Walking Ancient Paths Through British Woodland

The Paths Beneath the Trees

Some footpaths are simply the shortest line between two gates. Others are far older than the wood that now covers them. The track underfoot may be a fragment of a drovers' route, a medieval timber-hauling way, or a parish boundary path trodden for a thousand years. The trees came later, or were replanted, but the line stayed — because a path used for centuries is usually the easiest way across the land, following the contour, the spring line, the dry ridge.

Look for it properly and the wood stops being a green blur. It becomes a document.

Sunken Lanes and Holloways

The most obvious clue is the path's own shape. Where a route has been walked, ridden and driven for centuries, the surface wears down while the sides stay put; rain washes the loosened soil into the middle and away downhill, and the track sinks further. The result is a holloway — a lane cut two or three metres below the surrounding fields, with banks either side and tree roots exposed like ribs along the walls.

A few things to watch for:

• Steep, high banks running along both sides of the path, often with ancient hedgerow species such as field maple, dogwood and spindle.
• Exposed root plates where centuries of feet have stripped the soil away from beech, oak and ash.
• A change in level where the lane meets a field — the modern gateway often sits metres above the old road.
• Damp, dark bottoms even in summer: holloways act as drains and rarely dry out fully.

Avoid these after heavy rain if you can. Clay and leaf mould make the sides treacherous, and the erosion you cause is very slow to heal.

Trees That Tell a Story

Woodland trees carry the marks of human use, and the clearest is coppicing: a tree cut near ground level on a rotation, so it throws up a cluster of straight poles. Cut hazel every seven to fifteen years and you get thatching spars, hurdle rods and pea sticks. The stump — the stool — thickens with age and can live for many hundreds of years, far longer than an uncut hazel.

You can spot a working coppice wood by its structure: a mosaic of stools at different ages, with stands of tall, mature trees left scattered among them for timber, and often a pollard here and there, a tree cut at head height above the browse line of livestock.

So when you see a hazel with a dozen stems fanning out from a gnarled base, you are looking at a stump harvested since long before the enclosures. Beside it, a straight-trunked oak with no low branches may have grown up in a gap opened by a felling a lifetime ago.

Boundary Stones, Banks and Markers

Woods were valuable — for fuel, timber, pannage for pigs and game — and boundaries were fought over. That is why so many paths through woodland run along a ditch and bank rather than across open ground. A bank with a ditch on one side is often a parish, manorial or woodland boundary of considerable antiquity.

Along such lines you will find stones. Some are plain, half-buried and moss-covered, easy to mistake for a boulder. Others carry a carved letter — a parish initial, a date, an estate name — and occasionally a bench mark cut by surveyors. A few stand where three boundaries meet and are known as three-shire stones. If you find one, leave it sitting where it is.

Practical Woodland Walking

Woodland routes need more care than open field paths, because the trees hide the way ahead. A few habits help.

• Carry a paper map and compass. Signal is patchy under canopy, and in winter the light goes by half past four.
• Know the rights of way. Public footpaths are for walking; bridleways allow horses and bicycles. Close gates behind you, even when no livestock is in sight.
• Wear boots with grip. Leaf litter over wet roots is the commonest cause of a turned ankle.
• Expect mud from October to April and midges on still evenings from May.
• Tell someone your route and return time, especially if walking alone.

Keep dogs under close control near ground-nesting birds between March and July, and on a lead around livestock and deer.

Reading the Wood, Season by Season

The evidence changes with the year. In late winter and early spring, before the leaves come, you can see the shape of the land: the line of the old lane, the ridge and furrow of previous cultivation, and the humps of old charcoal hearths — flat, dark circular platforms a few metres across, usually on a slope near a stream.

In spring, ancient woodland announces itself with wood anemone, bluebell, wild garlic and dog's mercury. These plants spread very slowly, so a large, dense colony suggests the wood has been continuously wooded for centuries, far longer than any map shows.

Summer brings the canopy and the butterflies; autumn the fungi, and the nuts and mast that tell you what animals are about. Look at nibbled hazel shells: a neat round hole means a wood mouse, a shredded shell means a squirrel.

Walk quietly, give vulnerable ground a wide berth, and let the older things stay as you found them. That is all these paths ask of anyone.