Whisky, Oats, and Onions: The Drovers’ Passage through Scarth Nick

In yesterday‘s posting, I told a tale of smugglers darting across the moors, slyly evading the prying gaze of the customs men who, I am sure, looked on in unmitigated fury at their repeated failings. The same wild terrain, it seems, was trampled not only by scoundrels with their wares, but by drovers steering whole herds of cattle from Scotland towards the markets of London, Leeds and Sheffield. One hears that Smithfield alone saw over 100,000 cattle and three quarters of a million sheep shuffle past its gates each year—a veritable pageant of dinner tables on the hoof. Such was the enthusiasm for livestock that turkeys apparently took to roosting in trees by the roadside, no doubt pleased with their overnight lodgings.¹In Yorkshire. “Dusty Feet” That Traversed the Roads from Scotland. Yorkshire Evening Post – 25 March 1938 https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000273/19380325/145/0006?noTouch=true

The familiar Hambleton Drove Road begins at Scarth Nick and up past the cheerless expanse of Black Hambleton. The route then traversed along the Hambleton Hills, skirting the edge of the Vale of Mowbray, and offering glimpses of the Pennines stretching away westward. And down they went, past the Kilburn White Horse, into the gentler hills where the promise of York lay just within reach. Today, of course, at Scarth Nick a sheet of tarmac conceals all hints of this history, squashing the imagination flat, and suppressing any reverie of these ancient sounds and odours under a blanket of dreary modernity. ²The Hambleton Drove Road. North York Moors Information Service.

One is told that following the Union of 1603, Scotland’s Highlands contributed many of these beasts, known as “kyloes,” small but determined creatures whose long horns lent them an air of defiance. Many of these hardy animals began their long walk in the Highland glens, converging on places like Inverness, Perth, or Aberdeen, before heading south, only to end up on English tables. Most drovers avoided the turnpike roads, along which there were, naturally, tolls, with the Great North Road—surely one of the country’s earliest attempts to fleece travellers—demanding the princely sum of fivepence for every score of cattle. Hence the high level drove roads remained popular.

As for the drovers themselves, we are left to the tender observations of Sir Walter Scott, who, in his novel Rob Roy, sketches them as rough, shaggy figures, “as dwarfish as the animals they had in charge.” In another work, The Two Drovers, Scott describes their provisions as little more than a handful of oats, a clutch of onions, and a horn of whisky; the last a curious sort of ration, no doubt rationed by the dribble, night and morning. These stalwart men also toted bags of shoeing irons and, when sensible, a weapon or two—a fitting emblem, surely, for a life where one’s companions were horned, and one’s path uncertain.

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  In Yorkshire. “Dusty Feet” That Traversed the Roads from Scotland. Yorkshire Evening Post – 25 March 1938 https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000273/19380325/145/0006?noTouch=true
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  The Hambleton Drove Road. North York Moors Information Service.