By 1825, the age of the Welsh drovers was already under pressure. For centuries, these men had walked cattle from Anglesey, Snowdonia, and beyond, driving them hundreds of miles to markets in London and across England. They were famed for their toughness, their knowledge of the roads, and their reputation for honesty — drovers often acted as informal bankers, trusted to carry money across long distances.
But change was coming. The Menai Bridge opened in 1826, the same year George Stephenson’s Locomotion No. 1 first ran. Within decades, railways would replace the drove roads, shrinking journeys that once took weeks into days. The donkey that once carried supplies became a quaint relic of the road.
Taverns, fairs, and market towns along these routes often hosted gambling dens and crooked card games. While records rarely detail organized “rings” in the modern sense, travelers and drovers alike were vulnerable to sharpers who preyed on the unwary. A crooked hand at cards, a weighted dice, or a debt unpaid could spill into violence — and in isolated inns, justice was slow to catch up.
The route followed in the story is typical of the routes taken during that period with one exception. The route detours from Capel Curig to rise over the pass and down to Llanrwst. This is simply to go past three farms where I spent many of my summer holidays as a child – Maes Mawr, Cornel and Blaen Nant.
This story grows from those tensions: old ways versus new, trust versus betrayal, memory versus change. It imagines one of the very last great droves, and a family secret carried along its dusty miles.
If Taid Williams is a man of the past and Hugh of the future, then their journey is not just along the drove road to London, but along the line between memory and progress — a line still visible today, if you walk the old roads.