It took 10 years of living here before I looked hard at my town’s Ordnance Survey map. There, like most who neglect study of their closest ground, I saw my daily familiar articulated in a diagrammatic, unfamiliar way. Here notable historic echoes inscribed alongside its present. And I discovered that a footpath named the Jurassic Way not only glanced my door but set off from it, travelling 88 miles from this old Lincolnshire town to the unlikely end of Banbury, traversing a ridge-seam of limestone that gave Stamford its stone and the route its name. Drawn, it presents like a diagonal scratch across the belly of England.
With spring here I decided to walk it piecemeal, beginning today with the first mile. With the town’s spires to my back I cross the floodplain of the meadow, joining the bank of the Welland. Its banks are plump with green, the water still but for the odd ripple from a surfacing fish. The path is a balding in the grass.
These ways are everywhere, linking here and there. They harmonise with the flow of the land and slink around modern, bludgeon infrastructure, like ivy across the hard lines of a wall. Robert Macfarlane’s exploration of such in The Old Ways depicted these ancient routes as the “habits of a landscape”. Linearity is scarce in nature so when found it’s a way of relating a route ridge, river, edge line as a way to follow, nature’s navigational guide rail.
Before, I’d viewed the rise ahead beyond the town’s edge as simply a hill. Now, as I walk on this storied path I see it as a geologically ordained passage, probably travelled in the paleolithic. Neolithic people may have used it to link hunting grounds. An important Roman route crossed the Welland here. Today’s use of this first mile seems for people to walk their dogs.
As I walk along the way away from town I watch other urban lines diverge as modernity loosens and this old path asserts: telephone lines, railway lines, the road. Things quieten, until it’s just the path and the river. Then fields, up the hill, onward to Banbury if I wanted. And backwards in time, it feels.
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