Transhumance
Twice a year the flocks move between winter and summer pasture, along routes older than any of the borders they now cross.
The drove roads are still there, and in several countries they are still legally protected — wide green corridors running through land that has otherwise been enclosed for two centuries. In Spain they are cañadas reales, and there are about 125,000 kilometres of them. They are public land, ninety varas wide, which is a little over seventy-five metres.
Whether anyone still walks them is a different question.
Right of way
Every autumn a shepherd drives a flock through the centre of Madrid, down the Gran Vía, past the department stores, to make the point that the right has not lapsed. It is a piece of theatre and it is also a legal manoeuvre: rights of way in Spanish law can be weakened by disuse, and the walk is evidence of use.
The flock is around 1,500 head. The city pays a toll, notionally, of fifty maravedís per thousand animals — a coin that has not been minted since the nineteenth century, so it is settled in a token payment and a photograph.
A right you never exercise is a right you are in the process of losing.
The practical version
Away from the cameras the movement is mostly by lorry now. A flock that took three weeks to walk from Extremadura to the Cantabrian pastures takes eight hours on the A-66, and the lorry does not need a shepherd, three dogs and a route with water on it every fifteen kilometres.
What the lorry does not do is graze the corridor on the way. The cañadas were maintained by the animals that used them; without that, scrub closes in, and a right of way that cannot be walked is harder to defend than one that can.