Boyhood memories of market day

Patrick Laurie on the survival of traditional market towns, which now feel few and far between

Market day through the eye of a seven-year-old Patrick

There’s a smell of sawdust and disinfectant in the town on market day. The roads are already half-filled with trucks and trailers by eight o’clock in the morning, and the carpark is brimming over by the time the sales begin. Lots of places call themselves ‘market towns’ because they were based around the buying and selling of livestock, but the expression feels stale nowadays since so many markets have died or dried up. It’s not so much about markets anymore – a ‘market town’ is more likely to mean ‘well-heeled’ or ‘administratively significant’. But my home town of Castle Douglas has held onto its market over the years. It’s not only a market town in the modern sense — full of cafés, galleries and shops which sell decorative wickerwork — but for reasons which escape many of Castle Douglas’s more prosperous inhabitants, it’s also a place where cows and sheep are sold three times a week.

The market at Castle Douglas has survived because this is livestock country. Jammed between the bogs and boulders of the northern Solway coast, Galloway has some of the best and most productive grassland in Scotland. The annual show and sale of belted galloway cattle draws buyers from across the world at the end of October, but despite the fact that everybody goes daft for black and white ‘beltie’ cattle, the market is more than a leisureland. Many thousands of blackface ewes go through the ring each year; fat lambs and stores* in their tens of thousands are shipped across country from Belfast to Newcastle and south down the A1. Markets which were merely convenient or ‘nice to have’ are dead nowadays. It’s believed that 600 of these businesses have closed since the Second World War, to a point at which we now have the barest and most slender minimum. Here’s the real reason why the local market survived, just as others at Longtown, Hexham, Carlisle and Newton Stewart still exist in a chain which runs across the south of Scotland and into Cumbria and Northumberland — the arrangement of markets is an interdependent web which continually feeds back and forth upon itself.

To understand how this network operates, you need to collar one of the livestock haulage drivers who lurk around outside the market gates on a sale day. Most of what they move stays within Galloway, but the story gets more interesting when you ask them about their work further afield. That’s when relays begin to open up, and like London cabbies, these men can tell you how to perform some extraordinary logistical juggling acts; they can explain how to get a bull from Castle Douglas to Tavistock, even as they’re rolling a cigarette. To start with, they’ll take the animal to Carlisle where it’ll be met by a lorry heading south down the M6 to Stoke-on-Trent (when you live in Scotland and have a pretty shaky understanding of English geography, it’s astonishing how everything seems to happen in Stoke-on-Trent – I aspire to go there someday). In Stoke-on-Trent, a different lorry will take the beast to Bristol, and from there it’s no problem to find a driver who knows not only the nearest village but the final field where the animal is due to be delivered. Complete with loadings and unloadings, rest stops and water breaks, these computations are not only worked out in realtime — they’re also costed, as if you planned to start the trip in the next 15 minutes.