To Mr. Duignan's description of the route from North Wales may be added the details given in Aikin's valuable Journal of a Tour through North Wales in 1797. He was lucky enough to see some black cattle, reared in Anglesey, swimming across the Menai Strait on their way to Abergele fair, where they would be bought up by drovers and disposed of at Barnet fair to farmers in the neighbourhood who would fatten them for the London market. Many of the cattle while swimming across the strait were carried towards Beau- maris Bay; boats rowed after the stragglers and sometimes the boatmen threw ropes round their horns and towed them to the shore. From Abergele the cattle would probably go up the Clwyd valley, for there is an inn called the Drovers' Arms a mile or so north of Ruthin and near by is a field where cattle used to be thrown and shod. Thence they would make for the Old Chester Road. ********** Although the dealer and foreman drover and other senior drovers would put up at inns, occupying beds at prices ranging from 4d. to 6d. a night, the juniors would often sleep under hedges in the fields with the cattle. The pay of the drovers who took cattle from Haverfordwest to Ashford early in the nineteenth century was at the rate of 3s. per day plus a bonus of 6s. on being paid off at their destination. They supplemented their earnings by selling milk when near places of any size. After the cattle had been sold at Ashford, the dealers came back by coach and the drovers on foot. Every effort was made to avoid turnpike gates. When this was impossible, at some such gates one man used to carry another on his back so that only one person could be charged. No account of the Welsh drover must omit mention of the drover's dog.
