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Wade's Causeway

eburacum

eburacum

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A few years ago me and my missus went up to look at this ancient site, up on the North York Moors miles from anywhere;
Wade's Causeway

Despite what it says on the Wikipedia entry, there is some doubt about the Roman origin of this causewy. A noticeboard at the site says the origin is uncertain, and the causeway itself is made of quite large rough stone (some of the boulders included in the causeway would have made driving a cart or chariot along it practically impossible).

But most interesting of all was a discussion we has with a lone archaeologist who was workin the site. He said to us, "If this road was built by Romans they were the tidiest Romans I've ever heard of."

He explained that he was looking for dating artifacts along the causeway; on any other road, the Roman builders would have dropped artifacts- coins, little holy statues, horse equipment, cracked pots- but here, nothing. He reckoned it was much older than the Romans, and was possibly Neolithic.

I haven't found much mention of this theory on the net- only here, on this page
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/sit ... _well.html
the well is situated beside the route of Wades Causeway the 'Roman road' (aka The Old Wifes Way) which has recently be a source of some speculation as to whether parts of the causeway pre date the roman road, one eminent archaeo has gone so far as to suggest that the section of the causeway that runs across Wheeldale may in fact be a Neolithic linear monument.
Click to expand...

Anyone else have any info on this? If we can find some references, I would suggest that the Wikipedia entry at the very least could be amended accordingly.
 
I'm working on the Saturday, unfortunately...
but thanks anyway.

If you see the causeway, bear in mind it seems quite different from most other Roman roads (as far as I understand it, anyway).
 
eburacum said:
I'm working on the Saturday, unfortunately...
but thanks anyway.

If you see the causeway, bear in mind it seems quite different from most other Roman roads (as far as I understand it, anyway).
Click to expand...


We didn't get to check this site until late Sunday afternoon...

I see what you mean about it looking difficult to travel on in a wheeled cart or chariot!

What sort of neolithic structure could it be? Are there any others like it?
 
There is nothing like it exactly anywhere.

My wife, who has a degree in archaeology from many decades ago, says that it might have been a road, and the lumpy appearance is due to 2000-4000 years of wear and tear. Farners trying to move the stones might have left it in a sorry state. One idea she has is that it is a Celtic road, built as a copy of Roman practice without any detailed plans to work from. This would explain the lack of Roman artifacts.

But I like the idea that it is neolithic, and there are straigh features like the Cursus at Stonehenge and the avenues at Avebury which it vaguely resembles. Or even the alignements at Carnac; all these are straight or linear features of unknown purpose.
 
eburacum said:
There is nothing like it exactly anywhere.

My wife, who has a degree in archaeology from many decades ago, says that it might have been a road, and the lumpy appearance is due to 2000-4000 years of wear and tear. Farners trying to move the stones might have left it in a sorry state. One idea she has is that it is a Celtic road, built as a copy of Roman practice without any detailed plans to work from. This would explain the lack of Roman artifacts.

But I like the idea that it is neolithic, and there are straigh features like the Cursus at Stonehenge and the avenues at Avebury which it vaguely resembles. Or even the alignements at Carnac; all these are straight or linear features of unknown purpose.
Click to expand...


The first thing I thought of was a cursus, but I've never heard of one being constucted like that. All the ones I've seen/heard of are monuments of earth with banks and ditches. Like a 'stretched' enclosure.

One other thing it vaguely reminded me of was the stone 'causeway' at Maiden Castle in Swaledale. Though this has two rows of rough stones, that form an 'avenue' that enters a hillfort. (The hillfort is an oddity in itself, being halfway up a hill, overlooked by the summit - not a good defensive postion!)...
Here's a pic of that 'avenue'...
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v480/ ... inton3.jpg
 
Maiden Castle is Iron age, isn't it?Swaledale isn't too far away.

Perhaps it is an example of the same phenomenon; in which case my missus' Celtic theory looks a bit more likely.
 
eburacum said:
Maiden Castle is Iron age, isn't it?Swaledale isn't too far away.

Perhaps it is an example of the same phenomenon; in which case my missus' Celtic theory looks a bit more likely.
Click to expand...

I think most of the site's use was during the Iron Age. But one paper published in 2003 (The Archaeology of Yorkshire, The Neolithic & Bronze Ages, T.G. Manby, A. King & B.E. Vyner, YAS Occasional Paper No.3, 2003) said it wasn't a 'single phase monument'.

I wonder if there are the remains of something as yet undiscovered at one or both ends of Wade's Causeway... :?:
 
I spoke to one of the West Yorkshire Archaeology Service team today, and Wade's Causeway came up in the conversation. He reckoned that what you can see there today isn't a Roman road, but the foundations of one. That's why it looks so rough.

Come to think of it, some minor Roman roads were less well-made than the major ones, weren't they? And surfaced with 'gravel'? The upper surface could well disappear over time, leaving the rough foundations...?
 
Relatively nearby are the so-called Cawthorne 'practice camps'; a set of camps seemingly never used in earnest, but used presumably for practice and manoevres.

Perhaps this was a practice road, never finished.
 
I was reminded of the newly discovered 'Rotherwas Ribbon' - a prehistoric paved structure of some sort.. does anyone have any thoughts on this comparison with Wade's Causeway?
 
I went past Wade's Causeway at the weekend, and decided to check the interwebs to see if any more info on its origin had surfaced. Here's a letter by "Stockton based archaeologist Blaise Vyner published in British Archaeology, no 29, November 1997";

'I should like to comment on the 'road' across Wheeldale Moor, which you illustrated on the front cover. This structure is often referred to as one of the best surviving instances of unaltered, though robbed, Roman road construction. However, apart from being roughly on a line drawn between Cawthorn Roman camps and the Roman fortlet on Lease Rigg, it has none of the characteristics of a Roman road. It is restricted to Wheeldale Moor, and follows a sinuous course. It is also broken by watercourses. For some time I have suspected that this monument is in fact a Neolithic or Early Bronze Age boundary line.'
Click to expand...
http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba29/ba29lets.html
So at least one local archaeologist doubts the Roman attribution; that 'lone archaeologist' mentioned in my first post might even have been Vyner himself.
 
Ooh nice to see you're still thinking about it. Someone I know has long had his prehistoric theories about it too. I should prod him for details.

The folklore's interesting too.
 
I wonder how the causeway compares to Cam High Road, the Roman Road in Wensleydale? I've been along it a couple of times and there are stretches with the original road material visible. That road changes course a couple of times as well, at the top of Wether Fell.

Just to throw in another source, this Dalesman page suggests a medieval origin (we're the peasants tidier than the Roman army?).
 
There's an intriguing Twitter thread on trods - old paved routes over the Yorkshire moors - which may or may not be tangentially relevant to Wade's Causeway. I have trodden the one at Mankinholes myself, and that one is rumoured to be Roman. Embarrassingly, I did not know about the Magna Via, down the other end of the valley (more or less). Now I have another thing to add to my to-do list next time I am back home: there is something magical (albeit the very opposite of unearthly) about walking a path that has been trodden for centuries. I cherish the detail about the dry-stone waller who was tasked with flipping the setts on one trod, as the surfaces had become very worn. Of course, the other sides were equally worn.

An added bonus is the link to the story of the same name by Algernon Blackwood - well worth 10 minutes of your time.
 
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