Can you imagine spending six months of every year walking more than 540 miles over challenging terrain, scrambling up precipitous rocky hills, and over mountains; trudging across unpredictable boggy moors, fording treacherous deep, fast flowing rivers, crossing lakes, and even swimming stretches of sea?

In 1785 Gartmore found itself on the core drove route which ranged from the Inner Hebrides to the new Falkirk Tryst. It’s hard to believe that for about 100 years a third of all of Scotland’s Black Cattle (amounting to tens of thousands per year) were driven through this tiny village from Tiree, Islay, Jura, Mull, Argyll, and Kintyre, on their way to the three annual Falkirk Trysts, then onward to Norfolk to be fattened - eventually arriving for slaughter at Smithfield Market in London.

Black Cattle and sheep were driven from every corner of Scotland, across hundreds of miles of bleak landscape and mountains, over a network of primitive routes to these mammoth gatherings, where English cattle merchants, brandishing credit notes, came to acquire the beef that fed the growing cities of the south, and Britain’s war effort against the French.

But where exactly did Gartmore’s drove route come from - and where did it go?

Come along to see and hear new evidence that traces the exact drove route into, and through Gartmore - then onward to Falkirk.

It will open your eyes to the many places you see on a daily basis, and take for granted.

We’ll also expose an ancient lost road, (emanating in Drymen), excitingly rediscovered only this month.