The Winding Country Lanes of England

Visitors to England, and in many cases those who are life-long residents of the country, are often puzzled as they travel through the countryside by the seemingly illogical and erratic way that the roads and country lanes twist and turn in all directions.  You can be travelling in a particular direction one minute, only to find that a moment or two later you are travelling entirely the opposite way for no apparent reason.

 The answer to this conundrum is in fact quite straightforward and lies, like so many things in England, in the country’s rich historical past.

 In the days before England took on the charming patchwork of fields that is commonplace in the English countryside today, the countryside was densely populated by woodland, punctuated here and there by isolated farming communities.  It was for this reason that people rarely travelled in the lowlands preferring, whenever possible, to use the trackways on the high ground where they would be relatively safe from thieves and wild animals. 

 One such trackway – The Ridgeway – which has been in existence for thousands of years, runs from Overton Hill in Wiltshire to Ivinghoe in Buckinghamshire, covering a distance of 87 miles, and is still in use today as a popular destination for walkers from all over the world wishing to follow in the footsteps of their prehistoric forefathers.

 By the Middle Ages the countryside had well and truly been opened up to farming and the basic network of roads and lanes linking the towns and villages had been established.  

As many field patterns had by now been created, and the right to walk across fields somewhat restricted, people had little choice but to follow the line of the field boundaries to reach their destination.  The result of this formed the basis of what is now the English country lane.  But, as most things are never straightforward in life, other human activities intervened to alter the shape of the lanes.

 Always in need of more land, farmers regularly encroached onto the byways, thereby altering their shape.  It only required one farmer to ‘grab’ a portion of a lane on one side, and another farmer further along on the opposite side to do the same, and a permanent ‘S’ shape would be created in what may otherwise have been a fairly straight lane.   Depositing a heap of dung, disused farm machinery, pens for livestock or making a wood pile at the edges of a lane would also, with the passing of time, alter its shape.