Primal pathways: exploration, trade and pilgrimage
The Road, the route, the pathway, the track. Since the earliest times, roads have been central to the human psyche and to our survival, as important as fire, shelter, food and community: primal pathways for human development. As humanity has spread across the earth they have learned the best routes to the next food source, the next crossing point, and these pathways have become fixed for long periods.
Matt Writtle, as part of a photographic project along the Ridgeway, writes:
Everything we do as humans is determined by a route … the vehicle we use to connect and survive. Over the centuries paths have created social cohesion and community, voyages of discovery and increased knowledge.
Our evolution, from the earliest Homo Sapiens to present-day life, began by travelling to forage or hunt for food. The route of a successful hunt – or passage to fruit and vegetables was passed on through generations to ensure the survival of our species. As these journeys were repeated, over time an imprint became visible on the landscape.
New ideas: the spread of Neolithic culture
Those imprints are often still there in features such as Grim’s Ditch along the Ridgeway. In southern Britain, the high chalk escarpments that are such a feature of the natural landscape became the major routes along which people first spread after the most recent ice age, avoiding impenetrable or boggy lowlands.
The hunter gatherer way of life of the Mesolithic period was essentially replaced by a new culture that had spread from the Levant through Turkey, along the Mediterranean coast and – over 2500 years throughout Europe – but still connecting back to older sites as mechanisms of trade developed, and eventually arriving in Britain about 5800 years ago.
A mystical presence
When this Neolithic culture arrived in Britain, the old routes on the high chalk scarps were already thousands of years old. They must have also been deeply imprinted in the folk memory and taken on a mystical significance.
Though they were undoubtedly important communication and trading routes, they were also the place where this new culture started to place their monuments to the dead, starting with the long barrows of the early Neolithic. The first true farming settlements would have been established on fertile areas of land nearby, with the monuments visible on the horizon above.
Hilaire Belloc in The Road (1923), writes eloquently on the primal significance of these pathways. His book is mainly a study of the route along the high chalk escarpment that runs along the North Downs. This became an important pilgrimage route from Winchester to Canterbury, in Medieval times. But he recognises that it was a much more ancient route, one of a network, including the Ridgeway, that goes right back to the earliest occupations of Britain after the ice age.
He believes – and I agree – that a deep psychological and spiritual importance attaches to roads for all humans. And for those that occupied this island, the old stone roads of the chalk uplands were particularly significant. This is from his introduction:
There are primal things which move us. Fire has the character of a free companion that has travelled with us from the first exile; only to see a fire, whether he need it or no, comforts every man. Again, to hear two voices outside at night after a silence, even in crowded cities, transforms the mind. A Roof also, large and mothering, satisfies us here in the north much more than modern necessity can explain; so we built in beginning: the only way to carry off our rains and to bear the weight of our winter snows. A Tower far off arrests a man’s eye always: it is more than a break in the sky-line; it is an enemy’s watch or the rallying of a defence to whose aid we are summoned. …
Of these primal things the least obvious but the most important is The Road. It does not strike the sense as do those others I have mentioned; we are slow to feel its influence. We take it so much for granted that its original meaning escapes us. Men, indeed, whose pleasure it is perpetually to explore even their own country on foot, and to whom its every phase of climate is delightful, receive, somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. They feel a meaning in it; it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it explains its own vagaries, and it gives a unity to all that has arisen along its way. …
It was the most imperative and the first of our necessities. It is older than building and than wells; before we were quite men we knew it, for the animals still have it to-day; they seek their food and their drinking-places, and, as I believe, their assemblies, by known tracks which they have made.
A pilgrimage route
Further, Belloc notes that the ancient routes converge on Salisbury Plain, which would have become a market place for trading and ultimately the centre of power.
Stonehenge developed in a series of stages as its importance grew and became the centre of Britain’s Neolithic religion. Religious artefacts from Wales and Scotland were brought to this centre. The effort to do this and to construct the monuments of Stonehenge, Avebury, Silbury Hill and others suggests a highly centralised theocratic civilisation had developed by the later part of the neolithic period, able to marshall the labour of thousands and plan work over many years.
We now know that people flocked from a wide area to feast at midwinter at Durrington Walls, just by Stonehenge: and walking the Ridgeway to Stonehenge would have been one of their preferred pilgrimage ways, lined as it was with monuments to the dead. These routes would have seemed like tentacles spreading out from the centre to all parts of the island, the network that bound this culture together.
The final part of the journey is believed to have been along the Avon, which runs south from the Ridgeway. See this post about the link between the Ridgeway and the Avon: