The drovers themselves were a distinctive breed. Sir Walter Scott called them “as wild, as shaggy, and sometimes as dwarfish as the animals they had in charge.” They travelled with a few handfuls of oatmeal, two or three onions, and a horn of whisky, used sparingly at night and in the morning. They carried shoeing irons for the cattle, for the cloven hooves were fitted with thin oval iron plates, fastened with “ox nails” to prevent lameness. Shoeing a restless cow was no easy task, and where possible it was left to a village smith. One blacksmith in Boroughbridge was said to have made thirty thousand ox nails in a year, and once earned £6 in a single day from passing drovers. There was no credit; money was carried, and carried securely.

By the season’s end, when the fields lay in stubble, Yorkshire farmers often bought a few worn and thin beasts, turned them out to winter pasture, and sold them the following summer for twice the price, fattened and ready to resume the journey to slaughter.

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  Relics of Drovers’ Roads in Yorkshire. “Dusty Feet” That Traversed the Roads from Scotland. Yorkshire Evening Post – Friday 25 March 1938 https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000273/19380325/145/0006