Why Move the Herd Up the Mountain Every Summer? Using Two Places at Once

High pasture produces abundant grass for a few months and is buried in snow for the rest, while lowland pasture is available year round and is needed for growing crops and hay during the summer. Moving animals up when the snow clears therefore exploits a resource that would otherwise be wasted, and it simultaneously frees the lowland fields for cultivation and for cutting the winter fodder the animals will need. The movement is seasonal and repeated rather than a migration, with the same community returning to the same places, which distinguishes it from nomadism where the whole household moves permanently. Only some of the community travels, usually the herders, while the rest stay and farm.

Making it work needs arrangements well beyond the herding itself:

• •Rights of way along which herds can pass, frequently ancient and legally protected
• •Rights to graze particular high pastures, held communally in most systems
• •Rules on when the move happens, since grazing too early damages the pasture
• •Buildings at both ends, with huts and dairies at the summer pasture
• •Cheese and butter making at altitude, since milk cannot be carried down daily
• •Agreement with the communities the route passes through

The practice is legible in mountain regions long after it stops. Drove roads and droving lanes survive as sunken tracks, as unusually wide rights of way and as networks of paths converging on passes, and in Spain the network of protected routes runs to tens of thousands of kilometres and is defended by legislation dating to the thirteenth century. Summer settlements of stone huts and dairy buildings stand at altitude, in some regions in considerable numbers and now mostly abandoned. The pastures themselves are maintained by grazing, so the open high meadows of the Alps and comparable ranges are a product of the practice rather than a natural state, and they revert to scrub and woodland when it ceases. Place names record the routes and the pastures.

Comparable seasonal movements occur wherever a resource is available only at certain times and the arrangements are worth setting beside each other. Reindeer herding across northern Scandinavia and Siberia follows the animals between coastal summer and inland winter ranges over far greater distances. Pastoralists across the Sahel move north with the rains and south as they fail, in a pattern that depends on agreements with farmers whose fields the herds pass and whose stubble they graze, and the breakdown of those agreements under population pressure and climate stress is behind several serious conflicts. Herders across central Asia moved between summer and winter pastures for millennia before collectivisation disrupted it. The common requirement is secure access to both ends and to the route between, which is what usually fails.

The practice has contracted sharply across Europe and elsewhere within living memory, for reasons that are economic rather than agricultural. Herding at altitude for months is labour intensive and poorly paid, and the people who did it have other options. Road transport allows animals to be moved by lorry, which removes the droving routes from use and severs the communities along them. Lowland intensification and imported feed make the high pasture unnecessary. Land ownership changes and tourism development have closed routes. The consequences include loss of the open habitats and the species that depend on them, increased fire risk as scrub accumulates, and the disappearance of associated knowledge, which is why several countries now subsidise the practice explicitly and why it has been recognised as intangible cultural heritage.

Moving animals to high pasture in summer exploits grazing available only briefly while freeing lowland fields for crops and hay, with only the herders travelling. The system needs protected routes, communal grazing rights, agreed timing and buildings at both ends. High meadows are maintained by the grazing and revert to scrub without it.