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Little positive attention seems to have been given to surfacing roads, but this mattered less than it would now: wheels were designed for soft ground and many roads were wide enough to pick a way round sloughs.

A big consignment of timber was once sent in 1309 from Gamlingay to Grantchester (Cambs) 'at Christmas in hard Frost'.⁴²²

Ownership of highways; purprestures Minor lanes were occasionally private property:

Lane. Item, pasture in the lane (venella) leading from Rothyng Tye to Albosdonn 1 acre 2¾ roods 0 perches

Leaden Roding survey, 1439²⁹²

With this exception, and except also for unfenced footpaths across fields, highways were part of the common-land of the manor. They had definite boundaries (hedges or ditches) and did not belong to the adjacent farmers (cf. p.281). Much business in manorial courts was concerned with encroachments on common-land, called purprestures.

Purprestures could occur on any common-land, but they most often took the form of narrowing a road, either by a neighbouring farmer pushing out his frontage or by a third party setting up a smallholding within the road itself (Fig.

12.9). Manorial courts often condoned purprestures on payment of an annual fme to the lord of the manor:

Robert Cook made a purpresture in the common way, 10 ft long and 1 ft wide . .

3d.

Court roll, Redlingfield, Suffolk, 1276⁴²³

A purpresture near the Pillory, 54 ft long, 4 ft wide at one end and 1 ft wide at the other end.

Court roll, Earl's Come, Essex, 1428-9⁴²⁴

A purpresture . . . established by Richard Gyva, turner, of Takeleghe

[bounded] by the ditch of the close of the tenant of the said Richard . . . on the

north, and the king's way called Stanstret [the Roman road, p.255] on the south;

65 ft long by the said ditch [measured] by a ruler, and in width at both ends and in

the middle 3 ft by a ruler. [Gyva paid ld. a year for it.]

Hatfield Broad-oak 1448²⁷⁴

Fig. 12.9. Purprestures on highways.

(a) By a farmer extending his fields on to the road: outside the Bradfield Woods, Suffolk. The Ordnance Survey of 1836 shows a wide road, reduced to its present width soon after. The hedges show that the south side has been narrowed; traces of the original edge still exist in woodland which has grown up since.

(b) By people living in the road and building houses and planting gardens on it: outside Chalkney Wood, Essex. The road now threads its way past four encroachments, three of which were already there in 1598 (Fig. 2.2) and may be much older; they are mapped as in 1876. Ivy Cottage is still a small house as in 1598. Cottage A has disappeared since 1876 and its site has been taken over by the field adjacent. Mill's, already so called in

1598, has grown into a substantial farm and its origin as a purpresture is no longer evident. Cottage B, though it began off the road, has long ago encroached on to it.

Also at Hatfield, rents were collected in 1328 for 'a certain place of purpresture for a muckheap' and '1 pit of purpresture outside the gate' ;425 in 14467 John Nedeman was fined for appropriating 14 feet by 8 feet of the King's way for a lay-by (diuersorium) to put his cart in ²⁷⁴

A more complicated affair came before the royal courts in 1412. Sir Thomas Hengrave and three others had been granted a licence to divert the road from Mutford to Carlton Colville (north-east Suffolk) where it passed through Mut­ford Wood; they had stopped up the old road but had not made a new one, and did not own the land on which to do so. The gang were also in trouble for narrowing another road and throwing mud from their ditches on to it, as well as on poaching charges.⁴²⁶ (The diverted road exists to this day around what remains of the wood.)

Ancient roads, of whatever origin, usually have a course which on the small scale consists of a series of wobbles (Figs. 12.5,12.11, Plate III). Over the centuries, travellers have had to go round fallen trees, sloughs, holes, muckheaps, purprestures, dead horses, and all the things that people put or allow to remain on the highway; and they have often continued to go round after the obstruction has disappeared. The resulting small diversions come to look as if indeed 'the rolling English drunk­ard made the rolling English road'. Occasionally a road has a strong enough structure, like the great agger of Ermine Street in Lincolnshire, to resist these diversions and to preserve the straight line. Sometimes, on major roads, the alignment has been approximately restored by modern roadworks. With these exceptions, Roman roads rarely have the long views ahead which the 1-inch map, on which widths are exaggerated, indicates that they ought to have. An exactly straight road is more likely to be an Enclosure Act road.

I do not know whether the original boundaries of any Roman road are still functional. Medieval and earlier roads are very variable in width, often within a short distance₃ and have boundaries which are even more sinuous than the road itself (Fig. 12.5). Where one hedge is straight and the other sinuous this generally indicates that a farmer has seized part of the highway to his own use. In Ancient Countryside a characteristic feature is the sudden narrowing of the highway where a cottage in a long narrow garden has been built in it. Some formerly wide main roads - eg. north and south of Braintree, or between Birmingham and Stratford-on-Avon, or south of Sherborne (Dorset) - have such 'squatter' houses and gardens, which may themselves be of some antiquity, going on one after another for miles within the original width of the road. Dating the hedges often helps to establish the sequence of these purprestures.

Post-medieval roads, even if not straight, can usually be recognized by their accurately parallel hedges. In the east Midlands, minor roads, often 60 feet wide, made by the earlier Enclosure Acts, contrast with the usually narrower main roads taken over from the Middle Ages. In Cambridgeshire the enclosure commissioners were less generous.

Holloways An expatriate in a new country, where roads roll out prosaically over the ground surface, misses especially the holloways of the English land­scape - the lanes mysteriously sunk in deep ravines which protect them from sun and the blasts of winter, lined with great trees whose roots overhang far above, their cavernous shade the home of delicate plants like hart's-tongue fern, shining cranesbill, and moschatel. Holloways are specially typical of parts of England, and have been for more than a thousand years (p.261).

A very few holloways have been made by putting a road into an existing natural ravine - a combination called a 'grundle' in East Anglia. Others, on main roads, are cuttings deliberately excavated to reduce gradients. But most holloways are the result of centuries of erosion on unpaved roads. Traffic loosens the surface and prevents vegetation from holding it, and rain washes away the debris. Usually this requires vehicles, but there are a few foot hollo­ways (eg. the man-wide holloway on the coast path north of Cadgwith, Corn­wall).

Holloways are widespread, and to select examples can be little more than to give a list of favourite landscapes. They are abundant in the Lizard Peninsula (Cornwall), south-west Wiltshire (especially the Semley country), and the area south and east of Sudbury (Suffolk). Such landscapes of holloways are typical of Ancient Countryside. Well-developed holloways take at least 300 years to form (I have seen an incipient holloway of some 200 years' wear in Massachusetts) and are therefore less usual in Enclosure Act country, although there are many single holloways inherited from earlier periods that enclosure commissioners failed to destroy.

Development of holloways depends partly on topography - they form most easily on slopes - and partly on geology. The grandest I have seen are in the bess of the Kaiserstuhl in Germany, canyon-like lanes up to 80 feet deep with vertical sides and trees meeting over the top. We do not have bess on this scale, but many readers will know the splendid holloways down to Flatford Mill (East Bergholt, Suffolk), formed in an accumulation of bess washed down from elsewhere in prehistory. Upper Greensand forms the dark and intricate rock­sided holloways around Midhurst in the Sussex Weald. Lower Greensand forms many in Wiltshire (eg. around Urchfont) and Dorset.

Holloways usually have the sinuous outlines of other ancient roads, especially on Lower Greensand where the sides may collapse after heavy rain. Where a holloway has been widened to serve as a main road, one side is usually straight­ened and the other left sinuous; examples may be seen at Hitchin and Truro.

Unfenced highways A highway, being part of the common-land of the manor, is not usually demarcated from any commons which it may happen to cross. Many roads gradually widen into funnels (in Dorset called 'horns') as they pass into greens, heaths, or wood-pasture (Fig. 6.9). A constant feature of the Lizard Peninsula and other parts of Cornwall is the lane from each farmstead funnelling out between fields on to the moorland.

People crossing unfenced land often find existing tracks too rutted or wet for convenience and make new tracks alongside. Bundles of parallel tracks are typical of ancient routes across heath or moorland and can often be seen, at least from the air, centuries afterwards.

Vegetation The verges of highways are old grassland of a peculiar and often rather unstable kind, traditionally grazed and fertilized by the dung of passing beasts and by washings from the road surface. They are not usually among the richest kinds of grassland, but they are important especially in those regions where old grassland of any kind is now rare. In much of England road and railway verges are now the chief home of such general grassland plants as cowslip, knapweed, rock-rose, and hay-rattle (Rhinanthus minor). Few species are confined to verges, but many are commoner there than in other habitats; these include oat-grass (Arrhenatherum elatius - the characteristic roadside grass which farmers occasionally mistake for wild oats), kex or cow-parsley (Anthris­cus syivestris - the well-known spring umbellifer, typical of roadsides rather than of hedges between fields) hedge-garlic (Alliaria petiolata), and black horehound (Ba/iota nigra). Chalkland verges have great knapweed and its broomrape para­site (Centaurea scabiosa and Orobanche elatior). A few national rarities, such as the native grape-hyacinth (Muscari atlanticum), are mainly on roadsides.

Most of these plants are not confined to ancient roads. Some, indeed, depend on recent disturbance, such as the (Socratic) hemlock (Conium maculatum) now profuse along motorways and the rare mullein Verbascum puiverulentum some­times found on road-widenings in Norfolk. A specially rich kind of verge, related to woodland grassland (p.109), is often to be found where an ancient road approaches an ancient wood.

Tracks and earthen road surfaces themselves support certain plants that withstand being stood on. These include the plantains whose pollen marks the beginning of civilization in the Neolithic. Other plants such as the smaller rushes (7uncus articulatus and J. bufonius) and creeping buttercup grow in ruts and sloughs.

Little-used tracks and paths and the trodden ground around pasture gates have a specialized flora. Most of these plants require seasonal moisture. Species of muddy tracks are probably the most severely threatened class of the British flora apart from cornfield weeds. Most of them appear to stay in one place rather than to colonize new sites; they are lost partly through the tendency for traffic to be concentrated on fewer tracks and partly through the modern love of drain­age. One of the famous Lizard Peninsula rarities, the tiny rush Juncus mutabilis, grows in cart-tracks across moorland at places where they cross the edges of bess deposits. This rush, a short-lived annual plant, germinates from buried seed where water seeps into a rut. As D.E. Coombe and L. Frost have shown, this very special habitat depends on a vehicle using a centuries-old track just once or twice a year, and is in danger of being lost through the complete disuse of the tracks. The Lizard has many other cart-rut plants including the curious water-fern Pilularia globuhfera and several aquatic buttercups. Another threatened plant is mousetail, Myosurus minimus, a plant of similar habitats including cattle-trodden gateways on Fenland pastures. The fleabane Pulicaria vulgaris was recorded by John Ray in 1660 ‘in many watery or moist places of the highways' of Cambridgeshire;⁴³⁶ it has long been extinct in the county and is very severely reduced throughout England. A specialized, and also declining, plant of permanent water trickles in Cornish holloways is the delicate Cornish moneywort, Sibthorpia europaea.

Conservation

The loss of specialized plants is but one of many threats to the course, structure, and vegetation of historic highways. Ploughing and obstruction of rights-of-way across fields is a familiar offence which used to be committed with less impunity than it is now:

William atteWater senior ploughed the church-way in a field called Warmelee to the grave nuisance . . . [fined 1d.]

Court roll, Hatfield Broad-oak 1444 ²⁷⁴

As we have seen, even roads and lanes with boundary hedges are seized and ploughed out by adjoining landowners, though now perhaps less often than earlier this century.

Purpresture, too, is very much alive. The modern version of the classic practice begins with a householder mowing the verge outside his garden, continues with boulders placed to prevent people from driving on the verge, and ends with the ditch filled in and the verge absorbed into the garden. Some farmers grub out hedges, fill in ditches, and cultivate the highway up to the edge of the asphalt. This too is an ancient abuse:

The Abbot of Ripton ploughed up a certain Royal way in Thorington [Suffolk] in width 3 feet and in length 20 perches.

Hundred Rolls 1272 ⁴³⁷

Local authorities are curiously reluctant to prevent public land from thus slipping gratis into private hands. They often evade this duty on the pretext that the soil of highways belongs to the owners of the adjacent lands. This notion apparently arises from confusing those highways that are mere rights-of-way across fields with those that are separate parcels of land in their own right. Most roads, all lanes, and some footpaths are the latter. Highways set out by Enclo­sure Act or Turnpike Act are expressly vested in the highway authority; and it is perfectly clear from ancient custom that (with rare exceptions) pre-Enclosure ­Act highways in England, with their verges, are part of the common land of the manor. In neither case do the highways belong to the adjacent landowners, who have no more right to annex them or their verges than does anyone else.

The grassland of roads is neglected and abused. Verges are dug up from time to time. They may be buried by highway engineers who can think of nowhere better to get rid of excess subsoil (arising through errors in calculating cut-and-fill). Some county councils in the 1960s (and perhaps even now) sprayed verges with weedkillers in the childlike belief that this would prevent weeds from growing on them; weedkillers, alas, kill cowslips more effectively than they kill weeds. At best, mowing depends on the whims and budgets of highway author­ities. Many verges, once mown too often, are now mown too seldom: they turn into tall tussocky grassland and then into woodland.

It is a pity that so much effort and research should have been put into the new vegetation of motorway verges (which, to judge by the precedent of the rail­ways, hardly need special treatment) and so little into the deteriorating plant cover of existing highways. But the latter is not entirely neglected. The work of the Ramblers' Association in upholding rights-of-way is well known. Less publicized is the activity of the county Naturalists' Trusts in identifying and protecting specially important lanes and verges: for example the work of Mrs J. Mummery for Essex Naturalists' Trust.⁴³⁸ This is done in collaboration with highway authorities, but usually no special action is asked for. The selected verges are given normal management, but are marked by posts so that any destructive treatment can be avoided.

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12 04-02-12