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It would seem the situation in Northern Ireland is fairly clear, at least. The The Roads (Northern Ireland) Order 1993 says that anyone who "turns loose any animal onto a road...shall be guilty of an offence" but:
it shall be a defence for the keeper of an animal to show—
(a)that he took reasonable precautions to prevent the animal from wandering onto the road; or
(b)that the animal had wandered onto the road from unfenced land and that—
(i)the land is situated in an area where fencing is not customary, and
(ii)that he had a right to place the animal on that land.
So a reasonable interpretation might be that you can graze animals over roads if you always have. There is some ambiguity about 'customarily' unfenced land - if you have unfenced land not used for grazing which suddenly is grazed again, is that covered? I suppose the key thing is that it means if a sheep slips through a poorly maintained fence on to a busy A-road and causes an accident, the farmer can't just claim that it was free grazing and nothing to do with them.
Chris5156 wrote: ↑Mon Feb 19, 2024 10:29
Not wandering, but certainly present: the NSL dual carriageway A30 across Bodmin Moor has signs and warning lights to allow cattle to be herded on or across the road. It might be the busiest and most important road you’ll find livestock by design.
Yes, I've actually been stopped by the lights and had to wait for a herd of cows to cross the road. Took quite a while from what I recall
Pathetic Motorways has an anecdote about a guy droving his cattle across the old A556 four times a day. Not sure if that story was *ahem* embelished at all...
There are plenty of free-roaming sheep in the Forest of Dean, due to ancient common land users' rights, which still exist in certain parts of Britain because we never had the French Revolution.
When I learnt to drive, a vital skill was keeping your eyes peeled for livestock. Obviously there were deer as well as sheep. Nowadays there are wild boar down there as well.
Don't hit them. I've seen how impact with a sheep can give a previously square Ford Cortina a surprisingly rounded appearance.
Owain wrote: ↑Mon Feb 19, 2024 20:15
There are plenty of free-roaming sheep in the Forest of Dean, due to ancient common land users' rights, which still exist in certain parts of Britain because we never had the French Revolution.
When I learnt to drive, a vital skill was keeping your eyes peeled for livestock. Obviously there were deer as well as sheep. Nowadays there are wild boar down there as well.
Don't hit them. I've seen how impact with a sheep can give a previously square Ford Cortina a surprisingly rounded appearance.
There are plenty on the North Yorkshire moors, Swaledale Sheep are quite happy to eat bracken.
The problem we had in South Cambridgeshire were the deer especially the fallow deer which can be anything between 40kg and 80kg and they seemingly appear out of nowehere, this road was very dangerous when they were moving from one territory to another.
Often the first you knew they were there was they came straight though the undergrowth, one problem is that keeping the numbers down by shooting is no longer acceptable. I havent seen any wild boar but badgers have a habit of undermining roads with their setts which can lead to roads being closed.
The Wikipedia page to which I linked above includes the following section on roads:
Commons are often crossed by unfenced public roads, and this leads to another problem on modern pasture commons where grazing survives (or is to be reintroduced). Historically, the roads would have been cart-tracks, and there would have been no conflict between their horse-drawn (or ox-drawn) traffic and the pastured animals, and no great difficulty if pastured animals wandered off the common along the roads. However, these roads now have fast motorised traffic which does not mix safely with animals. To continue (or restore) grazing, such roads may need fencing or at least blocking at the edge of the common with cattle grids – however fencing a common is reminiscent of the process of enclosure, historically fatal to its survival, and permission for fencing on a common is a strictly controlled process within the UK planning system.
Public roads through enclosed common land were made to an accepted width between boundaries. In the late eighteenth century this was at least 60 feet (18 m), but from the 1790s this was decreased to 40 feet (12 m), and later 30 feet (9.1 m) as the normal maximum width. The reason for these wide roads to was to prevent excessive churning of the road bed, and allow easy movement of flocks and herds of animals.
Owain wrote: ↑Mon Feb 19, 2024 20:15
When I learnt to drive, a vital skill was keeping your eyes peeled for livestock. Obviously there were deer as well as sheep. Nowadays there are wild boar down there as well.
Don't hit them. I've seen how impact with a sheep can give a previously square Ford Cortina a surprisingly rounded appearance.
Colleague from Canada had an encounter with a moose there. Although he pulled up and stopped first the moose was spooked into defending something, got its head down and charged head-on. It was only the radiator bursting and the large steam cloud that frightened it away, otherwise the police said they were known to charge again. The big Chevy V8 was written off.
Owain wrote: ↑Mon Feb 19, 2024 20:15
…keeping your eyes peeled for livestock. Obviously there were deer as well as sheep. Nowadays there are wild boar down there as well.
Don't hit them. I've seen how impact with a sheep can give a previously square Ford Cortina a surprisingly rounded appearance.
Concave, presumably?
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Owain wrote: ↑Mon Feb 19, 2024 20:15…keeping your eyes peeled for livestock. Obviously there were deer as well as sheep. Nowadays there are wild boar down there as well.
Don't hit them. I've seen how impact with a sheep can give a previously square Ford Cortina a surprisingly rounded appearance.
Concave, presumably?
Had the sheep been hit head-on (from the car's perspective, not the sheep's), it would have been.
However, the Cortina MkIV was a very angular design, and after what was presumably a glancing blow (from the car's perspective; I have no idea about the impact on the sheep) the nearside front corner was completely rounded off. The vehicle was still drivable, but was presumably scrapped soon afterwards.
My cousin had a Peugeot 405 that was written off after a disastrous encounter with a stag (the animal variety; not a Triumph).
A sheep once committed suicide in front of my VW Passat Mk2 on the A87 near Shiel Bridge. The road was unfenced but had a crash barrier, and a few of them were grazing on the verge when one of them suddenly turned right just as I reached it. It left the front bumper slightly concave and put a dent the size of a 50p in the bonnet.
Another A road, although less significant than the A87, where sheep are likely is the A924. https://www.google.com/maps/@56.7343604 ... &entry=ttu I've often seen old tyres fixed to posts and painted with the message "lambs on road" but haven't found any on GSV.
There are plenty of unfenced upland roads where livestock can roam free. This, for example is the A488; I've had a quick look but haven't found any actual sheep in the road. More common, in my experience, is when farmers walk their livestock from one field to another across a public road: I've been stuck at the A6/A5270 junction above Buxton waiting for the cows to come home.
I remember when I did the hazard perception bit of my driving test about a quarter of the hazards were sheep in the road, so perhaps the examiners were trying to tell me something.
"If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed." - Sylvia Plath
I took my South African driving licence in Johannesburg. When getting my learners [provisional] licence, I was shown the sign for a cattle grid and asked what it was. Unknown to the examiner, I had been brought up in a small counrty town and had often seen cattle grid, so I proceeded to describe it to him in detail. After about 10 sewconds, he told me to shut up - I obviously knew what it was and possibly knew more about them than he did.
The A686 and A689 from Alston to St Johns Chapel were the most important roads where sheep used to wander near me. Also the A66 near Keswick used to have a cattle crossing with warning lights in the eighties and nineties, where at 6am one morning I was brought to a halt by a farmer crossing the road with his Friesian cows to be milked. Cows being cows they had a habit of standing in the road and looking into the stopped cars.
Around this part of Essex as mentioned we used to have sheep and cows on the main road. Nowadays the longhorn cattle are geo-restricted to small areas within the Forest to stop them getting run over and to create the clearings to encourage tree growth.
There was a smallholding in Epping with large chickens and geese that used to wander onto the main road by the hospital but that has stopped since the grazer died.
Sheep and goats freely roam the Lake District, Yorkshire Dales and Moors, Peak District and most National Parks. I've seen a few cattle on the roads there too and had my hat licked by a cow on Great Gable. Horses and ponies wander on Dartmoor and Exmoor.
Back in 2022 I had to stop on the B6355 north of Duns to avoid running over several quail or similar small birds that clearly lived on a farm by the road.
New Forest ponies haven't been mentioned yet. I've stopped to admire them and to let them wander over the road. Too often they just stand and gaze at you. I'm sure they're just being bloody minded
Here's one herd I saw in Longnor Derbyshire blocking the traffic some time ago. It was obvious this was a regular journey for them as the farmer simply let them out of one field on the right of the pic and they walked straight to the farm just 200m to the left.
The road from Burgh by Sands to Port Carlisle must be one of the best drives in England. It's built over a roman road, so is completely straight, looks directly on to Scotland and while the mooing things tend to keep to the grass, they can occasionally wander on to the road and stare you out in your car. Also beyond the cattle grid towards Port Carlisle, you can speed up quite easily to the NSL as the road is straight and doesn't have much traffic.
Port Carlisle, while just a street now and a bowling green, was created to be a port for the city of Carlisle, with a canal to Carlisle, but it never did much and the canal was filled in after 30 years. There was an attempt to keep the port going when a railway line was opened in 1854, but competition from Silloth saw it fall into disuse and the railway was closed in 1932. Also until 1914, a passenger service from Drumburgh to Port Carlisle consisted og a small carriage hauled by a horse.
I've come across numerous flocks of sheep and cattle on my wanderings in the hillier parts of Britain. The most awkward moment was one day on the long minor road to Kinloch Hourn from the A87. The minor road goes over a single track bridge over the northern arm of Loch Cuaich. Approaching the bridge I could see that there was a highland cow contentedly munching grass to the left of the road in front of the bridge, and its calf was standing in the middle of the road on the bridge. What to do? I waited for a few minutes trying not to startle them.... nothing happened. I tried beeping my horn. I tried revving the engine. I tried getting out of the car and gesturing at them with my walking poles. Nothing. Eventually I edged the car very gingerly onto the bridge, but now I was between the calf and its mother with its very big horns. The calf initially got the message and started walking across the bridge in front of me, but then it got alarmed and stopped about half way across the bridge. At this point, mother cow figured out what was going on and started walking across the bridge behind me. So now I'm on the middle of the bridge, calf in front of me, cow behind me. After what seemed like a very long time, the calf managed to squeeze between my car and the side of the bridge and was reunited. Drama over .
I remember following a friend, there were eight of us heading up to go horse riding in North Wales, and there were a lot of sheep on the road. Me, the more country driver, stopped the car and waited for the shepherd to clear. He hit the horn. Nothing was broken on his car, but there were a few hoof print dents on the bonnet.
Sheep are ones I really tend to avoid. Part of it is I suspect growing up in a dairy area I had more experience dealing with cows on the road. But also sheep are less predictable, often give the impression of having the IQ of a root vegetable, and although sheep often have a suicide wish, ewes with lambs can be vicious in order to protect them from a perceived threat. They will attack where a cow with a calf is more likely to put herself in the way and stare you down, bovines have a size difference over most of predators if the predator is on its own. Sheep don't.
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One place where you often get free-range cattle rather than sheep is on Minchinhampton and Rodborough Commons between Stroud and Cirencester. The roads that cross the common are all unclassified, but some of them are ruler-straight and until around the turn of the century they were NSL, and 60 was definitely possible even if not advisable. There was a steady trickle of accidents involving people driving too fast and hitting the cows. They reduced the speed limit (and enforced it) and also tried various ways of making the cows more visible, like putting hi-viz jackets on them.
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Once met four Highland cows on the C1034 Strathmore Hope Road who refused to vacate the road despite edging right up to them and tooting horn. Eventually I admitted defeat, lost the staring competition, reversed and took the risk of driving around them - all four wheels off road.
The C1034 is one of the longest C roads in the Highland region, running through the north west of the sparsely populated county of Sutherland. It starts at the crossroads in the tiny village of Altnaharra, and runs west then northwest, following the River Mudale. The watershed is crossed just beyond Loch Meadie, and then the road drops into Strathmore. This is a long, flat valley, stretching all the way north, along the shores of Loch Hope, to the tiny village of Hope near the north
In an average year there are between 42,000 and 74,000 collisions that involve deer and motor vehicles and the deer rarely come out of the incident well. well. There was a funded study of this between 2003 and 2020 you can see the results here. https://www.deercollisions.co.uk/
Many of them are smaller species such as Muntjac's and Fallow deer but the injury rate for drivers was over 450 per annum and several drivers were killed. The law in the UK requires such incidents to be reported to the police only when human beings or domestic animals are involved. As I recall you are supposed to report an incident with a dog but not a cat.
See Road Traffic Act 1988 section 170 which only requires a notification if the animal is a horse, cattle, ass, mule, sheep, pig, goat or dog.
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