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Lost Paths & Roads

Yithian

Yithian

Parish Watch
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Joined
Oct 29, 2002
Messages
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Location
East of Suez
The Way Through the Woods

THEY shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again;
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate.
They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods . . .
But there is no road through the woods.

Rudyard Kipling, in Rewards and Fairies [1910]
HERE
 
Here in Iowa, as in many predominately rural states, there are thousands of these little abandoned roads, marked by signs saying "umaintained country road, Grade B, enter at own risk." I love these roads that connect nothing, deadend abruptly, and are perfect for just hanging out and watching the skies change overhead. Dead roads have an incredible essence, a presence, whether it be of fairies or just the weight of their own forgotten histories.

Stephen King wrote a short story, maybe in Skeleton Crew? about a man who goes off with a modern equivalent of the Fairy Queen, driving wildly in her car down one of those cursed forgotten roads. Good stuff.
 
A more urban take -

Here in Glasgow, for years there was an unfinished motorway bridge, right in the city center, at the bottom of Sauchiehall St, near Charing Cross Undergound.

It came off an ordinary street, rose up (as a turn-on to the motorway), and just stoppped. The end of the street was closed off, but this half-finished bridge was there for years.
 
A less urban take...

Where I grew up,in lovely Thornaby(England)There was a chunk(a few hundred feet)of Roman road,out in the woods-it's probably developed by now-but it had this feeling-nothing esoteric-this strange sense of once having been something important,but now left far behind....

Last time I was there(in the late eighties)in was still in a wonderful condition.

(As you go out towards Ingleby Barwick from the Town Centre)
 
Ah, perhaps even the roads we think we know are lost . . . (strokes chin and stares meaningfully into the distance . . .)

I notice whenever we get a light dusting of snow and a bit of a wind to blow it that the road I can see from my house reveals the pattern of its underlying cobbles. They're completely invisible the rest of the time.

Now, since we're in poetic mode:

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again. A. E. Housman :(
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Now, since we're in poetic mode:

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again. A. E. Housman :(
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Ah, shit, that describes my life perfectly... :(
 
US review for new book on ancient (Celtic) paths, navigation and technology. The Discovery of Middle Earth, by Graham Robb, is called, The Ancient Paths, in the the UK.
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/03/the_celts_were_smarter_than_we_think/

The Celts were smarter than we think

A new book offers evidence that the Iron-Age Celts possessed highly sophisticated scientific skills

Salon.com. By Laura Miller 4. November. 2013

Graham Robb is an ambling historian. His best-known book, “The Discovery of France,” was based on his travels over 14,000 miles of road by bicycle. France, he argued, is not the culturally homogenous whole it’s typically assumed to be, but an assemblage of distinct and often insular local cultures. As Robb sees it, history, and especially its concealed but detectable residue, can be better understood up close, by putting your feet on the ground where it happened.

Perhaps fittingly, then, Robb’s new book, “The Discovery of Middle-Earth,” constitutes a detour. I should state immediately that this work has nothing to do with J.R.R. Tolkien, and was published under the title “The Ancient Paths” in the U.K., where Robb lives. But “The Discovery of Middle-Earth” might well appeal to the more cerebral and historically inclined portion of the Tolkien fan base, and the title is not inappropriate: Long before Tolkien adopted the name Middle-earth for his imaginary land, the term was used by Celtic and Nordic people for the world we inhabit, halfway between the realm of the gods and the underworld.

It’s the Celtic version of Middle Earth that interests Robb. He was researching a new book by biking along a very old road called the Via Heraklea, which, according to legend, ran from a promontory in Portugal (considered the edge of the known world in classical times), through the Pyrenees and the Alps to Liguria in Italy. The road was said to have been laid down by the Greek hero Hercules, but only fragments of it have survived to modern times, and parts of its course have long been a subject of contention. “In its original, mythic incarnation,” he writes, “the Via Heraklea marches in a straight line like the son of a god for whom a mountain was a paltry obstacle.”

Robb found that if he plotted out the trajectory of this line, it strikes an Alpine pass where sits a spring sacred to the Celts who also associated it with Hercules. In addition, this trajectory follows the angle of the rising sun at the winter solstice as it would have been 2,000 years ago. Another phenomenon that intrigued Robb were six place names along the Via Heraklea that are variants of “Mediolanum,” a name given to about 60 known sites in the ancient Celtic world of continental Europe. (The Italian city Milan is one of them.) Mediolanums are somewhat mysterious, as they seem to have had some significance, yet many of them are in the middle of nowhere (now and historically) and devoid of the religious artifacts typically found at sacred sites. Why were so many of them near the Via Heraklea, and was there some significant connection?

In short, yes, at least according to Robb. “The Discovery of Middle-Earth” is very much Robb’s own discovery — of what he asserts to be a magnificent, overarching, gridlike pattern, based on the heavens, determining the Celtic settlement of Europe during the Iron Age. ...
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More at link.
Not one, but two, Guardian reviews for The Ancient Paths:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/11/ancient-paths-graham-robb-review

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/27/ancient-paths-graham-robb-review

Definitely in the Fortean territory of ancient paths, trackways and sacred geometry, with this one.
 
Strange this thread popped up again - just this morning I wrote:

"In the distance of the photo that accompanies this article is another stretch of tidal water, Pagham harbour. I spent a lot of time exploring Pagham in my teens (and even sailed there a couple of times). The area also has a history of flooding and reclamation - the land to the north of the harbour is below sea level, and in parts of the harbour could be seen the remains of roads that had been made on dry land before the sea came back in."

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 70#1365070

I also mentioned Pagham and its sunken roads in 2002:

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 9022#99022
 
I had my copy of this off the shelf earlier:

SmartSelect_20200403-002607_Gallery.jpg

The opening essay is masterful.

ON THE ROAD AND THE
FASCINATION OF ANTIQUITY

ON THE ROAD AND THE FASCINATION OF ANTIQUITY

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. Nor are these emotions a memory or a reversion only as one crude theory might pretend; we craved these things—the camp, the refuge, the sentinels in the dark, the hearth—before we made them; they are part of our human manner, and when this civilisation has perished they will reappear.

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. But for the mass The Road is silent; it is the humblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said, the greatest and the most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest pioneers of our race. 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.

It is easy to re-create in oneself to-day a sense of what the Road means to living things on land: it is easy to do it even in this crowded country. Walk, for instance, on the neglected Pennines along the watershed of England, from Malham Tarn, say, to Ribblehead, or from Kirkby Stephen up along the crest to Crossfell and so to Alston, and you will learn at once what follows on an untouched soil from the absence of a track—of a guide. One ravine out of the many radiating from a summit will lead to the one valley you seek; take another stream and you are condemned at last to traverse mountains to repair the error. In a fog or at night, if one has not such a path, there is nothing to help one but the lay of the snow or the trend of the vegetation under the last gale. In climbing, the summit is nearly always hidden, and nothing but a track will save you from false journeys. In descent it alone will save you a precipice or 6an unfordable stream. It knows upon which side an obstacle can be passed, where there is firm land in a morass, and where there is the best going; sand or rock—dry soil. It will find what nothing but long experiment can find for an individual traveller, the precise point in a saddle or neck where approach is easiest from either side, and everywhere the Road, especially the very early Road, is wiser than it seems to be. It reminds one of those old farmers who do not read, and whom we think at first unreasoning in their curious and devious ways, but whom, if we watch closely, we shall find doing all their work just in that way which infinite time has taught the country-side.

Thus I know an old man in Sussex who never speaks but to say that everything needs rest. Land, he says, certainly; and also he believes iron and wood. For this he is still ridiculed, but what else are the most learned saying now? And I know a path in the Vosges which, to the annoyance of those who travel by it, is irrational: it turns sharp northward and follows under a high ridge, instead of directly crossing it: some therefore leave it and lose all their pains, for, if you will trust to that path you will find it crosses the ridge at last at the only place where, on the far side, it is passable at all; all before and beyond that point is a little ledge of precipice which no one could go down.

More than rivers and more than mountain chains, roads have moulded the political groups of men. The Alps with a mule-track across them are less of a barrier than fifteen miles of forest or rough land separating one from that track. Religions, which are the principal formers of mankind, have followed the roads only, leaping from city to city and leaving the 'Pagani,' in the villages off the road, to a later influence. Consider the series Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Athens, and the Appian Way: Rome, all the tradition of the Tuscan highway, the Ligurian coast, Marseilles and Lyons. I have read in some man's book that the last link of that chain was the river Rhone; but this man can never have tried to pull a boat upon the Rhone up-stream. It was the Road that laid the train. The Mass had reached Lyons before, perhaps, the last 8disciple of the apostles was dead: in the Forez, just above, four hundred years later, there were most probably offerings at night to the pagan gods of those sombre and neglected hills.

And with religions all that is built on them: letters, customs, community of language and idea, have followed the Road, because humanity, which is the matter of religion, must also follow the road it has made. Architecture follows it, commerce of course, all information: it is even so with the poor thin philosophies, each in its little day drifts, for choice, down a road.

The sacredness which everywhere attaches to The Road has its sanction in all these uses, but especially in that antiquity from which the quality of things sacred is drawn: and with the mention of the word 'antiquity' I may explain another desire which led me to the study I have set down in this book: not only did I desire to follow a road most typical of all that roads have been for us in western Europe, but also to plunge right into the spirit of the oldest monument of the life men led on this island: I mean the oldest of which a continuous record remains.

To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to establish aimless truths: it is rather to fulfil a function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take on body—are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed. Reverence and knowledge and security and the love of a good land—all these are increased or given by the pursuit of this kind of learning. Visions or intimations are confirmed. It is excellent to see perpetual agony and failure perpetually breeding the only enduring things; it is excellent to see the crimes we know ground under the slow wheels whose ponderous advance we can hardly note during the flash of one human life. One may say that historical learning grants men glimpses of life completed and a whole; and such a vision should be the chief solace of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from fulfilment.

Now of all that study the chief charm lies in mere antiquity. No one truly loves history who is not more exalted according to the greater age of the new things he finds. Though things are less observable as they are farther away, yet their appeal is directly increased by such a distance in a manner which all know though none can define it. It is not illusion; perhaps an ultimate reality stands out when the details are obscured. At any rate it is the appeal which increases as we pass further from the memories of childhood, or from the backward vision of those groups of mountain which seem to rise higher and more awfully into the air as we abandon them across the plains. Antiquity of that degree conveys—I cannot pretend to say how—echoes which are exactly attuned to whatever is least perishable in us. After the present and manifold voice of Religion to which these echoes lead, and with which in a sense they merge, I know of nothing more nobly answering the perpetual questioning of a man. Nor of all the vulgar follies about us is any more despicable than that which regards the future with complacency, and finds nothing but imperfection in that innocent, creative, and wondering past which the antiquaries and geologists have revealed to us.

For my part I desired to step exactly in the footprints of such ancestors. I believed that, as I followed their hesitations at the river-crossings, as I climbed where they had climbed to a shrine whence they also had seen a wide plain, as I suffered the fatigue they suffered, and laboriously chose, as they had chosen, the proper soils for going, something of their much keener life would wake again in the blood I drew from them, and that in a sort I should forget the vileness of my own time, and renew for some few days the better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect, articulate, and worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity and the long accumulation of evil. It was perhaps a year ago that I determined to follow and piously to recover the whole of that doubtful trail whereby they painfully made their way from one centre of their common life to the sea, which was at once their chief mystery and their only passage to the rest of their race—from Hampshire to the Straits of Dover. Many, I knew, had written about that road; much of it was known, but much also was lost. No one, to my knowledge, had explored it in its entirety.

First, therefore, I read what had been written about this most ancient way, I visited men who were especially learned in geology and in antiquarian knowledge, I took notes from them, and I carefully studied the maps of all sorts that could help me in my business. Then, taking one companion, I set out late in December to recover and map out yard by yard all that could be recovered and mapped out of The Old Road.

No better task could be put before a man, and the way in which I accomplished it my readers shall judge in the essay which follows this introduction, and in the diary of my journey with which the book shall close.

Full Text:
https://www.ajhw.co.uk/books/book321/book321.html
 
Here's an example of a different type of lost pathway - lost railway tracks ...

GhostTracks-CapeMayNJ.jpeg

116-year-old 'ghost tracks' unearthed following pesky coastal storm

Mysterious World War I-era railroad tracks hidden in the Atlantic Ocean? It's not quite the plot of a thriller novel, but rather an actual discovery found along a beach in Cape May, New Jersey, in the wake of a fierce coastal storm last week.

Liz Goldsmith was walking along the shores between Sunset and Higbee Beach last Tuesday when the ocean - fueled by the combination of the storm, coastal erosion and the daily low tide - unearthed one of the area's rarest finds. The tracks, which date back to the early 20th century, were seen in 2014 for the first time in over 80 years and have since been revealed by different weather events in subsequent years, including by a couple of big storms in 2018. ...

Nicknamed "ghost tracks," the tracks were used to support sand mining and World War I munitions testing, according to NJ.com. The Cape May Sand Company also used the rails from 1905 to 1936 to remove sand from the beach and turn it into glass or cement. ...

Local historian Ben Miller told NJ.com in 2017 that cement created from the sand that was carried along the tracks helped build the Panama Canal. ...

The 'ghost tracks' went over 80 years without being seen before coastal erosion unveiled them. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2022/05/17/railroad-tracks/3771652818807/
 
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EnolaGaia said:
a different type of lost pathway - lost railway tracks ...
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I've always been fascinated by the concept (mythical or real?) of solid-gold railroad spikes being used, during the early days of American track-laying reaching some significant completion milestone or (presumably?) cross-connection. I've no cultural awareness of this being done anywhere else in the world (and it maybe didn't even happen then....or did it?)

Were these a literal reality? If so, were they stolen, or somehow camouflaged? And might this lost/preserved section of track include one?
 
BS3 said:
I've seen a few interesting, if sad, articles on Lebanon's old rail system:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/reviving-lebanon-train-system

https://www.aramcoworld.com/Articles/September-2021/Rust-and-Dreams-on-the-Beirut-Damascus-Railroad

https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2016/5/1/a-trip-back-in-time-on-lebanons-disappearing-railway
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Good find.
I always find old disused railways and roads to be quite sad. Even more so when they've turned an old line into a cycle/walking path.
I know that probably sounds odd, but when I used to walk on a disused line in the 1980s with my Granddad (who had worked on it until Beeching came along) it was a very quiet place and my Granddad would point out where their huts etc used to be, then we'd go through a dark. dank tunnel and out over a viaduct and we'd maybe see a handful of people. Years later I went back with MrsF and they'd done it up, smoothed the hardcore, made the tunnel safe and put lights in it etc and there were so many townies people around that we spent most of our time trying not to get run over. Add in all the litter they bring with them and clogging up the roads in their big cars and it really isn't a pleasant experience for me now.
 
Floyd1 said:
Good find.
I always find old disused railways and roads to be quite sad. Even more so when they've turned an old line into a cycle/walking path.
I know that probably sounds odd, but when I used to walk on a disused line in the 1980s with my Granddad (who had worked on it until Beeching came along) it was a very quiet place and my Granddad would point out where their huts etc used to be, then we'd go through a dark. dank tunnel and out over a viaduct and we'd maybe see a handful of people. Years later I went back with MrsF and they'd done it up, smoothed the hardcore, made the tunnel safe and put lights in it etc and there were so many townies people around that we spent most of our time trying not to get run over. Add in all the litter they bring with them and clogging up the roads in their big cars and it really isn't a pleasant experience for me now.
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But at least they are being used. Even if it's just for townies to get out of a weekend and ride their expensive bikes up and down; all that effort and manpower and sweat and toil that went into building those old tracks didn't go for nothing.

It's lovely when they are all romantic and overgrown and nobody knows about them, but surely it's better to have them opened up and useable?
 
Floyd1 said:
Good find.
I always find old disused railways and roads to be quite sad. Even more so when they've turned an old line into a cycle/walking path.
I know that probably sounds odd, but when I used to walk on a disused line in the 1980s with my Granddad (who had worked on it until Beeching came along) it was a very quiet place and my Granddad would point out where their huts etc used to be, then we'd go through a dark. dank tunnel and out over a viaduct and we'd maybe see a handful of people. Years later I went back with MrsF and they'd done it up, smoothed the hardcore, made the tunnel safe and put lights in it etc and there were so many townies people around that we spent most of our time trying not to get run over. Add in all the litter they bring with them and clogging up the roads in their big cars and it really isn't a pleasant experience for me now.
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I have a some very vivid memories of walking a few miles of disused railway lines near to my childhood home; they'd been closed about seven years at that point but the track, level crossing gates, bridges etc were still in place. In this case it's all gone now: rails, bridges and even embankments gone in some stretches. I guess conversion to a path would have been preferable but I agree about them lacking a bit of atmosphere!

A short distance away we also had a stretch of very old single track road that was replaced and blocked off with tons of earth when I was very young. Years later I forced my way through the nettles and vegetation to find that a long tree-lined stretch of it between two bends had been left untouched, old tarmac still in place and covered in years of fallen leaves, even an old sign in the hedgerow. There was something quite magical about that.
 
catseye said:
But at least they are being used. Even if it's just for townies to get out of a weekend and ride their expensive bikes up and down; all that effort and manpower and sweat and toil that went into building those old tracks didn't go for nothing.

It's lovely when they are all romantic and overgrown and nobody knows about them, but surely it's better to have them opened up and useable?
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I'd rather see nature take it over.
 
Victory said:
Thank for posting.
How close is it to the current coastal railway?
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Hi Victory. It was a continuation of the current coastal line.
If you look at an aerial view will see that the line now stops at Nahariya. If you follow north, (and you have a good eye) you can see the scar of where it used to run. Of course, most of it has now been built on, but there is this one remaining short stretch, just south of the car park for Achziv. Until relatively recently you could still see the old lines in the asphalt of highway 4 which crossed the line twice (they have since taken the lines out now though).
There is a 'then and now' map here that shows where the line and road ran (the road was slightly altered here at some point, to straighten it out and to take it more away from Achziv).

There is also a memorial here to the Palmach fighters, although I have not visited unfortunately; https://www.google.com/maps/@33.050...2OwZPxo2Y_6G-RQSW8Ow!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en

The remaining stretch from Achziv to Rosh Hanikra (3 miles) is now a coastal path that you can walk all the way to the tunnel at the border with Lebanon.
 
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Floyd1 said:
Hi Victory. It was a continuation of the current coastal line.
If you look at an aerial view will see that the line now stops at Nahariya. If you follow north, (and you have a good eye) you can see the scar of where it used to run. Of course, most of it has now been built on, but there is this one remaining short stretch, just south of the car park for Achziv. Until relatively recently you could still see the old lines in the asphalt of highway 4 which crossed the line twice (they have since taken the lines out now though).
There is a 'then and now' map here that shows where the line and road ran (the road was slightly altered here at some point, to straighten it out and to take it more away from Achziv).

There is also a memorial here to the Palmach fighters, although I have not visited unfortunately; https://www.google.com/maps/@33.050...2OwZPxo2Y_6G-RQSW8Ow!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en

The remaining stretch from Achziv to Rosh Hanikra (3 miles) is now a coastal path that you can walk all the way to the tunnel at the border with Lebanon.
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Thank you.

I am having a memory issue.
"Altered memory".
I have definitely driven that road along the coast, parked up and been to the Rosh Hanikrah grottoes.
But somewhere in my mind I "remember" getting a train along that bit of coast too.
I know for sure I have done that to Haifa, but did I go further?
I cannot be sure.
Bizarre!

But the coastline is etched into my head...it's that natural bit of beach, relatively undeveloped.
Which makes it such a contrast to Tel Aviv.

P.S.
The Palmach museum in Tel Aviv is well worth a visit.
More of a guided experience than simply looking at things in display cases.
 
Victory said:
Thank you.

I am having a memory issue.
"Altered memory".
I have definitely driven that road along the coast, parked up and been to the Rosh Hanikrah grottoes.
But somewhere in my mind I "remember" getting a train along that bit of coast too.
I know for sure I have done that to Haifa, but did I go further?
I cannot be sure.
Bizarre!

But the coastline is etched into my head...it's that natural bit of beach, relatively undeveloped.
Which makes it such a contrast to Tel Aviv.

P.S.
The Palmach museum in Tel Aviv is well worth a visit.
More of a guided experience than simply looking at things in display cases.
Click to expand...
I'm wondering if you're remembering the stretch north of Caesarea where the railway swings back towards the coast. That area was (and still looks like it is) quite undeveloped too, from Nasholim up to Haifa.

Also there was a short stretch just south of Acre that used to run very close to the beach and over the Na'aman river (the line has since been straightened and moved inland here now as the old bridge needed replacing). Maybe that bit stuck in your mind too.

Edit to say: The reason I mentioned the bit just south of Acre was in case you had maybe once carried on up to Nahariya.
 
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The obvious one in the UK are the old drovers' roads, particularly those from Wales to England. There was a whole, very significant, economy and culture around them that vanished quickly with the coming of the railways. Some of the Welsh droves would start with the cattle being swum across the Menai Straits from Anglesey. Until less than twenty years ago the old routes were very little used except by a few walkers, though mountain bikers now seem to be taking some of them over. Some will take you into what still seem like some very wild places (by British standards).

https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/5934018

They have their own peculiar identifying points, like wide verges, and waymarks such as the pine trees often planted to advertise an overnight pasture. I always liked the story that the drovers' families knew they would be returning, after several weeks away, because the dogs would come back a couple of days earlier.
 
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