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| Jack Linthicum... |
 Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2009 4:24 am |
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England's oldest continuously used road. Slide show at the citation.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/travel/01ridgeway.html?ref=travel
November 1, 2009
Hiking History: England’s Ancient Ridgeway Trail
By HENRY SHUKMAN
THE Ridgeway is the oldest continuously used road in Europe, dating
back to the Stone Age. Situated in southern England, built by our
Neolithic ancestors, it’s at least 5,000 years old, and may even have
existed when England was still connected to continental Europe, and
the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine.
Once it probably ran all the way from Dorset in the southwest to
Lincolnshire in the northeast, following the line of an escarpment — a
chalk ridge rising from the land — that diagonally bisects southern
England. Long ago it wasn’t just a road, following the high ground,
away from the woods and swamps lower down, but a defensive barrier, a
bulwark against marauders from the north, whomever they may have been.
At some point in the Bronze Age (perhaps around 2,500 B.C.), a series
of forts were built — ringed dikes protecting villages — so the whole
thing became a kind of prototype of Hadrian’s Wall in the north of
England.
The land here is downland, somewhere between moorland and farmland,
hill after hill curving to the horizon in chalk slopes (the word down
is related to dune). Here on these pale rolling hills, the plowed
fields, littered with white hunks of rock, sweep away in gradations of
color, from creamy white to dark chocolate. The grassland becomes
silvery as it arches into the distance. The wind always seems to be
blowing. The landscape is elemental, austere, with a kind of
monumental elegance. The formal lines of the fields and hills not only
speak of the severity of life in the prehistoric past, but would also
match some well-tended parkland belonging to an earl.
I used to come here as a child. The Ridgeway, now officially called
the Ridgeway National Trail, was a favorite Sunday outing. Just half
an hour south of Oxford, my family’s home back then, its steep turfy
hillsides were the best place in the world for rolling downhill. We’d
lie across the grassy slopes and roll down sideways. You could go for
hundreds of feet, until dizziness got the better of you, and you got
up with the ground spinning, before tackling the long scramble back up
to do it again. Maybe we didn’t get quite the thrill from the huge
views over southern England that our parents did, but we loved the
wind coming up fresh from the southwest, and the big clouds scudding
by, and the sense of space and openness.
We also loved the Uffington White Horse, the most famous chalk drawing
of England, a huge, graceful, serpentlike beast scratched and dug into
the grass just below the top of the escarpment the Ridgeway follows,
made 3,000 or so years ago by the same people who built the stone
circles of southern England, the so-called beaker people, named after
the beakers they were buried with. We used to walk along the White
Horse, over its chalk surface.
But I never knew what exactly the Ridgeway was, or the White Horse for
that matter. When a friend suggested a walk along the trail earlier
this year, I jumped at the chance. Southern England is built up, and a
long-distance footpath that navigates a route straight through it —
for the most part avoiding roads and settlements, one that takes you
past some of the best Neolithic monuments on earth, and through
ancient landscapes — was surely worth checking out, this time as an
adult.
The Ridgeway of today is 87 miles long. But about half of that is a
series of footpaths that connect the original old track following the
ridge up on the chalk escarpment to the Thames River in the east. With
time constraints, and a desire to walk the ancient road only, my
friend Rory and I decide to walk only the old western half of the
trail — about 40 miles — from the market town of Wantage (where King
Alfred was born) to Avebury, famous for its huge circles of monolithic
standing stones.
To make any journey back in time, the first thing you have to do is
park the car. We set out on a weekday morning in chilly March to join
the Ridgeway at roughly its midpoint. Our plan: to cover the distance
to its western end over the next two days.
Equipped with light daypacks containing rain gear, lunch and snacks,
and wearing a pair of good athletic shoes each, we bounce up the lane
toward the tremendous escarpment of chalky turf looming ahead of us, a
great green tidal wave we have to scale. This is the “ridge” of the
Ridgeway, and it runs for dozens of miles in a massive east-west
rampart. The old road runs along the top of it, near the rim,
connecting the series of ancient forts.
By the time we’ve made it up, and finally land on the ancient road,
the spring in our step has long since wilted, and we’ve both shed our
fleeces and sweaters, down to T-shirts, in spite of the cold overcast
weather. The “road” looks like an old farm track, rutted by the odd
tractor in mud, and makes for wonderful walking, as it undulates
smoothly over the level ground at the top of the ridge. It’s close to
silent up here. Soon the sound of traffic fades from consciousness,
and we move back into a world of bleats and birdsong, and soughing
wind.
“This is what I’m after,” Rory tells me. “To get away from the sounds
of petrol.”
“Escape the carbon age?”
“Back to the Neolithic. Where it’s quieter.”
We strain our ears. Sure enough, away in the distance we can just hear
a tractor growling faintly.
Every so often we pass one of the distinctive clumps of beech trees
that dot the landscape. There’s something about these copses: when
you’re in one, its whistling shade is eerie and beautiful, steeped in
a sense of another time, of history, of the age of the landscape. They
have something of the dense atmosphere of a graveyard. When you’re
looking at them from far away, they form thick dashes and hyphens on
the sweeping page of the land. The grasslands up here, beloved of
sheep and horses, curve away in sculptural lines, creating deep bowls
and broad gullies. It’s a landscape that exhales prehistory, littered
with burial mounds, standing stones and hill forts thousands of years
old.
Maybe it’s England’s chilly spring deterring the folks, maybe the fact
that it’s a weekday, but we haven’t yet seen a single other hiker.
And, in fact, over the course of the walk we meet a total of only four
other walkers.
The first major site we reach, in a few miles, is the familiar White
Horse at Uffington. This Neolithic marvel, a 374-foot serpentine line
of gritty chalk, dug into the hillside below the ridge, visible from
many miles away — in fact only really visible from a distance — has
the graceful lines of the Lascaux cave paintings. The way it’s
embedded in the very land has made it a talisman of southern England
over the centuries. Below it the ground drops away steeply to a flat-
topped knoll like a platform or stage on which St. George is alleged
to have slain the original dragon. (Some say the chalk horse is
actually a dragon.)
After a rest of half an hour, we heave ourselves back up to the track
and march onwards, always with the land falling away to one side, down
to the vale below the Downs, with its network of hedgerows, its
patchwork of fields. And always with the skylarks, those
quintessential English songsters, celebrated in so much poetry,
warbling away above us. In spite of the cool weather — we’ve both
pulled our sweaters on again — the larks seem to know it’s March, and
spring, and time to sing. They climb up and up (their “invisible
mending,” as the poet Ian Hamilton Finlay calls it), becoming specks
easily lost against the cloudy sky, fluting out their intricate songs
all the while, until they fall silent, and drop into hair-raising
dives, pulling out just before the ground.
Around 2 o’clock we stop for a late packed lunch at the next major
site, Wayland’s Smithy, a long barrow, or burial mound, guarded by
several large gray stones at its entrance, and by an encircling ring
of rustling beech trees. The barrow lies like an exhausted greyhound,
in the midst of a constant hissing of leaves. The trees create an
atmosphere of timelessness. In their shifting shade, the whole scene
seems halfway to a black-and-white image, and the sense of ceremony
and mystery that accompanied late Stone Age burial is alive and well.
Rory laughs. “Spooky, no?”
It is. It has it all. The grave site. The mysterious beeches. The
place could be one of those portals to another dimension beloved of
contemporary children’s literature. Something in the DNA seems to wake
up, as if somehow recognizing the ceremonials of another time. No
wonder there has been a long tradition in England of people devoting
themselves to unearthing the secrets of the lost religions of pagan
times. “Ley lines” are said to connect the ancient sites in a network
of “energy meridians” reaching all over Britain and Ireland. The land
is a riddle to be unfolded — a project at which our prehistoric
ancestors were apparently far more adept than we are. According to
some, their standing stones and hill forts attest to their reverence
for these geomantic energies.
Every five or six miles, walking at a good pace of three to four miles
an hour, we reach one of the turfy hill forts, a ring of dike and
ditch, which made this whole ridge such a formidable defensive
barrier. It protected King Arthur’s Britons from the invading Saxons,
then the Saxons themselves from the marauding Vikings. Today the forts
make for good way stations, places to break the journey with a snack,
meal or drink. If you need something more substantial, occasional
roads cross the Ridgeway and will take you down to the villages strung
along the foot of the high ground, for lunch in a pub (the Royal Oak
in Bishopstone, just before the hill fort of Liddington Castle, has
excellent food, and its own organic farm).
Late in the afternoon, we leave the ridge to make our way down to
Ogbourne St. George, where we plan to spend the night. In the fading
light, weary of limb and mind, I somehow misread our Ordnance Survey
map. By the time I realize it, I’ve added two unwelcome miles to the
end of the day. When we finally reach the clean, small Inn With the
Well (named after the deep glass-covered well in its bar), we’re all
too ready for a pint.
In the bar we meet a party of three other walkers doing the Ridgeway
the opposite way from ours. They somehow missed their turn down to the
village too, and we all raise a glass to the fine art of orienteering.
My room is in an annex, and the tub has wonderfully, fearsomely hot
water. The bathroom fills with steam immediately, and I have to go
50-50 with the cold tap even to get a toe in the water. But 15 minutes
of sweating and gasping is the perfect hiker’s medicine. We meet back
in the bar, restored and fully perpendicular, for a further pair of
pints, and a brace of excellent local pork chops in cider sauce.
THE next morning, the weather hasn’t lifted. But at least it’s not
raining. We head off, after a full British breakfast in the pub, under
wide leaden clouds, winding back up the formidable face of green
hillside, and make our first stop of the day at Fyfield Down, a vale
studded with gorse, with ancient “strip lynchet” field terraces
marking the land in italic lines.
The turf is littered with giant gray stones. It’s from here that many
of the standing stones in the nearby monuments came. The so-called
Grey Wethers (gray sheep), or Sarsen stones — the monoliths of many
stone circles — still lie strewn over the slopes here, left behind by
glacial action, looking like the rubble from some giant blast. In
medieval times, when the original erectors of the stone monuments were
long since gone, these monoliths were thought to be magical, in and of
themselves. Hence the name Sarsen, a corruption of Saracen — or Arab.
In those days, Arabs were considered magicians and wizards, perhaps
because their knowledge of math and science far outstripped the
comparatively crude Christian North.
On we go, from one Neolithic site to the next, past dramatic trees,
past views down onto villages with their churches, such as St.
Nicholas in Fyfield, far away from the sound of cars, dropping into a
walking rhythm outside normal time. It seems we’re moving through a
far larger context, one that sweeps across time. Conversation deepens.
We ponder the lives we’re leading, and how they measure up to what we
hoped for as young men. What influence did this land we grew up in —
gray above, green below — have on us? England has been the epicenter
of logical positivism, rationalism, empiricism, not to mention having
been a violent colonial machine. Yet it is also a land of mystery — of
Avalon, Arthur, Merlin, Druids and standing stones. There’s a magic
just under the surface. It may be harder to reach than ever, as the
car lobby ensures that more and more roads are built, with ever more
vehicles bringing us to the carbon tipping point. But the magic and
beauty are still here. This is the land that poets from Wordsworth to
Hardy and Housman felt compelled to celebrate.
Meanwhile, my left hip is stiffening and aching, and it’s a relief to
drop down into Avebury, our destination, on the western end of the
Ridgeway. It’s late afternoon when we reach the village, and the
largest of all megalithic sites in Britain. Trees, stones, hills and
chalk: these were the things with which the ancient people made their
art. And they made huge art pieces. At Avebury, two giant earth banks
surround a circle of stones more than 300 yards across. This in turn
encloses two inner rings of stones. Many are gone, broken up in the
1700s to create building materials for the village that now stands
right in the center of the complex. It’s a strange sight, the English
village houses cheek by jowl with ancient monoliths, but it’s a
poignant expression of what this whole area is about: successive
layers of human history hard up against each other.
It’s only around 60 miles from London and a few miles from the M4
motorway, but it could be thousands of years and a million miles away.
After a stroll among the huge stones, we head for the Red Lion pub, in
the middle of the village, killing time with a genteel English cream
tea, as we wait for our bus back to the city.
FOOD AND GHOSTS
The full 87 miles of the official Ridgeway National Trail can easily
be divided into shorter segments, depending on time available. It can
be cut more or less in half, by deciding to walk only the older,
original western section, which passes all the great prehistoric
sites. Day hikes, and half-days centered on the Uffington White Horse,
or Wayland’s Smithy, or the Avebury Stone Circles, can easily be
devised by studying the map. The trail’s excellent Web site
(www.nationaltrail.co.uk/ridgeway) is full of advice, and
possibilities for accommodations and meals.
STOPS ALONG THE WAY
The Royal Oak in Bishopstone, near Swindon (Cues Lane;
44-1793-79-04-81; www.royaloakbishopstone.co.uk), has excellent
organic food, including pork belly slow cooked with fennel and sherry
and not-to-be-missed triple-cooked French fries.
The Inn With the Well (Marlborough Road, Ogbourne St. George;
44-1672-84-14-45; www.theinnwiththewell.co.uk), a coaching inn that
dates back to 1647, has comfortable rooms, good food and a spacious,
inviting bar. Double rooms start at £55 a night ($91.85 at $1.67 to
the pound).
The Red Lion in Avebury (High Street; 44-1672-53-92-66) enjoys its
legend as one of the 10 most haunted pubs in Britain — especially by a
former landlady, known as Florrie, who was murdered here by her
husband — and its position as one of the only pubs on earth to be
situated within a stone circle. It’s a good place for a restorative
cup of tea. |
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| Whiskers... |
| Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2009 10:05 am |
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Guest
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On 2009-11-01, Jack Linthicum <jacklinthicum at (no spam) earthlink.net> wrote:
[quote]England's oldest continuously used road. Slide show at the citation.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/travel/01ridgeway.html?ref=travel
November 1, 2009
Hiking History: England’s Ancient Ridgeway Trail
By HENRY SHUKMAN
[/quote]
[...]
Very nice  ) (But "Equipped with light daypacks containing rain gear,
lunch and snacks, and wearing a pair of good athletic shoes each" might be
considered under-equipped; the weather can turn very quickly, and poor
visibility and hypothermia are real possibilities at any time of year).
Here's the official web site
<http://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/Ridgeway/index.asp?PageId=1>
--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~ |
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