The needs of a massively expanded Royal Navy for salt beef during the Wars of the Spanish Succession, growing demand in the urban areas of Scotland, northern England and, especially, in London, the impact of the new common market between the two countries after 1707, and late-seventeenth-century prohibitions on cattle imports from Ireland were all significant factors in this golden age of the Highland cattle trade. By the 1720s it was reckoned that as many as 30,000 beasts were being driven south annually to the Lowlands.
