Wilts
KG Watts, in his book Droving in Wiltshire, makes it clear that there are two "sets" of drovers' roads in Wiltshire: the North Wilts droves, carrying traffic from Wales via Bristol; and the South Wilts droves, from Exeter and beyond, around the A303. One road from Salisbury to Marlborough joins the two sets.
Both "sets" would be aiming for either for the London markets or Southampton and Portsmouth, for the navy.
In the prologue to his book, KGW tells a delightful story from the memoirs of Edith Olivier in the 1930s. She and her father were driving in a carriage from Wilton to Wilsford when they came across a flock of sheep spread on either side of the road. Not recognising the breed, her father got down to talk to the shepherd, who was from Dorset and whose boss owned one of the only two flocks of this breed in the country. Every year, part of each flock was exchanged with the other, which belonged to a Hertfordshire farmer. [Breeding purposes?] The sheep were upset by train travel and there was too much traffic - even then - on the main roads, so the shepherd had for years driven them by lanes and byways in May...2mph for 3 weeks. All along the route he knew fields where he could turn them in for the night and inns that would provide him with a bed. When he reached Hertfordshire he would rest for a week or two then drive back to Dorset the sheep he had come to fetch.
If that doesn't make you nostalgic, nothing will.
Facts and detail crowd the pages, but a few pieces of memorable wisdom shine out. For instance, the difference "between chalk and cheese" had nothing to do with a 14C poet but the enmity between the graziers in the West of the county, whose lowland grass produced fine cattle for cheese and those in the eastern chalk uplands who were forced to graze sheep. The Sheep-men avoided the cattlemen on Salisbury market days, and vice versa.
Just one more: the Yew was called "The Hampshire Weed" by Wiltshire men, who marked drove-routes with Scots Pine.
* * *
July 2020: thanks to an email from Peter Williams of Pewsham we visited North Wiltshire recently to find it richly-endowed with drovers' tracks.
We normally stay in an area for 3-4 days and cover 90% of the walks we're interested in; this time we stayed a week and covered under 10%. What a county!
Outside the centres of population, there is so much open space. Thank you, Peter.
Part of Summer Lane