I have not had the fortune to meet drovers from Wales, but where the Icknield Way through Buckinghamshire rounds the promontory Beacon of the Ivinghoe Hills I have seen men with sheep from Berkshire or Dorset journeying towards Dunstable, Royston, and the farms of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. They have to go much on the hard grit to-day, and I have heard that they are kept off the unfenced Ridgeway lest the flock should eat too much of the pastures in their passage. The sheep dislike the grit as much as Mr. Burroughs loves it and I hate it, and what with the traffic and the harshness of the road it is not surprising to hear of a Welsh flock taking a week to get from Warminster to Monckton Deverill. Where the high down roads are fenced there could be no better wayfaring. The track is twenty or thirty yards wide or more. It is untouched by wheels, and grows nothing but grass and the most delicate flowers. Along similar droves doubtless the sheep go up to the alpine grass in summer, as the shepherd in California told Miss Mary Austin.[5] “We went between the fenced pastures, feeding every other day and driving at night. In the dark we heard the bells ahead and slept upon our feet. Myself and another herdboy, we tied ourselves together not to wander from the road.... Whenever shepherds from the Rhone are met about camps in the Sierras they will be talking of how they slept upon their feet and followed after the bells.” The best time to meet travelling sheep is after one of the fortnightly markets at East Ilsley among the Berkshire Downs, or at the time of the Ram Fair there on August 1st, or at the time of Tan Hill Fair on August 6th, or Yarnbury Fair on October 4th. Tan Hill and Yarnbury fairs are both held within the circuit of an old camp on the high chalk. Yarnbury is a meeting-place of trackways over Salisbury Plain. Tan Hill is close to the great Ridgeway and other trackways. Tan is supposed by some to be connected with the Celtic “tan,” meaning fire, and with Celtic religious festivals having ceremonies of fire. This fair was held at a very early hour, and there is an obvious temptation to suggest a religious origin for the beacons said to have been lighted to guide the drovers.[6] I do not know what number of sheep would be sold at this fair. Defoe says that as many as five hundred thousand were sold at Weyhill Fair, one farmer attending to represent ten or twenty in his own county of Sussex or Oxfordshire. If this number came to Tan Hill it was worth a night’s drenching to see the beacons and the multitudes arriving, to hear the bells and the sea of tired bleating and the sharp chiding of the overstrung dogs and the curses of the sleepy drovers upon that smooth, bare mountain without house or hut or a white road, or anything much newer than Wansdyke except the square of mustard that began to dawn through the mist like a banner not far away. [5] _The Flock_, by Mary Austin. [6] _Wiltshire Archæological Magazine_, XXXIV.