whether on the roads or on the trails – but especially the trails – do you consider the feet/hooves that have been there before you?

I am just reading a book that recounts the journey of King Oswald from Iona to Bamburgh, and in it is an account of him and his men following the sheep trails along the north side of Hadrian’s Wall. I can only imagine that much of the same land – indeed, many of precisely the same trails – are traversed by some of us on here quite regularly.

Certainly where I am in South Wales, I think about where the Romans might have made their roads, and in more rural parts, where monks or knights or even just ancient farmers might have walked, and I am awed.

Riding (and, I suppose, rambling) probably gives us access to the contemplation of this living history in a way that few other activities could possible do.

When we’re out, we are almost literally inhaling the spirits of those before us, and I have to say: it’s not something I was quite so confident of when I rode the vast landscapes of Canada. The Native peoples may have been there before me, but the fact that their history is to us a pre-history makes it slightly harder to ponder, and that there was simply so much land for so small a population makes it statistically far less likely that I was actually in precisely the same place that one of their number may have been.

So, has anyone else ever been struck with this incredible sense of historical connection/continuity when out on the bike?

I often wonder why the road or trail I’m on is where it is. What made the route convoluted, what was at the end or the sides. Some are obvious, for example, avoiding boggy ground or farmsteads. Some for reasons long forgotten. If I’m travelling to a new area I’ll buy an OS map and plan routes or just get a general feel for the lie of the land.

On Strava I have a running Course Record on a mile long bridleway segment of Stane Street, the old Roman Road from Chichester to London. Also have the KOM on a bike on a shorter section nearby.

It has been in continual use for around 2000 years by foot, horse and more recently bike, and no one has ever been recorded going faster than I have.

Take that Romans!!! 😁

the antonine wall passes near me and some of the trails weave along it, often think of the people who dug it out by hand, probably with a whip nearby, to keep the unruly pics at bay, and we now go to play on it.

Get it quite a lot, especially on old Roman roads and old industrial areas. Always amazes me at how an area that we now perceive as peaceful and worth protecting was once an area of industrial destruction or mass dwellings for whatever reason. As you say, we have a wealth of these places in South Wales.

We have a section of an old Roman road on one of our local rides. Wish the buggers had gone round the hills rather straight on.

One of the bridleways locally runs between the ruins of an abbey and some caves some hermit monks used to live in.

I do get a feel for the history and background of our environment around here – I think a lot of people who ride or hike probably feel it.

I live on the edge of a former mining and steel town. The area is crossed by old canals, disused railway lines etc, some now cyclepaths, some bridleways. I follow the local history FB page and some of the pics and documents they’ve been putting up during lockdown are fascinating. An area I ride through regularly was a railway coal depot right through to the miners strike, you’d have no idea just riding through there now.

Absolutely. I like knowing where the names came from, too. And finding old, forgotten stuff- we spent a lovely few days recommissioning some bit of forgotten primal Glentress, you’d never have guessed there was anything there but scrape off the moss, cut down some saplings, and there it was.

When we’re out, we are almost literally inhaling the spirits of those before us

That’s what the 2m rule is for.

On a more serious note it is something I think about a bit as it goes.

Not just in terms of famous yet mysterious northern saints, either.

Oddly I just find myself realising that once upon a time there could have been a life and death moment on that very spot. Maybe an iron age man versus wolves. Maybe a highway robbery.

Or just a ‘mundane’ thing. A relationship break up. A first kiss. Maybe a first bit of how’s your father.

Just makes you realise that you only get one crack at this ‘life’ malarkey.

So, has anyone else ever been struck with this incredible sense of historical connection/continuity when out on the bike?

Not so much on the bike as in the pub. Our local haunts are all centuries old and I do often think about how they would have been throughout their history. It seems very strange to think of these places as busy coaching inns on the road to London.

I also grew up in Oxford and I’d sit on the wall of Queens College waiting for the bus home from school. I wonder about the lives of others who would have sat in the exact same spot.

Always. Many of my routes are selected because they follow old drove roads, military roads etc. As a result I also do a bit of volunteer work with the Scottish Rights of Way Society (Scotways). That can involve trying to find the traces of long lost roads and tracks. I get a real buzz scouring barren moors or thick forests and then coming across an orphaned culvert or where a track has been cut into a hillside.

My blog is full of little snippets of these.

And it’s one of the reasons I rarely visit trail centres. I find them too sterile.

Absolutely. I have been riding lots of the Ridgeway recently and so looked up the history. people have been using it to travel for thousands of years and it’s covered in hillforts and earthworks. Today we rode to Avebury stone circle which is 6000 years old. I find it very therapeutic to think about.

 I find it very therapeutic to think about.

Definitely.

Lots of people, lots of lives, lots of happiness, lots of tribulations. Makes you think.

The ones I like are the old drove roads.
So sunken over centuries of foot, hoof and wheel that the tree roots are visible in the “walls” of the road. There are loads in Kent, a few in the Peak District.

Always thick woodland, a sort of tree tunnel. They’re really nice – bit mysterious, dark, sheltered, quiet.

I tend to look for the prehistoric bits. Hut circles,hill forts and so on. Canmore is a great resource

Once you start looking the evidence of past activity is absolutely everywhere, so yes 🙂

tj +1

Oh, and look up ‘place based learning’, projects such as Stories in the Land and Teaching in Nature..

@SaxonRider – have got ever been up to the part of Northumberland?

It’s glorious…. But don’t tell anyone else

@ElShalimo:

have got ever been up to the part of Northumberland?

Yes, quite a bit actually. And if I didn’t live in South Wales, Northumberland would be my destination of choice in a heartbeat.

I am more of a an early medieval historian, but the reach of late classical Rome is something I find breathtaking, so have gazed on Hadrian’s Wall in awe many times.

A stunning part of the world indeed, but don’t worry… I’ll keep it secret. 😉

Canmore – I use the map search but you can search in different ways

It tells you every archeological dig on each site so you hopefully know what you are looking at

https://canmore.org.uk/site/search/result?SITECOUNTRY=0&view=map

One of my local trails has a small broken down house type building. It’s very small, but probably Victorian or even later, so too small for a house. Given that it’s next to a built trail that’s been cut into the hillside I think it’s some kind of foreman’s hut or office for a quarry, and the trail is the access road. Lots of my local trails are old access for workings from the early industrial revolution – some are still visible.

There’s also an abandoned farm near the quarry in Machen. It’s pretty big and not that old, The building looks is late Victorian or Edwardian, contemporary with many of the houses in Cardiff and the Valleys. I’m guessing the quarry bought all their land and they sodded off somewhere else with the money and abandoned their house. It’s right next to the quarry. Not far from there is another abandoned farm that looks much bigger. Both are quite spooky.

There’s also in the same valley a big Elizabethan house set back from the road that I only noticed recently. Can’t get close to it because it’s still a private house. And another earlier probably Tudor manor type house not far away. This to me is remarkable, because back in those days Wales was a pretty poor backwater, so those houses were few and far between and their owners must have been pretty powerful people. That also reminds me of the remarkable Ruperra Castle which was built in I think 1630-something. Not a popular time for building big houses of course, in between the manor houses and the modern country estates – it’s unusual because it’s mock castle shape but a long time before Victorian romantic revival ideas. It’s a ruin now and quite accessible by bike (if you’re willing to be cheeky!). It was built by a relative of the Morgans who owned Tredegar House for centuries and occupied until the 30s or so.

Then there’s a WWII secret communications bunker in the local woods (nice singletrack to get to it); mines dating from Tudor times at Castell Coch; several very old churches built in the Welsh tradition on top of hills (this is to make you miserable and/or think about the straight and narrow on your way to Church on Sunday) – all within the context of local MTBing within a 5-6 mile radius of my house.

https://www.heritagepaths.co.uk/#zoom=7&lat=56.8030&lon=-4.5979

No I haven’t but since we bought an Elephant Bike I’ve thought it would be an interesting challenge to follow Hannibal’s trip through the alps with a load of them.

I happen to live a couple of miles from an RAF base where my grandfather (Mother’s side) was stationed during the war, I never met him but as I ride past the massive old hangers I often wonder if he might have also ridden down the same lanes 80 years ago. Funny thing is that equidistant the other way is an Army camp where my uncle (married my Dad’s sister) did his National service (with Jack Charlton), again I think of him when j ride past, he was here before my mum and Dad knew each other and were married. Neither were locals here, they both lived over 100 miles away before coming here. I moved 100 miles to live here before I knew this, and I’m not in RAF or Army btw.

A few years back wasn’t some a few articles on the coffin roads around the country in the magazine?

How folk would try to avoid death taxes by travelling routes to the church for the burial, many of these are now great trails.
I use some of the old beeching lines and former coal lines around my way and often wonder what went before. Even now I ride a line regular that as a kid I lived near that had trains running down along it, we lived not far from a crossing. Seems a million years ago now when I ride it.

A bit. Who were those kids who dug the pump track in the woods? Some must be almost in their 30s by now…

Op, I completely relate too what you say. It’s actually one of the reasons mountain biking appeals to me. Plenty of tarmac roads follow ancient tracks but being on a dirt track somehow seems much more connected to the travellers of yore. Hollow ways particularly fascinate me, they are magical, particularly at dusk. You could be going back in time as you stand there.

It’s also a reason I was hugely into metal detecting till a few years back, sadly something I can’t do these days. The feeling of holding an object (not always coins, personal items, precious to someone till lost or discarded due to breakage etc) not touched for hundreds or even thousands of years is indescribable.

I currently wear a Roman Republican denarius on a thong around me neck. I dug it up in a field in Essex.

Over 2000 years old. It predates the invasion of Britain. I’d absolutely love to know how it got there and what it’s story is.

I find that mind blowing.

Living in Aus’ I ride beside the Yarra River where people hunted and fished in the same way for 40,000 years or so

Adjacent to noisy multilane highways there are gumtrees that predate the arrival of Europeans less than 200years ago

Railways have come and gone within that time as have the wharves that sailing ships tied up to

This is something i’ve felt since i was really young. I think it started when we did a primary school trip to the village church and were shown gouges left by soldiers’ swords on the columns inside the church in the civil war.

I’ve never quite come to grips with how awe inspiring social history is.

When i went to uni i gravitated to historical geography and wrote my dissertation about historical (mainly 19th century) transport routes. Then i did a masters called Landscape and Culture (more historical geography).

In my 20s i emigrated to Australia and while i thought maybe the history connection would be lost, it’s anything but. I was lucky to get work in Tasmania that sometimes involved checking road alignments for historical significance – making sure we don’t destroy history. Apart from the fieldwork, where we’d walk through convict built culverts and so on, I’d spend ages in archives looking at old maps and surveyor’s plans. Once i found, by chance, at the bottom of a filing cabinet, what i guess must have been the first map of the Hobart surrounds. Mount Wellington wasn’t yet named, there weren’t any roads, and the only tracks were marked (i think in pencil) as ‘native tracks.’ It was amazing… and i decided to put it back where it was.

Where i live now in Queensland my road marks the border between two aboriginal tribes – it may have been so for thousands of years. Then it became a coaching route … So every time i leave our place i’m heading off over layer upon layer of history. Much of the local landscape has been modified by urbanisation, forestry, feral species, so i’m always wondering what it would have looked like.

In a weird kind of circularity, on our property there are rocks in the creek marked with grooves where according to local indigenous people, their ancestors would have ground black beans to prepare for eating. Even though it’s a rainforest now, there’s no sign of black bean trees anywhere nearby. My kids are the age i was when i first saw the gouges in our church, so it will be interesting to see if it captures their imagination.

OP (and others) if you’ve not already read this, you’ll probably enjoy it:

The Old Ways

Matt

I find it almost crippling.

Most of the scottish borders is drovers roads and ancient tracks or hilltop forts or later tower houses that or merely piles of stone er even just a grassy bit with a name on a map. I find myself NEEDING to know more about it, who was there what it looked like etc.

As an part of my job i inspect railway bridges throughout scotland which takes through alot of forgotten places and old railway lines it makes me quite grumpy that its lost. We also do alot of river restoration and i struggle to align the grassy field i am standing in with the sometimes unbelievably big industrial sites that have just been wiped off the face of the earth, i feel less sad about that though!

In the UK I often think about this when I’m riding along a narrow lane or track that’s 6ft below ground level because millions of feet have scoured it out over a thousand years.
I did have a whoa moment in the US on a path when someone pointed out the permanent ruts were caused by wagon trains on the Oregon Trail. That’s living history right there.

Yep, used to ride part of the ridge-way in the Chilterns. I did wonder whether they moaned about how shit it was in the middle of Winter as much as I did.

I will say though, lots of folk overestimate the age of both woodlands and tracks/roads/paths. Lots aren’t “very” old in the grand scheme of things. Many “Roman roads” are actually Turnpike, or enclosure roads or ex-railways for instance

Yes! Saw this thread last night and couldn’t sleep for thinking about it – so many interesting posts here – thanks for all the stories and links.

I often think about my surroundings in that way when I’m out and about, and have been known to spend way too much time lost in old maps and old photos trying to reconstruct in my mind how things might have been. I love finding remnants of the past in the landscape – even just an old, abandoned cottage with no roof, and a tree growing up through the middle – and imagining what it must have been like to know it as a home, rather than as a ruin.

There’s a steep, wooded glen near me, and I recently found out (in the OS Name Books on Scotland’s Places) that this is where the villagers went to hide, with their horses, in times of ‘commotion’ – for example during the Jacobite risings of the 1740s.

Standing in someone’s footsteps gives me a shiver – and makes me consider that probably not much has changed in the intervening period in terms of some basic human needs and desires – safety; food on the table; warmth, comfort and shelter, &c. – just played out in a different way these days. Fascinating. I never enjoyed history much as a youngster, but seeing it around me in the landscape has definitely sparked my interest. Probably one of my most profound experiences of being whipped back in time was coming round a bend on a walk to find the remains of a Roman bath-house. It prompted much time spent in interesting reading.

Also near me, there is a track off a small road which leads nowhere – it just stops dead in a bank of grass. This had me perplexed for some time until I was looking up an old map and realised it must be the remains of the old main road into the village. Love a bit of landscape detective work.

Has anyone read A History of Scotland’s Landscapes by Fiona Watson? I was thinking of having a look – it sounds promising.

My blog is full of little snippets of these.

scotroutes – could you point me in the direction of your blog please? – sounds really interesting.

I quite often think of the fact Epping Forest is known as the Krays/ Gangsters back yard for a reason, twice I’ve seen areas roped off as human skeletal remains have surfaced.

Puts and edge to night riding…

Living in Cirencester, it’s basically impossible for me to leave the house without walking, riding or driving along something Roman. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago I ‘discovered’ a large exposed section of the original Roman city walls in the big park in town, I’ve only lived here ten years 🙂

This is one of the reasons I love staring at OS Maps, cos you can see the old routes that in some places are now a track across a field and in others a dual carriageway…

For those living in the South West, there is this great tool our charity I work at has been involved with.

Home

mrwhyte, that is OUTSTANDING. Between that and the air traffic site from the other day, I’m never getting any work done again…

That is excellent.

Often.

I love history especially engineering of any age.