The old lanes that meander through the centuries

November 28, 2022, 9:23 pm , by Richard Lutz

Richard Lutz takes two paths that he won’t forget

The writer Edward Thomas described those ‘indelible old roads…’, those long ancient paths that roam spiderlike through Britain. To him, an ageless track begins ‘… before I come across its traces and ends miles beyond where I stop…’

Some are unending, some short and hidden by time, many covered now by tarmac, heavily farmed fields, shopping malls, a relentless sea, homes. Some old routes are swept from memory.

Two stand out for me. And for different reasons. But both share qualities, qualities of age, history and place. And they survived, sometimes in bits, over hundreds of generations.

Thr first is when we decided to pick up part of the old Icknield Street. It follows a Roman road and over centuries went by many names: The Rigning, Hikenild Strete and then Ryknild Way, before settling on the modern (ish) Icknield Street. It runs northwest though south Wales and England from St David’s to Tynemouth on the North Sea. We saw on our map how it appeared and disappeared north of a Warwickshire river town called Bidford and then emerged in muddy bits, near Wixford, mentioned briefly as a boozing haunt by Shakespeare 400 years ago.

What was left of this cross country route, used by monks, merchants, soldiers and journeymen was a slim sunken track that dipped into a cut though the terrain and become what is known as a holloway- a steep channel riven by centuries of boots and hooves and carts and wagon wheels back to Roman times.

No noise entered this abandoned lane….

Straggly willows, oak and birch now lined high embankments blocking out winter sun. We had to battle and bash through needy bramble vines, stumps of roots and deep mud. It was cold but clear and low light frequently speared through empty branches. The deepsided walls of the holloway had yet to be decorated with early primrose or even snowdrops. Sometimes there was a rustle in the undergrowth, a rabbit or fox keeping out of the way. The earth slept.

No noise entered this abandoned ancient lane that sliced into the land. I had hoped, naively and innocently, to see a remnant chucked aside, a staff, a button, a coin, a buckle. But it was empty of a souvenir history. Just mud, creaky trees, little bumps in the earthy sides that could be nothing or could be something left unremembered.

We emerged from this fragment of Icknield Street onto higher ground and followed, more or less, the curve of The River Arrow to tiny Wixford. We passed though the hamlet and, to our left, on a knoll stood St Milburga church.

It was built in the 12thc and named after an 8thc abbess. It must have given refuge and churchy succour to the travellers slogging their way north or south. There’s an ancient yew in the graveyard, some say as old as the church.

Inside are stone effigies of the medieval dead, their names and reputations dug into the soil of Warwickshire, into the stone and mortar of the walls.

The naturalist Robert Macfarlane writes about these old ways such as Icknield Street (and its cousin The Icknield Way in southern England) in his book appropriately called The Old Ways. It was in its pages that I first learned of Edward Thomas -quoted above- who died too young on the bloody battlefields of northern France in 1917.

Macfarlane doesn’t keep his feet solidly on solid ground on his incessant journeys. He navigated old seaways too where the Irish, Vikings and the wandering merchants followed the rough Atlantic coasts that linked Scandinavia, Britain, Ireland, all the way down to Spain, all the way through to the Mediterranean, all the way to Constantinople, Egypt, the fabulous multi-armed Silk Road.

And he writes about the shadow paths that take in the watery edges of Britain such as The Broomway off the Essex coast where the route evaporates into silt and tidal geography and, also, the Morecambe Bay path that hooks up Lancashire and Cumbria over a desert of wet quicksand, channels and tidal pools.

The treacherous Broomway I leave for another day. The Morecambe Bay walk remains etched in my mind.

Unlike many northern English days, this hike was blessed with spring sunshine and heat. The walk contains a hideous history: 21 immigrant mollusc pickers had recently drowned in the vastscape of the bay after being left to fend for themselves as night and the encroaching sea fatally approached.

With that ominous tragedy still in mind, we joined an official guided party led by a leader appointed by the crown. Yes, by a Royal appointment going back 500 years to allow safe passage to merchants and wayfarers across an everchanging landscape of quicksand, quagmire, sudden channels and the treachery of fatal tides.

This cross bay route can be as short as five miles but as long as 8 depending on the changing watery terrain. Our trail would be a zigzag without maps, without co ordinates. But based on the firmness of skill, experience and instinct. It was up to our guide on the day to decide how and where we walked.

We scanned the edge of the receding sea. There was a shimmer on the horizon. It was a haze of heat and mist meeting blue sky above. As we walked, a pair of quad bikes flanked us across the white expanse, or rather herded us in case we wandered too wide and too far. Slowly we made for the far Cumbrian shore, a coastline decorated with the ribbons of Lake District hills behind.

Unlike the fragments of the Icknield Street holloway, this coastal trip had no border, no curtailing embankments.. no road really, no path. It changed each day, it changed each hour. Icknield Street stayed put, embedded in British soil, pounded by a million footsteps. Morecambe Bay is wide as the moon, changing, twisting yet empty, treacherous, like a beast ready to devour those that tread on its sands. Both ancient, both stretching back into time. Both, as Edward Thomas wrote, ‘meandering over centuries…’