Transhumance

Based on Wikipedia: Transhumance

The Ancient Art of Following the Seasons

Every spring in the mountains of Poland, shepherds gather their sheep for a ritual called redyk. They light bonfires and drive the animals through the flames. They lead the flock three times around a small spruce tree stuck in the ground, fumigating them with burning herbs. The head shepherd, called the baca, pulls the sheep forward by sprinkling salt, while his assistants—the juhasi—watch carefully for any animal that breaks from the circle. According to tradition, each sheep that falls outside will die before autumn comes.

This is transhumance.

The word comes from Latin: trans meaning "across" and humus meaning "ground." Literally, crossing the land. It describes the seasonal movement of livestock between fixed pastures—typically up into the mountains during summer and down into the valleys for winter. But that clinical definition misses what transhumance really is: one of humanity's oldest choreographies with the natural world, a dance that has shaped landscapes, languages, and entire cultures across every inhabited continent.

Vertical and Horizontal: Two Ways to Move

There are two main patterns of transhumance, and understanding the difference reveals something important about how geography shapes human life.

Vertical transhumance happens in mountainous regions. When summer arrives, herders move their animals up to high alpine meadows where the grass grows lush and green. As winter approaches, they descend to sheltered valleys where the snow is less severe and fodder can be stored. The herders themselves usually maintain a permanent home in the valleys—only the animals travel with a handful of people to tend them, while most of the community stays put.

Horizontal transhumance occurs on plains and plateaus. Instead of moving up and down, herds travel across vast distances of relatively flat terrain, following the rains and the grass. This pattern is more vulnerable to disruption. A new political border, a drought, or economic pressure can shatter routes that communities have followed for centuries.

The distinction matters because vertical transhumance creates remarkably stable cultural systems. Mountains don't move. The summer pastures stay where they've always been. This permanence has allowed traditions like the Polish redyk to survive for generations, complete with their bonfires and magical protections and careful counting rituals.

What Transhumance Is Not

It's easy to confuse transhumance with other forms of pastoral life, so let's be precise.

Pure nomadism means a community has no permanent home at all. They move constantly with their animals, setting up camp wherever the grazing is good. Transhumant herders, by contrast, always have a fixed base—usually in the valleys—where most of the population lives year-round.

Semi-nomadism falls somewhere in between. The anthropologist Anatoly Khazanov actually identified five distinct categories: pure pastoral nomadism, semi-nomadic pastoralism, semi-sedentary pastoralism, distant-pastures husbandry, and seasonal transhumance. Other scholars don't bother distinguishing between transhumance and semi-nomadism, but they all agree it's different from true nomadic life.

The key difference is permanence. A nomad's home is wherever the herd happens to be. A transhumant herder's home is in the valley, waiting for their return each autumn.

The Words We Made for High Places

Here's a fascinating linguistic fact: across countless languages and cultures, people invented special words for those high summer pastures. And these words have become place names that dot the maps of mountain regions worldwide.

In Wales, the summer dwelling in the hills is called a hafod. The winter home in the valley is the hendref. Both words appear everywhere as place names and house names across the Welsh countryside. There's even a raw milk cow cheese named Hafod.

In Scotland, the summer shelter is a shieling, from the Gaelic àirigh or ruighe. In the Alps—Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland—the high pasture itself is simply called an alp. That's right: the word we use for the entire mountain range originally just meant a summer meadow.

In Scandinavia, the common mountain or forest pasture used for summer grazing is called a seter. In the Pyrenees and across Spain, families would decamp to rudimentary stone cabins in the high country. These names persist long after the practices that created them have faded, linguistic fossils of a way of life that once dominated every mountain community in Europe.

Before History: The Evidence in Bones

How do we know transhumance is ancient? The bones tell us.

Archaeologists studying livestock remains from prehistoric Europe have used isotope analysis—examining the chemical signatures left in bones by the water and plants an animal consumed—to determine that certain animals were moved seasonally between different locations. The isotope ratios in their teeth, which form during different periods of the animal's life, show distinct signatures from different elevations and regions.

This physical evidence confirms what common sense suggests: as soon as humans began keeping livestock, they would have noticed that grass grows at different times in different places. The high meadows stay green through the hot summer when valley pastures turn brown. The valleys offer shelter when the mountains are buried in snow. Following this rhythm requires no sophisticated technology, only the accumulated wisdom of generations.

The prevalence of hill peoples around the world—communities whose entire identity is shaped by mountain living—suggests that the knowledge needed for transhumance developed independently many times and was carefully transmitted from parents to children. Most traditional herders are conversant not just with animal husbandry but with subsistence agriculture, forestry, and the management of frozen water and fast-moving streams. This is a complex skill set, and it doesn't develop overnight.

The Balkans: When Borders Redrew the World

The Balkans offer a poignant lesson in what happens when politics collides with ancient patterns of movement.

For centuries, the peninsula was home to interconnected transhumant communities. Albanians, Greek Sarakatsani, various Eastern Romance peoples—Romanians, Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, and Istro-Romanians—and the Turkish Yörük all followed similar rhythms. They spent summer months in the mountains, sometimes traveling as far north as the Balkan range, and returned to warmer plains near the Aegean Sea for winter.

When the region was divided between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, borders between what are now Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslavia were relatively porous. Herders could follow their traditional routes without too much interference.

Then came the era of nation-states.

As the Ottoman Empire collapsed and new countries emerged, hard borders appeared that divided summer pastures from winter ones. Suddenly, following your sheep across a mountain pass meant crossing an international frontier. During times of war—and war has been tragically frequent in the Balkans—movement became impossible.

The Morlachs, also called Karavlachs, were Eastern Romance shepherds who lived in the Dinaric Alps, constantly migrating with their flocks. They are considered ancestors of today's Istro-Romanians. When new borders cut through their traditional territory, their way of life became unsustainable. The sheep didn't know about nations, but the border guards did.

Poland's Redyk: Magic in the Mountains

Let's return to those Polish shepherds and their springtime rituals, because the details reveal how transhumance became woven into the fabric of community life.

The word redyk refers to both the spring departure and the autumn return. In the local mountain dialect of Podhale, the autumn redyk is called uosod, which comes from a word meaning "to return sheep to individual farms." There's also a theory it derives from a word meaning "the separation of sheep"—the moment when the communal flock is divided back among its various owners.

The ceremonies were elaborate. First, the shepherds had to resurrect the "holy fire" in the kolyba, the shepherd's hut. Custom dictated that from that day forward, the main shepherd—the baca—must keep this fire burning continuously throughout the summer. The sheep were then led around a small mojka, a spruce tree planted in the ground to symbolize the health and strength of everyone present.

The fumigation with burning herbs and a special blessed item called a połazzka was meant to cleanse the animals of diseases and prevent misfortune. Leading the flock three times around the mojka served a practical purpose too: it concentrated the sheep into one group and prevented individuals from wandering off before the journey even began.

Then came the counting.

An 1876 memoir from the Tatra Society describes the process: the villagers would herd sheep from across the entire community to one agreed-upon place. They handed them to the shepherds one by one, mixed them together into a single flock, and counted the total. They called this "the reading." One juhas would hold a chaplet—a string of beads—adding one bead for every ten sheep. Another would release the animals one at a time from a fenced enclosure, counting aloud: one, two, three, up to ten, then calling out "desat!"

The stay in the high pastures, called halas, traditionally began on Saint Wojciech's Day, April 23rd, and ended on Michaelmas, September 29th. That's five months in the mountains.

At the end of the redyk ceremony, there was music and dancing. Musicians played traditional instruments: gajdas, a type of bagpipe, and violins. The community performed ancient dances with names like owiedziok, kolomajka, and masztołka.

In the pastoral culture of Poland, redyk was considered the greatest village festival. Today, it survives mainly as a folkloric spectacle for tourists and locals alike, but also for the highlanders themselves, who use it to maintain connection with their traditions. Sometimes the Transhumant Pastoral Foundation organizes common redyks that cross into Czechia, Slovakia, and Romania—a reminder of how these traditions once flowed across the Carpathian Mountains without regard for political boundaries.

Wales: The Hafod and the Hendref

The Welsh system was simpler than the Polish rituals but no less important to community life.

During summer, farm workers and sometimes the farmer himself would move to a hillside house called a hafod. The livestock grazed on the high pastures while the family lived in these seasonal dwellings. In late autumn, everyone would drive the flocks down to the valleys and take up residence in the hendref, the main permanent house.

This system has not been actively practiced for nearly a century. It survived longest in Snowdonia, that rugged corner of northwest Wales, after it had ceased elsewhere. Even now, remnants of the practice can be found in some rural farming communities there.

The names, of course, are everywhere. "Hafod" and "Hendref" appear on maps and mailboxes throughout Wales. And the physical practice hasn't entirely disappeared—it's just mechanized. Cattle and sheep that spend summer on hill farms are still transported to lowland pastures for winter, but they travel by truck rather than being driven on foot along ancient droving routes.

Scotland: Bothies and Drovers' Roads

Scotland developed its own vocabulary for the same practices. Agricultural workers spent summer months in bothies or shielings—the latter word coming from the Gaelic àirigh. The eastern part of Scotland was crisscrossed by major drovers' roads with evocative names: the Cairnamounth, the Elsick Mounth, the Causey Mounth.

The practice has largely stopped, but it continued within living memory in the Hebrides and the Scottish Highlands. Elderly people can still remember summers spent in the shielings. Today, upland flocks are transported by truck under a system called agistment—a legal term for keeping livestock on someone else's land—to lower-lying pastures during winter.

England: Hefting on the Fells

Evidence of transhumance in England dates back to at least medieval times, from Cornwall in the southwest through to the north. The Lake District developed a particularly interesting variation.

Hill sheep breeds like the Herdwick and Swaledale are moved between moorland and valley as the seasons change. But something additional happened in the Lake District: a behavioral trait called "hefting."

Hefted sheep stay within their farmer's allotted area of common land—their heaf—without needing physical fences. The knowledge of boundaries is transmitted from ewes to lambs, generation after generation. A flock's connection to its heaf becomes so strong that selling the sheep without the land they're hefted to makes little sense. The animals wouldn't know where they belong.

This is pastoral knowledge encoded not in human culture but in the sheep themselves.

Ireland: The Booleys and the Summer Hills

The Irish called their version of transhumance "booleying," and the pastures themselves were buaile—variously anglicized as booley, boley, bouley, or boola. These names survive in place names across the country.

In Kilcommon parish in North Mayo, you can still see a place called Buaile h'Anraoi where the landscape clearly shows the layout of the old rundale system of agriculture. The word "Summerhill"—in Irish, Cnoc an tSamhraidh—appears repeatedly in place names, bearing witness to where the livestock went during the warm months.

The practice is ancient. It appears in the Brehon Laws, the legal codes of early medieval Ireland. The system involved moving cattle from permanent lowland villages to mountain pastures for summer, which served multiple purposes: it relieved pressure on crops growing in the valley and provided fresh grazing for the animals.

Booleying remained widespread in the west of Ireland until the Second World War. Then it was superseded by something less romantic: seasonal migration of workers to Scotland and England for winter employment, and eventually more permanent emigration to the United States. The young people who might have driven cattle to the summer pastures were instead crossing the Atlantic.

Italy: The Tratturi

Southern Italy developed one of the most impressive physical infrastructures for transhumance anywhere in the world: the tratturi, or drovers' roads.

These weren't mere paths. The tratturi were formal routes up to 100 meters wide—that's 328 feet, wider than a football field—and more than 100 kilometers long. They permitted the passage and grazing of herds, principally sheep, between seasonal pastures. The scale of the system demanded regulation: as far back as the 17th century, Italian authorities established laws governing the tratturi and created a mounted police force to patrol them.

The practice continued with little change until the 1950s and 1960s, when motorized transport finally replaced the ancient routes. But the tratturi remain public property, protected by laws governing cultural heritage. The Molise region has nominated them for UNESCO World Heritage status—a recognition that these roads represent something irreplaceable in human history.

Spain: The Cañadas and the Cowboy's Ancestors

Here's something that might surprise you: the American cowboy tradition has its roots in Spanish transhumance.

Spain developed an extensive network of droveways called cañadas that crisscross the entire Iberian Peninsula, running mostly from southwest to northeast. These routes have been charted since ancient times. A standard cañada is between 37.5 and 75 meters wide. The cañadas reales—the royal droveways—reach 800 meters wide at certain points. Like the Italian tratturi, the land within these corridors is publicly owned and protected by law.

Transhumance was historically widespread throughout Castile, Leon, and Extremadura, where nomadic cattle and sheep herders traveled long distances seeking greener pastures in summer and warmer conditions in winter. When Spanish colonizers came to the Americas, they brought this pastoral culture with them. It evolved into the cowboy traditions of the United States and the gaucho cultures of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.

Think about that for a moment. Every Western movie, every rodeo, every piece of cowboy mythology—all of it traces back to medieval Spanish shepherds following their flocks across the meseta.

The High Valleys: Where Transhumance Was Everything

In some high valleys of the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian Mountains, transhumance wasn't just one economic activity among many. It was the main economic activity. Sometimes the only one.

These communities developed elaborate systems for distributing regulated passes and pasturage among different valleys according to seasonal use and community jurisdiction. The social structures that emerged were so distinctive that some groups are now identified as remnants of older ethnic cultures surviving in isolated minorities.

The Pasiegos of Cantabria, the Agotes of Navarre, and the Vaqueiros de alzada of Asturias and León all developed unique identities shaped by their transhumant lifestyles. They were set apart from settled agricultural communities, sometimes facing discrimination, always maintaining their own traditions and ways of life.

The Pyrenees: Cheese in the Mountains

Pyrenean transhumance deserves special attention because it illustrates how the practice adapted to modern pressures—and what was lost.

The system involved relocating livestock—cows, sheep, horses—to high mountain pastures during summer months. The fundamental driver was land scarcity: farms in the lowlands were simply too small to support large herds year-round. The high meadows provided essential additional grazing.

The mountain period traditionally started in late May or early June and ended in early October. Until the 1970s, transhumance was used mainly for dairy cows, and cheese-making was a central summer activity. In some regions, nearly the entire family would move to the high pastures with their animals, living in rudimentary stone cabins for the five-month grazing season.

This system, which evolved during the Middle Ages, survived into the 20th century. Then industrialization arrived. Young people left the countryside for factory jobs in cities. The knowledge of cheese-making and mountain living began to fade.

The practice declined but never entirely disappeared. The importance of transhumance continues to be recognized through popular festivals. And the Mont Perdu region of the Pyrenees—called Monte Perdido on the Spanish side—has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site specifically because of its association with transhumance culture.

The Sami: A Different Kind of Following

In Scandinavia, the Sami people practice transhumance with reindeer, but their system differs fundamentally from the sheep and cattle traditions of southern Europe.

Reindeer are semi-wild animals that migrate naturally between seasonal feeding grounds. The Sami's role is less about directing movement and more about following and managing herds that would travel regardless of human intention. The relationship between herder and animal is different—more like a partnership than the shepherd's authority over his flock.

Today, Scandinavian transhumance of all kinds largely involves motorized transport between pastures, which has changed the character of the movement. The weeks-long treks through the mountains, with their campfires and their accumulated lore, have been compressed into a day's drive.

Why Transhumance Matters

The dairy products of transhumant herds—milk, butter, yogurt, and cheese—have formed the backbone of pastoral diets for millennia. In communities where growing crops was difficult or impossible, the animals and their milk made life viable.

But transhumance shaped more than just nutrition. It created calendars: the departure dates of Saint Wojciech's Day in Poland or Michaelmas for the return became fixed points around which community life organized itself. It generated legal systems: the complex regulations governing Spanish cañadas or Italian tratturi. It produced distinctive architectures: the hafod and hendref, the shieling and the kolyba. It fostered technologies: cheese-making techniques perfected over centuries in mountain cabins.

And it connected landscapes. The tratturi and cañadas, the drovers' roads of Scotland and the routes of the Balkans—these created networks that linked winter valleys to summer peaks, lowland markets to highland pastures. They were the infrastructure of a world before roads and rails.

What's Being Lost

The transformation of transhumance in the modern era tells us something about what we value.

The physical movement of animals still happens. Sheep are trucked between seasonal pastures throughout the British Isles. Cattle are transported to summer grazing in Scandinavia. The practical logic of transhumance—exploiting different pastures at different seasons—remains sound.

But the culture is fading. The rituals that accompanied movement, like the Polish redyk with its bonfires and blessed fires, survive now mainly as folklore. The knowledge of routes and pastures, accumulated over generations and transmitted from parent to child, is being lost as young people choose different lives. The months spent in summer cabins, making cheese by ancient methods, are memories held by elderly farmers, not practices continued by their grandchildren.

Something irreplaceable is leaving the world: a way of knowing landscapes through the rhythm of moving through them, year after year, generation after generation.

The Dance Continues

And yet.

The UNESCO designations matter. They mark an international recognition that these practices have value beyond their economic function. The festivals celebrating transhumance in the Pyrenees draw tourists, yes, but they also transmit knowledge to children who might otherwise never learn their grandparents' songs.

The Polish Transhumant Pastoral Foundation still organizes cross-border redyks. Farmers in Snowdonia maintain traces of the hafod tradition. Italian conservationists protect the tratturi. Spanish authorities enforce the legal protections around the cañadas.

The dance between humans, animals, and seasons is slower now. The bonfires are lit for cameras as much as for spirits. The counting is done with spreadsheets rather than chaplet beads.

But somewhere in the Carpathians this April, a baca will resurrect the holy fire in a shepherd's hut. He will lead his flock around a spruce tree stuck in the ground. He will watch for the sheep that break from the circle, and he will wonder, as his ancestors wondered, which ones will not return in autumn.

The land remembers, even when we forget.