If you think traffic in Shrewsbury is bad, at least you don't have to contend with scenes like this. Nor the inevitable street deposits.

Here livestock is being driven through Castle Street, probably around 100 years ago. The photo was from the collection of the renowned Shrewsbury historian David Trumper, and for comparison we have pictured the same location today.

The cattle are likely to be on their way to Shrewsbury smithfield, which was in the centre of the county town in those days. On Tuesdays chaos was the norm on the road leading to the site, with drovers bringing in sheep and cattle.

To get your bearings, the library is off the picture to the left, and there's a glimpse of a tower of Shrewsbury Castle, the entrance to which is on the right. You'll notice that the large and rather grand building dominating the right of the old picture has long disappeared. 

David would have been able to give chapter and verse about it all, and when and why that building was cleared away but, alas, he died last year.

Long before the cowboys of the Wild West, Britain had drovers who would take livestock on long and arduous journeys to markets in towns and cities, there being no other way to get them there. They would be accompanied by dogs to keep the cattle under control, and for the overnight stops the livestock would be kept in pounds and paddocks.

However the tradition of long distance droving would be brought to an end by the advent of the railways, with livestock instead being taken to a convenient railway station and loaded onto trucks.

It may be, then, that the cattle in David's picture are actually on a relatively short walk at the end of their particular journey. Shrewsbury's busy railway station will have seen both departures and arrivals, and we can perhaps suppose that they have just come off the train from somewhere like Wales and are being taken to Shrewsbury smithfield - that is, livestock market - which was located in, unsurprisingly, Smithfield Road.

When did the practice of driving livestock through Shrewsbury town centre's streets come to an end? We'll look to older readers to come up with the answer to that, although they will really have to be getting on as the smithfield was moved out of the town centre well over 60 years ago and, in any event, no doubt in its final years livestock arrived in cattle wagons. 

Shrewsbury's new cattle market at Harlescott opened in July 1956 for sales of attested dairy and store cattle, although sales of other classes continued in the town centre until the Harlescott smithfield was completed.

The official opening of the new £500,000 Shrewsbury smithfield at Harlescott came on April 7, 1959, by which time buying and selling at the old cattle market had already stopped.

The town centre cattle market site was redeveloped in the 1960s, partly by the creation of the Riverside shopping centre, but it's all change once more with the recent demolition of that as part of a masterplan to regenerate the area.