The old droving roads, and where the sheep went

[Downland_George]

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 they were made for sheep and cattle moving in their hundreds, grazing as they went. We drove off the downs to the fairs, and the great one hereabouts was at Yarnbury Castle, the sheep sold inside the old hillfort itself, penned within ramparts where men had folded beasts for two thousand years without knowing it. My grandfather droved, and his father before him, and I went as a boy on the last of it, before the lorries came and the fairs died one by one. The roads are still there if you know to look. Most people walk a drove and see only a wide old lane. It is the ghost of a great moving river of animals, and of the men and dogs that went with them, and there is almost nobody left who can still read it.

[Marlborough_Nan]

Oh this is wonderful Mr Pyle, do go on, my grandmother would have loved you. She was a Cannings girl and her people kept sheep, and she talked about the drove and the fairs just the way you do, the dogs especially, she always said a good droving dog was worth more than the man holding it and the man knew it. Did your people ever come by the Cannings way? I only ask because shes from there, and Im sat here wondering if our two grans ever passed on the same road behind the same sheep and never knew it. Wouldnt that be a thing.

[Downland_George]

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 Cannings-country girls of sheep families, will near certainly have walked the very same drove and stood at the same fairs within a few years of one another, and never dreamed their grandchildren would meet on a machine neither could have imagined and work it out between them. I find I have to put the kettle on. That such a thing can still come to the surface, long after everyone who could swear to it is gone, is the whole reason I trouble an old man's eyes with this screen of an evening.

[Marlborough_Nan]

Put two kettles on Mr Pyle. Three miles and seventy years apart and here we are, the pair of us, working it out over the old sheep. I shall tell my aunt, shes the last who knew gran properly, shell not believe it. Thank you for this, it has made my whole week. I think we shall be friends, you and I, if youll put up with an old woman pestering you about droving roads and dogs.