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Robert Macfarlane on A. R. B. Haldane, Slightly Foxed Issue 36

Along the Old Ways

For many years of my life, I was fascinated by mountains and their tops: drawn upwards by what Joe Simpson nicely calls ‘the inverted gravity’ that peaks exert upon certain people. I climbed and mountaineered – ineptly but passionately – in ranges around the world: Snowdonia, the Lake District, the Cuillins, the Cairngorms, the Alps, the Rockies, the Tian Shan, the Himalayas. All of these expeditions, from half-day to multi  month, were centred upon summits. My companions and I would scry our maps, mark the tops we wished to reach, then plan our journeys around those high points. It did not occur to me to explore a mountain without reference to its peak.

These days I still love mountains, but I find myself just as interested in their passes and paths as in their summits; just as intrigued by the valleys and notches that have been gouged out of them by ice and by water, and the tracks that have been worn into them by the passage of animals and humans. The Cairngorm mountains of Scotland, the range I know best, are most famous for their tops: the Cairngorm itself, lonely Ben Avon with its granite tors, sharp and shapely Cairn Toul, and the grey peak of Ben Macdui, from which I have retreated on two occasions in winter, chased southwards on skis and on foot by raving boreal blizzards.

But the Cairngorms also contain one of Britain’s greatest valleys, the Lairig Ghru, which divides the massif into two main groups, and which rises to a pass at 835 metres – higher than many British mountains. The traverse of the Cairngorms by means of the Lairig Ghru is a reasonable challenge for a modern-day walker. It is bouldery, high and wild, and requires long tramps in from either end. Its entrances are guarded by sentinel peaks, in winter it is snow-scoured, and in summer the midges emerge in their millions (midges like me a great deal; I, consequently, dislike them a great deal).

Whenever I am in the Lairig Ghru, and feeling tired, or footsore, or othe

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For many years of my life, I was fascinated by mountains and their tops: drawn upwards by what Joe Simpson nicely calls ‘the inverted gravity’ that peaks exert upon certain people. I climbed and mountaineered – ineptly but passionately – in ranges around the world: Snowdonia, the Lake District, the Cuillins, the Cairngorms, the Alps, the Rockies, the Tian Shan, the Himalayas. All of these expeditions, from half-day to multi  month, were centred upon summits. My companions and I would scry our maps, mark the tops we wished to reach, then plan our journeys around those high points. It did not occur to me to explore a mountain without reference to its peak.

These days I still love mountains, but I find myself just as interested in their passes and paths as in their summits; just as intrigued by the valleys and notches that have been gouged out of them by ice and by water, and the tracks that have been worn into them by the passage of animals and humans. The Cairngorm mountains of Scotland, the range I know best, are most famous for their tops: the Cairngorm itself, lonely Ben Avon with its granite tors, sharp and shapely Cairn Toul, and the grey peak of Ben Macdui, from which I have retreated on two occasions in winter, chased southwards on skis and on foot by raving boreal blizzards. But the Cairngorms also contain one of Britain’s greatest valleys, the Lairig Ghru, which divides the massif into two main groups, and which rises to a pass at 835 metres – higher than many British mountains. The traverse of the Cairngorms by means of the Lairig Ghru is a reasonable challenge for a modern-day walker. It is bouldery, high and wild, and requires long tramps in from either end. Its entrances are guarded by sentinel peaks, in winter it is snow-scoured, and in summer the midges emerge in their millions (midges like me a great deal; I, consequently, dislike them a great deal). Whenever I am in the Lairig Ghru, and feeling tired, or footsore, or otherwise put upon by its asperities, I think of the drovers: the men who moved livestock through Scotland in the centuries before refrigerated trucks, licensed abattoirs, the A9 and the M80 – and who were surely some of the toughest walkers in British history. The drovers, wrote Sir John Sinclair with grudging admiration in his Analysis of the Statistical Account (1825), were ‘accustomed to scanty fare, to rude and often wet clothing, to cold and damp houses, to sleep often in the open air, to cross dangerous rivers, to march a number of miles without stopping and with but little nourishment, and to be perpetually exposed to the attacks of a stormy atmosphere’. The memory of which description is enough to put steel in the backbone and a spring in the step of any Gore-Tex-clad, Vibram-solewearing, manchego-and-chilli-chutney-sandwich-carrying contemporary walker such as myself. Through the droving years, the Ghru was the main route across the Cairngorm massif, taking cattle down through Glen Lui and then on south to Braemar. Sheep coming from Skye would occasionally be driven across the pass, and its last recorded use as a drove route was in 1873. The Ghru posed problems to the drovers in terms of distance and severity of weather and terrain. Each winter brought fresh falls from the surrounding crags, and the upper reaches of the valley would become crowded with leg-breaking boulders, ill-suited to the soft hooves and long legs of cattle. So it was that late each spring, once the snow had at last begun to melt, men were sent up to the high pass to shift the boulders and open the path. I know what I know of the drovers because of a remarkable and modest book called The Drove Roads of Scotland (1952) by A. R. B. Haldane, which I read first ten years or so ago, and then again in 2008, shortly before I walked across the Cairngorms from Blair Atholl to Aviemore in order to attend my grandfather’s funeral. It is renowned as the bible of droving history, and more broadly as a classic of Scottish history, and it introduced me – as it has introduced so many others – to the remnant traces of a vanished culture. ‘During the autumn of 1942’, the book begins, ‘I had occasion, in the course of certain work on which I was then engaged, to call to mind an old road which crosses the Ochils immediately behind my home near Auchterarder in Perthshire.’ Well, this is a sentence which – with its subtle rhythms, its controlled discretion and its swift adventure into memory – would not feel out of place at the start of one of W. G. Sebald’s paragraphs. It beckons the reader into the book as a path might beckon a walker’s feet. The beckoning continues:

For a mile or two back into the hills, the road serves as an access to upland farms, but at the sheep farm of Coulshill it loses this character, and from that point to its junction with the main road through Glendevon, it is now little more than a lonely grass-grown track crossing the hills. Little used as it now is, the grassy road retains the clear marks of extensive use by the traffic of former days, and it occurred to me that it would be of interest to try to trace something of its history.

Haldane started to dig back into the archive, to interview men and women in many parts of Scotland, and also to walk the landscape – following the shadows of the old drove roads where they could still be glimpsed in text, in memory and in the earth. He researched his subject for eight years before he began to write about it, gradually piecing together the story of the drove roads of Scotland. What Haldane discovered was that there are few Highland glens that were not used at one point as a route for the drovers, whose work was a major feature of Highland and Island life between the Act of Union in 1707 and the trade’s decline in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Illegal droving, mostly by reavers (cattle thieves) had dated back to the sixteenth century, but it was the agricultural revolution and the pacifying of the Highlands by General Wade after the 1715 rebellion that greatly extended the licensed droving industry. Cattle were the chief form of movable wealth in the Highlands, and they had to be brought from their grazing grounds down to the markets in the Lowlands and the Borders. A network of tracks, paths and practices came into existence to make this movement possible, and this network was what Haldane reconstructed (the 1971 hardback edition I own contains a fine fold-out map on which the routes and gathering areas are inked in red and black lines). Reading Haldane has transformed the way I understand the Highlands. He taught me how to follow on foot the routes of the drove roads, and to look for the patches of open ground that would have been the ‘stances’ of the drovers: the resting-places, close to water and on level ground, where the men could sleep and the livestock could graze. And he introduced me to the drovers themselves: these hard men, the long-distance lorry-drivers of their day, accustomed to the boredoms and rigours of their journeys, and equipped with internalized sat-navs of astonishing accuracy. They navigated not from maps but from memories, stories and gossip. Walter Scott in his The Two Drovers described them as being ‘required to know perfectly the drove roads which lie over the wildest tracts of the country, and to avoid as much as possible the highways which distress the feet of the bullocks, and the turnpikes which annoy the spirit of the drover’. What a sight a great drove must have been! Up to three hundred beasts and half a dozen drovers, some on foot and some on ponies, with their dogs, moving through country unmarked by tracks other than their own. The men on foot carrying ‘cromachs’ (sticks used to belt and berate the swaying stirks as well as for walking). Ten miles covered in a day, perhaps twelve: no more or the beasts would lose condition and value. There would be grazing stops at midday, and river crossings where necessary – the cattle pushed into the water, the drovers swimming alongside them and crying loudly to keep them moving. The drovers had no interest in summits, of course; only in passes, glens and river valleys. The traffic of the livestock was often referred to in contemporary descriptions as consisting of ‘streams’ of beasts, and indeed the characteristic marks of a drove road are similar to those left by the passage of a stream – alternately flowing in broad shallows or narrow deeps and rapids. The drovers emptied the Highlands and Islands of their livestock each year, draining them down towards ‘trysts’ (cattle fairs) at Stirling and Falkirk, with some of the cattle continuing even down to London – a south-flowing torrent of beasts, of beef, of capital. Haldane’s book – though wary of nostalgia and rigorous in its historiography – has a tinge of elegy to it, to which I am wholly susceptible. In his account the drovers, though resilient in the face of hardship, were by no means impervious to beauty. They relished, some of them at least, a love of movement and adventure. And they left behind them the traces of a fascinating age:

The brown sails of the cattle boats have gone from the Minch. On slipways and jetties from Skye to Kintyre, thrift grows undisturbed in the crannies of stones once smooth and polished with the tread of hooves. Lonely saltings where the Uist droves once grazed, and throughout the Highlands in hill pass and moorland, as in the minds of men, the passing years increasingly dim and obscure the mark and the memory of the men and beasts that once travelled the drove roads of Scotland.

 Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 36 © Robert Macfarlane 2012


About the contributor

Robert Macfarlane is the author of Mountains of the Mind (2003), The Wild Places (2007) and most recently The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012). Despite being a mountain-lover, he lives in Cambridge.

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