Is This The Oldest Road In Britain? | Ancient Tracks EP1 | Absolute History

[Music] britain is crisscrossed by an amazing network of ancient trackways these remarkable routes are our oldest roads and have been travelled for more than 5 000 years that is an extraordinary place walked by pilgrims and traders hunters and invaders celts romans saxons and vikings each track is bound up in myth mystery and legend this is it this is quite a strange looking monument [Music] but what's the truth behind all these megaliths and burial sites and lay lines and hidden caves along these pathways and why were their mystic origins such an attraction for later generations i'm going to explore these tracks to connect the clues they've left hidden in the british landscape now isn't this just about the best cave you've ever seen wow her name is majesty what other name could she have this week i'm in east anglia to find the ich nield way i want to know what this journey through norfolk and cambridgeshire can tell me about the history and legends of ancient britain through the stories songs and sacred places along its track these are the paths our ancestors would have followed the ancient trackways that we can still walk today this is the ich neil's way it's a great word ich kneeled isn't it and nobody has a clue what it means some people say it might have something to do with the word i seen i which was the name of buddhicus tribe and this was the pathway down which her victorious warriors went [Music] others say that it could come from an ancient british word for oxen the oxen's way but what i love is the fact that you've got this roadway snaking through east anglia and across to the chiltons and down towards the downs and then towards wessex and at its heart is a mystery that none of us can decode [Music] the igneous way is one of britain's oldest roads what remains today is a breed of prehistoric pathways i'm going to explore this elusive path from the coast in norfolk through cambridgeshire and finish my journey at whipsnaid in the rolling hills of bedfordshire [Music] along the way i'll explore a prehistoric mine i'll search for mysterious ley lines in the landscape uncover the hidden cave of a secret christian sect and hear terrifying tales of a demonic dog all of which will reveal to me how this ancient track was once used this is the norfolk coast at hanstanton i'm starting my walk near here a few miles inland at the beginning of the ichnield way for the last few miles i haven't seen much other than trees and grass and crops [Music] it's like the ignealed way is hiding its mysteries from me but this serene landscape is about to offer up its first puzzle somewhere extraordinary an ancient underworld that wouldn't look out of place in the lord of the rings grimes graves [Music] grim was the anglo-saxon word for the devil and when the early saxon settlers arrived here along the ancient ich niled way in the 5th and 6th century a.d they thought this ghostly place was his cemetery but these weren't graves the anglo-saxons were wrong this place had nothing to do with the devil far from it the uh it nailed way is just behind me beyond that ridge but i've come to this extraordinary moonscape just off the way it's man-made although a very long time ago and to my mind it's one of the most exciting archaeological sites in britain why do i think that because a friend of mine dug it [Music] when did you first come here i came here to dig in 1972 and i left here after i'd finished of five summers in 1976. so you were practically a teenager when you started i was uh practically a teenager but not quite yeah what was it that you found here well i mean for me this was a sight where i like died and gone to evan because it was a neolithic flintline site and i think by now you know how passionate i am about flints and to actually excavate a flint mine site well couldn't get any better could it and we've got mine down here this is one of the finest mines on the side oh i know what i will need this right you're going down first on me no no you can carry on you carry on you hold that one i will do my god it's a long drop it's about well in old money it's about 40 feet so we're looking at sort of 12 to 13 meters if my memory serves me correctly god dear oh dear grime's graves were neolithic mines that were dug to extract the precious stone used to make hunting tools like axe heads and spears descending this ladder into one of the 400 pits i'm going back an incredible four and a half thousand years [Music] oh it's really quite scary legs are a bit wobbly down phil how on earth would stone age people have been able to dig a shaft this deep how would they have done yeah literally through human endeavor i mean they had to be motivated to do it what did they use they used red deer anger picks tony i mean that's a typical sort of thing this is a modern modern one it's one of mine but there are literally thousands and thousands of these things scattered through the the galleries how many blokes do you reckon were working at a time well they reckon you'd probably be working a team perhaps of 20 and a team of 20 you'd probably need at least six months of the year so it was probably was a seasonal occupation when they get in each other's way well they might do at the top but as you've got to get down then you actually have the labor force because you need a lot of people to chuck the muck out and get it out the top what was it they were after they were after the floor stone as we go into the galleries yeah you'll see that there is this layer of pure black flint that spreads right throughout the bottoms of all of these galleries yeah you can see it's a complete seam of black flint and you can see here actually how they took it out they got their antler picks and they scored around the edge there literally gauging out a small trough at the top of the flint destabilize the chalk and then they were able to praise out the flint it's a very clear technique are those real antlers phil these ones are the real ones and you can see how similar they are to my replica one but what you i've got on here that you don't get on mine is this clay you see this clayer that's actually congealed on the islander that's off the hands of the miners that use them and oftentimes you can actually see the fingerprints of the last person who use that it really does put you into contact with those neolithic miners what i don't understand phil is you can find loads of flint on the surface so what were they doing making these complex series of shafts and galleries well there's got to be something that drives them to do it it's like they're building the underworld isn't it they could well be that that is it but but it's not it it's also that the objects that come out from grimes graves would in themselves be special and perhaps be revered and and respected it is an extraordinary place isn't it [Music] this was an industrial site certainly which no doubt used the ich neilled way as a distribution route but to me there seems more to it than that something urged these prehistoric miners beyond the need for arrowheads and axes to dig deeper to the underworld [Music] there are dozens of ancient stories about darkness and light and people going down into the underworld and coming back and people being reborn so it does make a kind of sense that neolithic people would have had some of the same preoccupations and might have enacted them out somewhere below me but that may just be fanciful and in fact these mines were simply industrial we'll never know will we but what we can be sure of is that making them required an awful lot of people and a lot of skill and surely four and a half thousand years ago every morning there would have been loads of blokes with deer picks on their back coming in this direction down the ic neil's way for a day's work at the pit i'm pushing on now back on the ikneeled way believed to be one of the oldest roads in britain well i'm not at the moment i'm at thetford railway station and that's because there was a time when this ancient track was all but lost inevitably giving way over millennia to britain's changing landscape but a century ago one of england's great war poets set out to rescue this forgotten prehistoric highway my journey meets his here where the old track meets the new on platform two [Music] in the year 1911 a brilliant young man called edward thomas arrived here at thetford station by train in order to embark on a journey back in time in his book he says that when he was on the train he met this bloke really fat man about 18 stone smoking a pipe and he said to him can you tell me where the ich nil way is and the bloke said well i know where the best plane trees and oak trees are around here and i know who's dead and who's living and i know the price of the land but the igneous way never heard of it and i reckon if you asked most people around here the same question today you get pretty much the same answer [Music] thomas was a poet and journalist who had a mystic sense of the road a compulsive walker he tramped his way over much of the south of england between april and june 1911 thomas doggedly searched for the missing ich kneeled way and its long lost story [Music] at a stroke the finished book caught the public imagination and poetically restored the magic of the ich nield it's iconic opening line reading much has been written of travel far less of the road i'm meeting his biographer matthew hollis at thetford priory why did he decide to walk the eggmaled way work thomas was a full-time critic he considered himself a hack he was as he said to a friend around about that time burning his candle at three ends by which he meant he was working all hours to put money on the table for his family and to keep things going and this was a job so up he came and he started here at thetford and on he went so in those days he wasn't a poet he wasn't a poet at this time this was 1911 when he came to write this book and the first poems he will write will be three years later but what's interesting about the ich nield way book is you can see him thinking about the poetry you can even find lines in the old way that will eventually re-emerge in the poems themselves did he like this area it was nice about that foot he saw it as the gateway to the igniled way some people like to choose between a landscape of hills and valleys and others like a landscape of light and water now if you're from this part of the world in stanglia you choose the latter you're used to the big skies and the colours in the water thomas wasn't from here he lived in hampshire he looked west to wales quite regularly and here was a little bit flat for him i i feel a bit guilty about this walk i have to admit that there's him approaching it with all this uh physicality and commitment and striding off into the distance was i can't find half of it and i go off and stay in a hotel for the night and i just feel a bit shambolic compared with him how long did it take him well there is a secret because thomas was capable of walking 10 15 20 miles a day he was incredibly athletic man he composed in his head when he was walking but when he wrote this book he cheated and he came here on two trips only one during the summer of 1911 and once during the autumn and even then he rode a bike and he finished the book in the british museum the british library as it was then why does that make me feel really good tragically edward thomas left behind the chalky ridges of the ikneeled way for the fields of france and the first world war he was killed aged 39 on easter monday 1917 the first day of the battle of arras [Music] for him a pathway like this one wasn't just a means of getting from a to b it was almost a meditation the rhythms that we set up walking along it would help us think and feel and create and get into ourselves and he loved the way that we would interact with nature along our path and the way that we invested it with life we say the path goes up the hill the path goes back down again no it doesn't it stays still it's us who do the walking but nevertheless we feel as though it's alive and i suppose that most people who walk a lot feel something similar but thomas's brilliance was that he wrote about it in such a fluent way [Music] i think he got the measure of the kneeled way quite early on i could not find a beginning or an ending to the ickneeled way he wrote it is thus a symbol of mortal things with their beginnings and ends in immortal darkness [Music] i've now left the heathland of norfolk and cross into cambridgeshire and i'm suddenly confronted by something that cuts dramatically across the ich neal way a place also described by edward thomas the devil's dyke the massive bank and ditch stretch in a near straight line for over seven miles and in a flat landscape reaches an imposing 30 feet in height [Music] there's a local story that the devil gate crashed a wedding a little town called reach a few miles in that direction and he was kicked out by the guests and he was so angry that on his way back to hell he carved this enormous gash out of the landscape with his tail must have been a pretty big devil wasn't [Music] it yet again the old devil gets the blame in reality of course the devil's dyke was man-made built by the saxons in the late 6th or early 7th century a.d this was a time of war between the ancient kingdom of mercia to the west and the kingdom of east anglia to the east and this huge rampart formed a crucial border for controlling trade and the movement of people between the two today it's a protected wildlife habitat where one resilient local tradition remains as a link to the past [Music] hey martin i like that let's have a look at these sheep yep see if they'll come through [Music] [Music] the most important function of this dike was the control of trade the dike itself runs at right angles to the mcneil way and local roman roads which were central for traffic going in and out of east anglia and one of the most significant commodities in anglo-saxon times to be traded [Applause] was it recording for six days in anglo-saxon society the great land owners counted their wealth in sheep and tracks like the ackneeled way provided the route to market by the wool boom of the middle ages there was an enormous demand for wool clothing in europe if you owned land you raised sheep with top prices paid by the weavers of flanders in belgium english wool was the crude oil of its day [Music] some parts of the ich nealed way are lost to the encroachment of agriculture and urban sprawl a landscape unrecognizable to bygone travelers a nearby parallel path brings me through hayley wood one of the last surviving ancient woodlands in britain [Music] it gives me a chance to experience the habitat that would have covered most of southern england at a time when the ich nield way was a thriving highway and it was a long tracks like this that trade would have traveled that news would have traveled and indeed that music and song would have traveled too i was walking out for to take the ass she met a sailor all on her way so i paid attention [Music] so i paid attention to hear what she did say tony this is not some mad solitary lunatic in the middle of the forest we did actually know we were meeting up here didn't we what was that song that's the dark eye sailor it's an old english folk song um common in these parts and others too that's a local version from uh from the mcniel way so um but it's a song that would be found all over england and and britain these songs genuinely traveled all all over the place to america to ireland scotland backwards and forwards um wherever people went they would take their songs with them um and sing them as they went the igneal way is pretty special isn't it very much so yeah and and to think that that passage of people carrying the old knowledge you know over generations and generations is a magic idea it's hard to resist this romantic idea of wandering minstrels in medieval england [Music] for travellers along the ikneeled way ballads and stories might have fired the imagination but they wouldn't have filled their bellies they only needed to look around them for that [Music] well we've got a veritable ladder here of stuff i mean beautifully growing here very common plants uh if you're looking for something pig-like this is the have a sniffer there poor it that does smell like a pig starch yeah this is my bacon sandwich isn't it indeed what is it it's the hogweed and a very common roadside plant the young younger shoots uh steam up beautifully to be a kind of asparagus alternative oh so you don't eat the stinky part no no that won't be very good for you but um uh got copious amounts of goose grass or sticky willy as it's called oh charming oh yeah yeah it's just disgustingly sticky isn't it yeah have a chew on that really yeah great for the immune system and um it's bitter but it's actually immensely nutritious actually this is quite it's like like a a bitter crunchy vegetable isn't it not grassy at all no this is the igneous way service station isn't it exactly or you're you're chemist but i didn't want to show you one other curious specimen the woody nightshade and these berries here as delicious as they look are deadly poisonous and there is also a brilliant folk song that connects to this plant here will you sing me off to it well i go on my way then we'd love to it's uh it's lord randall oh mother dare let my bed be made for i feel the gripe of the woody nightshade lie low sweet randall come all young men that you eat full well and those that's upright and merry it's far better i entreat to have toads for your meat to eat all the wild wild berry [Music] here in the town of royston in hertfordshire the igniled way crosses the roman road of ermine street also known as the great north road where the roman legions march north from london royston grew at the crossing of these two ancient thoroughfares on the surface this may look like any other charming town centre but under this pavement beneath me is something strange in 1742 workmen accidentally discovered a man-made cave with some unique mysterious christian carvings [Music] this place is so brilliant it's only about 50 miles from london i'd never even heard of it look you've got all these carvings see that tunnel that's the way people would originally come in on a rope and then if you look above that right up to the ceiling you see where the daylight's coming in that's the grill i was looking through when i was outside that betting shop the carvings themselves though this one that's pretty clear isn't it that's some christopher with a little baby jesus on his shoulder and he's walking along with his staff there and then they reckon this is the holy sepulchre where jesus was buried and i love this bit above it this here is the hand of god with those incredible fingers there and that thing that looks like a fish is actually the holy ghost which is just going to go hurtling out into the world and that's a crucifixion here's some katherine famous for the wheel of course there's the wheel on which she was tortured more figures down here very strange mystical figures and over here this is probably my favorite on this one here this is 13 of these figures they reckon these were the disciples and jesus at the last supper and you see this little sliver here well judas was such a bad lad but he has to be there because it's recorded that he was at the last supper but he's far too iniquitous to have his whole face shown now isn't this just about the best cave you've ever seen these strange religious carvings aren't displayed proudly like you might expect in some churches great lengths were gone too to keep this shrine hidden and the origin and function of the cave remain a mystery to this day we know it was used in the middle ages but by who was it a hermit retreat or a spiritual den for the night's templar it turns out though that this wasn't just a secret site for christian worship the cave holds an allure for pagans too royston is believed to be the meeting place between two important lay lines these ley lines are said to be straight energy lines connecting ancient mystical sites and it's believed this cave marks the exact spot where the two lines cross there are even some people who say they can detect these lines of energy i'm meeting derrick woodhead a practitioner of the ancient art of dowsing derek come in and let's have a stare around this fantastic place which is fairly wonderful now i know that uh it's really fascinating because of all the carvings but for you there's something about it that's additionally fascinating isn't it yes this is a an amazing place for dowsers because it's the crossing of the michael and murray lions this is also where the roman road crosses the way yeah but they're not the same thing um not necessarily no there is some sort of correlation between ancient trackways and um and ley lines can you show me how you'd identify these lines right well using dowsing rods um you can use pendulums as well i use a dowsing rod here which is a metal one on a spindle originally they were fork twigs they used to use but these days you can use the metal or plastic rods or timber timber ones um so what this does here is i'm asking sort of through from my subconscious to in a sort of semi-meditative state so are you in a semi-meditative state now yeah so try yes yes it's not my conscious mind that's doing that something's going through my nervous system and in my subconscious so i'm looking for the center of it so it's like a beam of imaginary white light i'm sort of visualizing them so i'm going to ask ask it where the center of the mary line is that's running through this cave and it's immediately pointing over this way and i'm asking for the rod to deflect when i go through the center of the the saint mary line and if i do it from another direction [Music] it's it's there so it's showing that is that where the two meters the merry line uh is flying through this way then i ask for the michael line and uh show me where the the where the michael lane is i know it's over that way so this closest point is over there somewhere um so i'm looking for the center of the michael line it's here so we've got two very powerful energy flows meeting about here so this would be a great place to sort of do meditation or prayer or connection with the divine or whatever this is a very powerful spot the idea of ley lines dates back to 1921 when amateur antiquarian alfred watkins saw how ancient landmarks in the countryside could be connected along a straight line watkins called them ley lines on lays and believed they revealed the prehistoric tracks of britain above ground and back on the ich niled way i'm up on the heath overlooking royston it's easy to see why he thought they were the outdoor footprints of a long past people watkins approach was pretty do it yourself you can imagine him on a sunday surrounded by his acolytes looking for ley lines and they'd come somewhere like the ick neil's way and they'd see something of significance on that horizon and they'd see something else a barrow or something over there and they get out their rac map and their rulers and their dividers and compasses and draw a straight line between them wow we've got another ley line it's a real pre-second world war picture isn't it [Music] watkins attracted acclaim and controversy in equal measure he used strange reenactments to explain his theory about some of these sites one of which was filmed at woodcraft folk camp near the river y in 1933 watkins ordered a wicker cage built on top of the queen's stone to illustrate his theory that the stone was a sacrificial altar the cage contained two victims wearing loincloths as a result of the success of his book people set out all over the country to discover their own paths i'm meeting the grandson of one of watkins disciples who just happens to be a druid i thought hello there so your granddad was pretty involved with watkins wasn't there yes he he started uh the straight track club with with watkins and ran in for nine years while watkins was still alive what was the straight track club well it was a club for people who were fascinated by this idea of the old straight tracks the alignments and they would go out on field trips together and they would plot lays on maps and then go out and actually walk them i love the idea of them all dressed up in their respectable clothes going around the walkways yes here you see pictures of their outings with sir charles de bell and watkins himself walking towards the camera what was his theory well his idea was that mounds church spires single standing trees on hilltops niches and ridges and so on were all aligned uh in a certain way it was used it was the idea was that in pre-history our ancestors used these particular markers as mark ways to help them navigate it was a sort of ancient gps system really they were particularly interested in the icmill way weren't they they were in fact in this book towards the end there's a cutting that my granddad put in from 1938 from the letters page of the times talking about the ickneeled way and about how it's not originally a roman road but was much older was an old track why do you think watkins ideas were so attractive i think his theories were so popular because his book was published in the 20s after the first world war we'd suffered the ravages of of that war so we yearned for the countryside whether it's creepy christian caves or lines of invisible energy the igniled way seems completely entangled in myth and legend stories created by generation after generation to explain the forgotten history along its path i'm now moving south along the highest part of the ich nield in bedfordshire to where the landscape gives way to the suburbs of greater london i'm on the lookout for a haunted hill steeped in dark tales of the supernatural [Music] over there is galley hill and it's surrounded by stories of hangings and executions and witches most of those stories have been virtually forgotten but there's one that still remains this is the story of the big black dog of gally hill a gallows was erected here and remained until the 18th century and visions of a hellhound have been reported ever since stories of the black dog can be found throughout british folklore often at places of execution and on ancient pathways like this one once upon a time hundreds of years ago a storm arose over this hill the fiercest storm in living memory and all the people of the pretty little market town of luton went indoors thunder and lightning crashed down and the fork of lightning came out of the clouds and it hit the gallows on galley hill which erupted into flames and out of the inferno an enormous black dog it sniffed around for a bit and then burrowed into the ashes and disappeared and ever after that if ever a traveler came by who had evil in his heart the dog would appear again tear open his chest look out his soul and take his soul with him down to the bowels of hell at least that's what i've been told carl thank you for coming to such a scary place to meet me today was there really a gallows on galley hill well i think there's every reason to think that there was the name is powerfully suggestive and it's also just the right kind of place to put a gallows up in what way well it's on high ground it's near a significant center of population and it's also amidst a number of different important route ways so this is a very good place to make a spectacle of punishment and to deter male factors and it's actually on the ich niled way isn't it so one could imagine that the images of all these people dangling and the stories to go with them would have traveled up and down the path yes absolutely so like in a present day horror movie you've actually put all the the evil dead in one place overlooking your town yes and i think that might be quite an interesting fact about the site because some of those late burials the people who we think might well have been the victims of the gallows were interred at this site not in a conventional way but rather head first inclined into the earth so you insert them in that way burying them head first perhaps if they dig themselves out they really dig themselves in yeah and that is is redolent of the kinds of beliefs that one sometimes finds um associated with these sites that they are populated by by ghosts by revenants by the returning dead i suppose that's where my story of the black dog fits in doesn't it this idea that he's dragging them all down into the bowels of hell very often the folkloric black dogs that they can be benign they can function as omens or portents but in very many cases the black dogs have more than a a whiff of the of the demonic or the infernal about them and that seems to be the character of the dog that was putatively seen on gally hill it's being portrayed as a as a hunter of souls a bearer of souls off to the other world and that sort of fits with a story about gally hill um as a place populated by lost souls lost souls have been a recurring theme for me walking along the ikneeled way following in the footsteps of all those long gone that have trod this track before me the ghosts of the past return as you encounter their clues along the path the ignealed way itself becomes a sort of ghost line i'm almost at the end of my journey now following the igniled way as it snakes along the eastward spurs of the chilton hills that's funny i always think of our ancient pathways as buried in the depths of the countryside in wiltshire or the lake district or the highlands or somewhere but here there's hitchin bedford dunstable places that i think of as extensions of the outer suburbs of london and yet it's so beautiful sorry hitchin [Music] the ignilled way brings me finally to whip snaid tree cathedral the end of my journey so much of the track has been forgotten but this part of it is about remembering a natural memorial to the lost generation of the first world war [Music] a symbol of how britain after the horrors of the western front attempted to return to nature and the old ways created as a sanctuary for reflection whipsnade is a place where every year people return to remember the fallen under a leafy canopy a place i think edward thomas had he lived would have loved it's not hard to see how this beautiful avenue of trees was inspired by the great knaves of the english cathedrals is it they were actually put up by a local landowner a guy called edmund blythe after the first world war in memory of the lads who'd died in france and you can imagine the survivors coming home bruised battered their worlds turned upside down maybe they'd lost their faith in god and these trees and bushes giving them some solace and a bit of calm to their shattered souls edward thomas of course captures that spirit marvelously in a poem he wrote called rhodes which starts off just as a celebration of the concept of roads i love roads the goddesses that dwell far along invisible are my favorite gods roads go on while we forget and are forgotten like a star that shoots and is gone but then towards the end of the poem he really twists the knife now all roads lead to france and heavy is the tread of the living but the dead returning lightly dance edward thomas's message was for each of us to find our own road and this has been mine my ich kneeled way i've picked up the path near the wash at hanstanton and have been guided along its route by prehistoric miners war poets ley lines and black dogs in some ways it's been both an emotional and an inspiring journey but in the end it's been a journey to feed the imagination the igniled way isn't one of those heritage paths where you get a little green arrow at every junction to tell you whether to turn left or right it's a confusing footpath it turns back on itself it splits into two sometimes or even three or you lose it completely and find it again another mile further on but the reality is that a track like this isn't so much about the destination it's about the journey and i've had a fabulous time even if like the great poet edward thomas i occasionally had to cheat a bit

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 60,599

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, absolute history, ancient tracks, british roads, britain's oldest road, tony robinson documentary, tony robinson history of britain, full length documentaries, history documentary bbc

Id: iccxf-Oy3kY

Length: 45min 58sec (2758 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020