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drove

Archaic Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A group of animals, especially cattle or sheep, being herded together; also a road along which animals were traditionally driven to market.

Detailed Definition
Drove derives from Old English "draf," from "drïfan" (to drive), and describes both a herd or flock in motion and the ancient trackways—droveroads—along which livestock were moved across country to seasonal pastures or markets. In poetry drove evokes the movement and noise of large groups of animals, the dust of summer roads, the calls of drovers. The historical network of droveways that crossed Britain before railways represents an entire vanished infrastructure, and when poets invoke drove roads or droves, they reach back to a pre-industrial landscape of seasonal migration and traditional practice. The word also carries a democratic energy—the multitude in motion—that distinguishes it from the more static images of fold and pen.
Example
Example in poetry:
The drove roads of Britain — ancient trackways along which cattle and sheep were moved from highland summer pastures to lowland winter farms or to market — represent a vanished geography of seasonal movement; A poet might write "they took the old drove road south in October, the beasts filling the hollow way from bank to bank, the dust rising like a brown season"; In pastoral poetry the drove represents movement and temporary communities — the social world of drovers, their dogs, their overnight stops at inns — as distinct from the settled, rooted world of the farm; Hardy's Wessex poems attend to the drove roads as features of the landscape that carry historical depth — paths worn by centuries of animal movement that persist in the topography long after the practice that created them has ceased; The biblical resonance of the drove — the movement of flocks and herds as evidence of pastoral wealth — connects English droving poetry to a much older tradition of celebrating the abundance of animals in motion; The noise and dust and sheer physical mass of a drove — hundreds of animals moving together, filling a road from hedge to hedge — provides a powerful visual and auditory image available to poets who want to convey the scale and vitality of pre-industrial pastoral economy.
Additional Notes
Drove is important for understanding a dimension of pre-industrial rural life that has left its mark on the British landscape but is largely invisible in contemporary experience: the movement of large numbers of animals on foot across country to seasonal pastures or markets. The network of drove roads — wide, unfenced tracks along which cattle, sheep, pigs, and geese were moved — constituted a major infrastructure of the pre-railway economy. Students should know that droving was a distinct trade: drovers were specialists who contracted to move animals across country, often over hundreds of miles, sleeping rough and managing the animals' pace to deliver them in saleable condition. The physical evidence of drove roads — their width (often forty feet or more), their traditional wayside inns, their characteristic course avoiding toll roads — persists in the British landscape. For students of Victorian and later rural poetry, the drove road is one of the features of the pre-industrial landscape that Hardy and others invoke to suggest historical depth. Related terms: herd, fold, pen, neatherd, swineherd.
Also Known As
droveway drover's road drift cattle road herd
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