Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 19 on 20/3/2005.

This article is 41 months old and some information provided may be time sensitive. Please check all details of events, tours, opening times and other information before travelling or making arrangements.

The wild world of the original cowboys

Cattle droving was a core part of Highland life and drovers lived a tough and hardy lifestyle. James Irvine Robertson reports

For centuries cattle were the only product of the Highlands that anybody wanted and the only product that generated cash.

The animals were the ancestors of today’s Highland cattle, but much smaller. A bull might weigh 250lbs – a modern beef bull can weigh 2,000lbs. The most humble tenant might own only one or two animals. The great man could own hundreds.

And because rieving or rustling was everybody’s principal recreation, the trick was to hold them long enough to sell them.

Cattle grazed on God’s grass, drank His water and breathed His air. What gave a man right of possession over them? Beasts only belonged to he who could defend them. In 1746 a report said that, for Highlanders, cattle theft was ‘the principal source of all their barbarity, cruelty, cunning and revenge; and that it ‘trains them up to the use of arms, love of plunder.’ And this attitude demanded exceptional men to drove them.

Every year the drovers would tour the islands and glens to buy, often on the strength of a promissory note, the season’s crop, and they would then drive them to the great markets at Crieff or Falkirk in October. From there, most beasts went on south again for fattening outside of London before being slaughtered to feed the metropolis or to be salted down for the army and navy.

The job was extremely demanding: “To purchase 1,000 cattle from a multitude of individuals, and march them, in one or more great battalions from the extremity of Scotland, into the centre of England, at the .....

To read the rest of this article you can buy this issue or subscribe to Scotland Magazine to have every issue delivered direct to your door.

By James Irvine Robertson

Section : Scottish History

Page number : 20