Up to the nineteenth century England had a flourishing trade in live whales. They were herded up into the Irish Sea and brought ashore in Cardigan Bay in mid-Wales.

There they were handed over to the highly skilled drovers who would conduct them overland all the way to the livestock markets at Banbury and Moreton-in-Marsh. (If the whales had really behaved themselves, they might treat them to a trip Drayton Manor or another amusement park instead).

The remains of these ancient tracks (or whaleways, as they were called) can still be seen across the Welsh highlands and the midlands of England. Like the American cowboys, the drovers apprently sang to their charges on the long journey, but of all these songs, only a single fragment has survived: the first line of a song which begins thus:

I've been a whale drover for many's the year ...