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Sherds does not share the passion for cycling that seems to have gripped so many people over the last two decades. In the words of the self-styled ‘Super-Tramp’, W H Davies, ‘A poor life this if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare’, and it is the standing and staring that walking permits, whereas cycling (uphill at any rate, with traffic presenting an ever-present threat) seems full of care. Walking puts you in touch with the past which is, as John Berger (author of Ways of Seeing) wrote, is not behind you at all but in front and beside you – that path you are following, that oak, ash, and thorn, that church tower on the horizon, they all possess time depth, and to walk down a sunken lane is to follow in the footsteps of the countless people who have tramped that path before.
Andrew Green, former Chief Librarian of Wales, clearly agrees with such sentiments: Voices on the Path, his newly published history of walking in Wales, is an extended paean to the joys of bipedal rambling (by contrast with bike-pedalism), whether for a purpose or for pure pleasure. The author begins with the evocative Mesolithic footprints preserved in the intertidal mud of the Severn Estuary and ends with the Slow Ways movement, which aims to create a national network of paths linking every settlement in Britain, a ‘superhighway of dreams and adventures’.
The book uncovers some remarkable stories, including that of the first documented account of a long-distance walk in Wales – undertaken by Giraldus Cambrensis in 1188 – and of the best-preserved medieval road in Britain, the Monks’ Trod, a 24-mile path engineered by the Cistercians in the 12th century to link their monasteries at Abbey Cwmhir and Strata Florida, and still very much in use today (sadly, though, by damaging off-road vehicles as well as walkers).
One vivid passage in the book describes the extraordinary history of cattle-droving, an important contributor to the wealth of Wales from the 17th to the early 20th centuries. Daniel Defoe noted that Ceredigion, in particular, was ‘the [cattle] nursery, the breeding place for the whole kingdom of England’. Drovers would visit the county’s farms and fairs, where they would drive a hard bargain as they purchased cattle and assembled herds of up to 400 bullocks. These were first shod for the journey in towns such as Tregaron, in mid-Wales, whose entire economy was based on catering to the cattle trade. These towns also provided the hired men who would accompany the chief drover and the herd on their journey east. (Andrew notes that most drovers were men, but not all: one remarkable exception was Jane Evans, pig farmer and drover, who later in life travelled to Scutari in Turkey to work as a nurse during the Crimean War alongside Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole, and Betsi Cadwaladr.)
Today’s drovers’ roads are havens of tranquillity, but the passage of a herd would have been a noisy and dangerous event in the past, as we learn from an eye-witness account of 1856, describing ‘hundreds of bullocks like an immense forest of horns, propelled hurriedly towards you amid the hideous and uproarious shouting of a set of semi-barbarous drovers who value a restive bullock far beyond the life of any human being, driving their mad and noisy herds over every person they meet if not fortunate enough to get out of their way’.
The future for Smithfield
Many of those cattle ended up being sold in Smithfield, the meat market that was granted its charter by Edward III in 1327 and is still, according to its operators, ‘the largest wholesale meat market in the UK and one of the largest in Europe’. Not for much longer, it seems, for the Court of Common Council, the decision-making body for the City of London Corporation, has voted to close the market, which will cease trading in 2028.
The Grade II-listed Central Meat Market, with its ornate cast-iron columns supporting a mix of cast-iron and timber trusses, is thus doomed to become another temple to consumerism, along the lines of Covent Garden, completing a process of gentrification that has been going on since the 1980s. This was accelerated by the decision in 2000 to convert the former General Market, standing to the west of the Meat Market, into a new home for the Museum of London.
Not unlike the bullocks rampaging down a drovers’ road, the Smithfield meat porters (known as ‘bummarees’) specialise in terrifying with shouts and curses anyone who threatens to impede their path as they carry heavy sides of meat from wholesalers’ stalls to the waiting vans of caterers, retail butchers, and restaurateurs. Later, they are likely to be found in one of the Smithfield pubs that have a special licence to open at 7am to cater for market workers at the end of their all-night shift. Here, too, gentrification is evident: the Hand and Shears pub today displays a sign requesting patrons to dress respectably where not so long ago it was not uncommon to see staff from St Bartholomew’s Hospital and from the meat market dressed alike in blood-stained aprons enjoying a well-kept pint.
Alfred’s Hall
The publication of the annual Heritage at Risk Register by Historic England is always a cause for celebration (this year 124 buildings and sites were removed from it, having been rescued) and for regret (155 heritage sites have been added to the list because they are at risk of neglect, decay, or inappropriate development).
Then there are the large number that just sit stubbornly decaying year after year, despite the availability of restoration grants. One such is the Grade II* Alfred’s Hall, in Cirencester Park, Gloucestershire, which has been on the register since it was first published.
The hall has long been claimed as the first ‘purpose-built’ ruin and an early example of Gothic Revival architecture, built to designs concocted by the newly ennobled Lord Bathurst (he was later created Earl Bathurst) and his good friend, the poet Alexander Pope. Together they laid out the Grade I-listed Cirencester Park, one of the earliest and finest examples in England of the kind of naturalistic planting that was then being promoted by the English gardener Stephen Switzer (1682-1745).
Michael Cousins, in his history of the hall published in The Follies Journal (No.8, Summer 2009), says that it was built in 1732, supposedly on the site where King Alfred rested with his army the night before he defeated the army of the Danish leader Guthrum at the Battle of Edington in AD 878 (Asser’s Life of King Alfred says that the king camped at Æcglea, which 18th-century antiquaries identified as Oakley Woods, the location of the folly).
The first Lord Bathurst was a philanthropist and patron of the arts, who counted Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, and William Congreve among his friends, as well as Pope. He was a founding supporter of the Royal Academy of Music and the Foundling Hospital, and the opera company he established commissioned works from Handel. Most importantly of all, he opened Cirencester Park to the public, and for 326 years there was unrestricted public access. That changed in March 2024, since when visitors have been charged for entry. Local people have staged demonstrations, but the current Earl Bathurst says that the entrance fee is needed to maintain and restore the park.
The website of the Bathurst Estate makes much of the family’s commitment to heritage and conservation, and to the ‘sublime landscaped park’ that they own. In addition, Bathurst Development Limited is constructing 2,350 new properties on 300 acres of former agricultural land to the south of Cirencester. The new housing estate, called The Steadings, is as large in area as Cirencester’s Roman predecessor Corinium Dobunnorum, Roman Britain’s second largest settlement after Londinium, and it will increase the town’s population by around 25 per cent. Let us hope that some of the revenue generated by Bathurst enterprises might be channelled into restoring this important folly, whose current condition is described as ‘very bad, with an immediate risk of further rapid deterioration or loss of fabric’.
