Cattle and credit cards

by - 23:04 on 19 March 2009

 

Here's a pic of an ordinary country lane in Perthshire. It leads down to the River Earn, ahead and marked by the line of trees at a point called Dalpatrick Ford, near the town of Crieff, in Perthshire. The notch in the background hills is the mouth of Glen Turret. This lies beyond the Highland line and is parallel to the Sma’ Glen, not in the picture but further east (to the right), which similarly leads out of the hills. 

There is a ghostly network converging on the old ford here from these and the other Highland routes out of the north. And this relates to the long-vanished trade of cattle droving. The peaceful Dalpatrick Ford was a main crossing place for the herds, raised in the north, en route to the autumn market or ‘tryst’ where they were bought by dealers from the south. Roughly in the first half of the 18th century, this market took place in nearby Crieff, then later at Falkirk, further south, beyond the River Forth. A straight line from Dalpatrick Ford back north towards the entrance to the Sma Glen more or less follows a road still called Highlandman’s Loan – because of its connection to the Highland drovers who came this way long ago.

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It’s extraordinary to think that in its cattle-dealing heyday, the little resort town of Crieff was virtually Scotland’s largest financial centre – and, in an eerie echo of today’s straitened circumstances, much of the cattle business was done on credit. There wasn’t much cash around, so the dealing was based on bills of exchange. This written promise to pay was in circulation pretty much like a banknote. There was even a bank crash in 1772 which brought down several embryonic financial houses who had interests in the cattle trade.

In Scots, the word ‘tryst’ means an agreed meeting place– so that the dealers ‘trysted’ with the owners or drovers to meet them in order to do business. There’s a strand of meaning of the standard English ‘trust’ in there as well – and so we return to the idea of credit, and the collapse of economies when that trust is absent. True in the old days and still true today.

Strictly speaking, Crieff’s days as an important tryst ended not because of financial reasons but because of the more peaceable political situation in the latter half of the 18th century, when the Jacobite threat had faded and English dealers felt more confident about travelling north of the Border! The tryst moved to Falkirk as it was nearer England. But just imagine those drovers, as they made their way through the mountains, hoping for a good price for their speculative purchases on the hoof. Or, better still, take part in Crieff’s very own modern take on the Drovers’ Tryst. This is an autumn festival with the emphasis on discovery of these old roads by walks and tours (though there’s a ton of other entertaining stuff as well, including the ‘Hairy Coo Mountain Bike Challenge’!) For more information, see www.droverstryst.co.uk
 

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