Tomorrow we start walking the Ridgeway, 87 miles from Wiltshire to Hertfordshire, six days walking for us.  It’s sometimes called Britain’s oldest road – experts aren’t sure about this but reckon that some stretches may be 8,000 years old.  Some of the earthworks we’ll pass – Waylands Smithy, Uffington Castle, Silbury Hill – are certainly several thousand years old.

Ivinghoe Beacon – the end of the walk

As its name implies, the way is defined by geography: it’s part of a longer ridge running all the way from the English Channel to the North Sea, characterised by a chalk escarpment.  Some other long-distance trails are also set by geography, such as the Pennine Way or the various coastal paths.  But all paths are in practice partly shaped by the landscape and partly shaped by human activity.  For much of its history, the Ridgeway was much less well defined: this was pragmatic in that if one track became too rutted and muddy, people would walk a bit to the side, gradually wearing down a new path, and at times the path was a mile wide.  Even then, there is evidence that it respected ancient field boundaries where these existed, and the position changed in the 18th century with the passing of Enclosure Acts which carved out private land and narrowed the path in the process.  So in one sense, we’ll be following in the footsteps of some of our oldest ancestors, but in other ways using a route that was properly worked out two or three centuries ago, and benefiting from a lot of modern maintenance work.

This combination of human influence and nature will apply to the landscape we will be looking out over too.  In the sixth form at school, when we were preparing for “general papers” of some sort, I saw a previous question that ran “The beauty of the English countryside is man-made: discuss.”  My immediate reaction was an angry dismissal of that: the trees, the colour of the grass, the rolling hills were entirely natural!  But some trees have been felled and others planted.  The mix of colours depends on which crops are planted alongside the green meadows – I suspect we will have my bugbear of oilseed rape to look forward to this week.  Our idea of the beauty of England has much to do with dry stone walls, and the sight of cottages and church spires in the distance, to break up what would otherwise be a monolithic outlook.  And all this has changed over time, as hedges have been replaced by fences, fields enlarged, and so on.  The line sometimes used that “the view will be much as it was in Wordsworth’s day” is appealing but probably not right.

As well as our oldest ancestors, we’ll be following in the footsteps of thousands if not millions of other travellers down the centuries.  Our reason for doing the walk – seeing the countryside and getting some exercise – is a comparatively recent luxury, only applying for a small fraction of the life of the Ridgeway.  Roads, ways, and tracks are above all a means for getting from A to B, so what journeys were our predecessors taking?  Trading goods between hill forts?  Heading for battle?  Driving cattle to market?  Using the ridge-way, literally interpreted, as an easier route between villages down below the escarpment where the ground was boggier?  Hopefully we will get more of a sense of this over the coming days.