[Stones] Bringing home the bacon

[littlestone]

ric wrote -

"hmm, not to mention Romans and Britons ... and Irish..."

Talking about the Irish...

"The county of Wiltshire in England has been the centre of bacon since the 18th century. Wiltshire became a bacon centre by an accident of location. At that time many pigs were imported from Ireland and driven in droves from Bristol on the west coast of England to London. Calne in Wiltshire a regular resting places for herds of swine was thus assured of a constant supply of pigs for curing."*

This is interesting :-) and I wonder why pig drovers took a route from Bristol via Calne when they could have taken a shorter, more southerly route, to the capital? There seems already to have been an established pig-curing culture in Wiltshire prior to the 18th century and, as it's a long way to drive pigs from Calne to London, perhaps most were slaughtered in Calne, cured and then transported to the capital. In other words there seems to have been an established pig-curing industry in Wiltshire prior to the 18th century - why?

There were, of course, pigs in Wiltshire long before the 18th century. Swindon (Old English swin dun 'pig hill') is mentioned in the Doomsday Book of 1086 and before that there is evidence of pig feasts, if not a very serious pig-culture, at Durrington Walls indicating that the animal was an important cultural/food commodity as far back as the Neolithic. 

*  http://www.britishbacon.com/index.html
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