They were drovers and stock raisers, who had come from far states, and brokers and commission merchants, and buyers for all the big packing houses.

The guard had just finished an account of a desperate fight which had happened at one of the fairs between the drovers and the farmers with their whips, and the boys with cricket-bats and wickets, which arose out of a playful but objectionable practice of the boys going round to the public-houses and taking the linch-pins out of the wheels of the gigs, and was moralizing upon the way in which the Doctor, "a terrible stern man he'd heard tell," had come down upon several of the performers, "sending three on 'em off next morning in a po-shay with a parish constable," when they turned a corner and neared the milestone, the third from Rugby.

The passengers are getting out of the steamboat, and into the coaches; the luggage is being transferred in noisy wheelbarrows; the horses are frightened, and impatient to start; the black drivers are chattering to them like so many monkeys; and the white ones whooping like so many drovers: for the main thing to be done in all kinds of hostlering here, is to make as much noise as possible.

Instead of cowboys, we called them drovers. I was an adult before I knew this; I had heard of drovers, and even of ancient drover's roads, but never given much thought to who the drovers really were.

These included drover routes, for moving cattle to the English Midlands, and paths for moving tack sheep.

Drover was a Truck Driver for American Liquid Company in Rhode Island for 20 years until his retirement in 1996.

Countryfile presenter Adam Henson will get a taste of the sheep drover''s life when he takes to the tracks above Llangollen.

Participants will be guided by experienced drovers, who may or may not look like the drover played by Hugh Jackman in Australia.