• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 381 0

was her third after the Dales Way from Yorkshire to Cumbria and the West Highland Way in Scotland. Strangely, my only previous LDP walk had also been along the Dales Way, though I was 15 at the time and it was more of a long pub crawl, interspersed with some walking and the odd bus trip when we were too hung-over to move unaided. I told her – possibly with a little too much evangelistic zeal – that I was sure it was better to finish at Avebury, rather than Ivinghoe, despite what all the guidebooks said. Coming into Avebury really did feel like the right conclusion, the end of a pastoral symphony that had been almost imperceptibly swelling to a glorious climax. Either way, she was going to have a great time, and we hugged each other goodbye, two complete strangers united for just a few minutes, but in the same cause. I crossed the line, if there had been a line, one week and two hours after leaving Ivinghoe Beacon, and a new addiction had begun.

To walk an ancient path, you probably need to go no further than a couple of miles from your front door. Although headline grabbers like the Ridgeway, the Icknield Way, the Sweet Track on the Somerset Levels or the Golden Road in the Preseli Mountains of Pembrokeshire make much of their undoubted antiquity, the footpath network everywhere takes you straight back deep into history, for they are some of the oldest features in our landscape. If you’re in the right frame of mind, you can feel it, those moments when suddenly you’re walking where thousands have gone before you, passing the same trees, fording the same streams and breathing the same champagne air. There are tell-tale signs on the map and ground alike: odd dog-leg routes edging around long-vanished boundaries, holloways and green lanes sunk like pensioners into comfy armchairs, smugglers and drovers routes heading high over the hills, church ways, pilgrimage routes, monks’ trods, herepaths, salt ways, drift ways and portways.

Into the higgledy-piggledy ancient British network of tracks and paths came the methodical Romans, who sliced their roads through the old ways in much the same way that we do with motorways now. In some parts of the country, the pattern left by the Romans endures still: where I live in mid-Wales, for instance, almost all of our market towns are between 15 and 18 miles apart, a day’s march. Many of the Roman roads are now tarmaced and integrated into the modern network, some as great trunk roads such as Watling Street (the A2 from London to Dover and the A5 from London to Wroxeter, near Shrewsbury), Icknield Street (the A38 in the Midlands) and the Fosse Way (the A46 from Leicester to Lincoln and the A37 and A429 in the south-west). Perhaps the most thrilling is the A68 north of Corbridge in Northumberland, the Roman Dere Street. So empty is the landscape and so straight the road, that it is all too possible to lose any sense of perspective and speed, as the many warning signs make clear. Other Roman ways are much-loved B-roads and country lanes, but many were never aggrandised by tarmac and provide some of our most striking bridleways and byways. And they almost always are bridleways or byways, rather than mere footpaths: proof that a route’s historic use, however far back it may date, is still generally used to determine its contemporary status.

Two of the most evocative paths I’ve ever walked have been over some of the best extant stretches of Roman road, both on bleak moorland. One sits high on Blackstone Edge above Rochdale, its tight cobbles and grooved channel like an illustration from a school textbook about the marvels of Roman engineering. Odd, therefore, that there is much academic debate as to whether the track is genuinely Roman or later. No such arguments at the other, north of Ystradfellte in the Fforest Fawr, the splendidly gloomy western part of the Brecon Beacons National Park. There, the cobbles are not quite so intact, but they still impress as the track runs up through a conifer forest in a perfect straight line, before cresting the hill by the ten-foot stone blade of Maen Madoc,