Burrowed out in ancient times by the slithering of a giant worm

February 16, 2024 4:46 AM

Many an ancient road is a sunken road. They are formed by the passage of people, animals, and vehicles over time. Things of beauty, they are found hither and yon, including in Middle Earth. They should be considered as critical sites of the Anthropocene, signature human impacts on the land that are important, perhaps vital, and still not wholly understood. Also known as holloways, they have inspired literary and artistic reflection, conjuring images of fantastic landscapes. Note that, per Wikipedia, a holloway is not the same thing as a tree tunnel, an excavated road, or a gully.
posted by cupcakeninja (13 comments total)

Robert MacFarlane's book (linked in the FPP) is so good. I love his work.
posted by Kitteh at 5:06 AM on February 16 [5 favorites]

Once in Germany my squad needed shelter for the night as it was getting quite cold and dark. We found this giant hole in the ground and piled in to use it as a windbreak overnight. In the morning we realized it was the foundation of some ancient (?) house. There was basically a "street" of these holes in the middle of a dense forest. It was both creepy and beautiful.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 7:26 AM on February 16 [13 favorites]

Thank you for this serene and tranquil post. :)
posted by Verg at 7:30 AM on February 16 [7 favorites]

These are amazing. One of my favorite activities is following animal trails through the woods to get to inaccessible parts of the park. I can imagine finding and following holloways like these. One of my dreams is to do a hiking tour of the British Isles.
posted by slogger at 8:51 AM on February 16 [3 favorites]

There's a great pub called The Royal Standard of England in a village called Forty Green to the northwest of London. It's been there for 800 years, and a drover's road goes past the front of the pub, which is why the pub - now in a rather out of the way place - was once exactly where it needed to be.

I'm currently reading a fascinating book called "The Drover's Roads of Wales" that talks about these ancient highways (even though many of them weren't sunken). If you can get your hands on a copy, the details of how they got geese to market is wonderful ;-)
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 9:02 AM on February 16 [9 favorites]

You can't leave that one hanging, 43rdAnd9th! Eager fans of Untitled Goose Game are waiting to hear them...

Great post, cupcakeninja.
posted by rory at 9:35 AM on February 16 [3 favorites]

PSA: the walls get thin in these places. Beware the man with thistle down hair or other signs of the Daoine Sidhe!

And if you do slip over, remember: Don’t eat anything!
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 10:50 AM on February 16 [13 favorites]

these are incredibly beautiful. now I want to plan my retirement around traveling to and walking along as many of these as possible. and if I am drawn into a strange mist, or greeted by red and white hounds, I don't think I will resist embarking on that adventure. (I might even eat a piece of fruit!)
posted by supermedusa at 10:59 AM on February 16 [3 favorites]

So... geese to market. Because they have delicate feet and aren't used to walking very far, they'd mix tar with sand and then drive the geese through it, giving them little tarry boots.

And the corgis that were used to help drive the cattle from North Wales would often arrive home two days before the men, because they knew their way home from London
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 11:16 AM on February 16 [17 favorites]

There are a few sections of the Camino Frances to Santiago which have a holloway vibe and you feel that The Way has been scuffled down into the earth by thousands of pilgrim feet. otoh the Camino was the most direct path from the Pyrenees to The City of God, so much of route has been covered in tarmac with 18-wheelers.

Essential recent reading on Thin Places [above] is Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochairtaigh [Canongate], which tracks her flight from Derry in the troubles. Her restless, disfigured soul sought solace in Thin Places - where the spirit world was separated from quotidian 'reality' by the shell-thickness of a robin's egg. She had been introduced to such places in Donegal by her beloved slightly off-kilter grandfather who was both seanathar and Seanchaí. Wherever she washed up for college or work, Kerri made time to roam, not always alone, in wild places where curlews uttered their plaintive cry and waves smashed against the cliff-base.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:17 PM on February 17 [3 favorites]

Mod note: [btw, this has been added to the sidebar and Best Of blog!]
posted by taz (staff) at 12:04 PM on February 18 [2 favorites]

I bookmarked this week before last and I've only just read it - I wish I'd read it earlier: it prompted a memory. A while back I was in Bridport, Dorset, having a little holiday on my own. Bridport is small but it has (or had - don't know) a well regarded art/media centre within walking distance of the sea, and I was trying to refresh the old creative juices. Now I've always found Dorset a bit odd, as if neither time nor space work as expected, like as soon as you cross the county boundary you're in some kind of wormhole, distances also take you by surprise and you're in a unique rolling landscape of funky little round-topped hills. Chalk hills. Dorset has it's own mystical painterly interpreter, David Inshaw, and he is accurate about the place. Though googling for paintings to demonstrate this I did find out that that 'Dorset' and 'mystical' are just about synonymous when talking about landscape painters.

All that is neither here nor there: but at the media centre I met a man who was editing a short film that featured the holloways. Dorset's patron saint is St Wyte. Rendered into Latin in more formal contexts, she becomes St Candida which I always find a bit shocking but then again it's a good mnemonic to link the name of an embarrassing complaint to a word you want to remember. The swapping between English and Latin in the names is peculiar and repetitive: "there is a shrine to St Wyte in Whitchurch Canonicorum’s Church of St Candida and Holy Cross." It was a place of pilgrimage containing relics of the saint.

In the short minutes of film to be edited, two humble-looking women in plain 16th C clothing and bare feet walk along the holloway through green dappled shadow. It was low-key and somehow touching. The filmmaker talked about finding out about the holloways, that was his interest I think, the network of them and also how longstanding the pilgrimage route was. The third link in the post (Middle Earth/Messy Nessy) mentions a Bridport holloway.

I didn't find any hollow roads but I did get to the church, can't remember how, it was before everyone had a smartphone. Walking distance, though everywhere felt very remote, but also walkable. There was a headstone to Robin Day the broadcaster just by the side of the church in the graveyard. It was strange to encounter a flash of our connected, electronic, urgently progressive 'Now', or rather, 'Then', during an interlude that had felt so timeless. Like, even the internet was down in the media centre most of the time I was there. It was that windy. Or maybe it was the wormhole.

This is the shrine of St Wyte in the church, the article says "Into one of the shrine’s three oval openings, pilgrims place their diseased or injured arms or feet (or a possession of somebody too ill to make the pilgrimage) as close to the saint’s relics as possible." IIRC the holes are quite big enough for a person to get into and curl up in.
posted by glasseyes at 7:15 PM on February 24 [1 favorite]

the walls get thin in these places. Beware...
In Bridport a fox came and sat by me near me by the edge of a wood los pantalones del muerte, does that count? I was eating a sandwich, woops
posted by glasseyes at 7:23 PM on February 24 [1 favorite]