I can share my experiences of Devon, Cumbria and now Cornwall.
Abattoirs rarely do the best butchering. Rough and ready, more like, and usually very little flexibility.
What seems to work best is to find a good butcher, one whose meat you’d buy if you didn’t rear your own. They will be fetching the meat they butcher for themselves from a local abattoir, and it’s likely to be a good abattoir if it’s a good butcher. In my experience, they don’t charge an arm and a leg to collect your carcasses from the abattoir when they fetch their own. In fact, my butcher in Cumbria charged me less for kill and collect than I would have paid the abattoir for kill myself, because of course he has a good deal with them.
So we usually organise through the butcher; sometimes they will book the animals in at the abattoir too. Then we take the animals to the abattoir, the butcher collects and butchers, and we then pick up from the butcher.
Our butcher here has been manic most of the summer. It’s a tourist area, so lots more meat required for restaurants, hotels and such through the summer, plus we had drought for months and we were all sending any animals in we could get away, to reduce the load on the non-growing grass. Then it’s busy again in the run-up to Christmas, of course. They can manage more special requests and so on when it’s a bit quieter
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