Roads and Tracks of the Lake District

Traces the history of Lakeland's roads and tracks from the ancient times up to the present. Looks at Roman roads, medieval and monastic routes, drove and sands routes, trade routes, turnpikes, enclosure roads and more recent developments to Lakeland’s lanes.

The Lake District is arguably the most written-about part of the British Isles, and one might have thought that, by now, there was little more to be said about it. There is a plethora of books covering virtually every aspect of the history and topography of the region, dealing with specific topics (ranging from abbeys to mines) as well as with specific local areas. And yet, very little has been written about Lakeland’s roads and tracks, apart from descriptions in walkers’ guidebooks. Moreover, one has only to glance through the indexes of any of the standard ‘Lake District’ texts to see how roads are neglected. Roads are taken for granted not only in these local studies but also in virtually every historical study of Britain; various authors have written much about travellers, and about the growth of trade, but have hardly given a thought to how people travelled from one place to the next. Few have asked why certain lines of travel have been preferred at various times, while once busy thoroughfares have virtually disappeared. The number of studies that has been produced of roads in specific areas of Britain is still very small. The study of the growth of our road system is fundamental to the understanding of all the other socio-economic features of the landscape. Roads are vital, and their history is inextricably tied in with the growth (or decline) of population, towns, industry, agriculture, and trade. Thus roads cannot be considered in isolation; their development has to be related to the rest of the landscape, otherwise their study would be nothing more than a drab list of construction dates and descriptions of the routes involved. The social, economic and political influences on people and the landscape determine how many roads there are, and how important those roads are in relation to each other, but it is the physical landscape which determines the precise routes which they take.

The approach adopted here is a chronological one - starting with Roman roads and working through to the present day. It is, however, difficult to maintain a strict chronological approach throughout, for the evidence for different types of roads becomes much greater after the Middle Ages, and it is better to look at drove roads in a single section rather than spreading out the references to them (which are dated between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries) over several chapters. There are very few roads which can be described simply as, say, medieval, for most of those in use at that time were created long before, and are still in use today. This highlights one of the problems about studying roads, namely that they rarely tend to be of just one period; a road may have been built by the Romans and used ever since. Another pitfall in studying roads is to look at a succession of individual routes as if they were isolated from all the other roads round about; roads must be studied as a system or network, and one which changes in time. Only for the Roman and turnpike roads is it possible and useful to look at individual routes simply because they were planned and made individually.

The geographical area covered by this book is rather wider than its title might suggest, for it would be rather pointless just to look at the roads inside the Lake District in isolation from the surrounding area. If we take the rather arbitrary boundary of the National Park as delimiting Lakeland, then this would exclude many important Roman roads, while the Shap road runs along its border for many miles; Kendal, which was such an important centre for trade and travel in the eighteenth century, would be omitted, as would any consideration of travel in Low Furness and the route across the sands. Accordingly, the book considers virtually all of the new county of Cumbria, but stops at the Solway and Roman Wall in the north, and at the Pennine ridge in the north-east. The book concentrates on the roads of the Lake District, but does not ignore those of the surrounding area.

Although numerous maps are provided to illustrate the text, it is only through looking at large scale Ordnance Survey maps that the full picture can be obtained, whether you are in the comfort of your armchair, or out in the field. The one-inch tourist map of the Lake District, plus the 1:50,000 maps of the surrounding area are basic requirements, while for detailed study, 1:25,000 or 1:10,000 maps will be required. Grid references are given throughout the book to places not immediately obvious, and the OS maps are necessary to locate them. The prefix letters have been omitted, but they are needed if you buy a larger scale map. Distances are given in km (miles), heights in metres (feet), whilst smaller measurements are in metric units only. Heights on the maps are in feet.

This book has two aims - first to tell the story of a particular aspect of Lakeland’s history and landscape, and second to encourage more local research. Research is not an elitist occupation undertaken by pedagogues in ivory towers - anyone who has an interest in roads, local knowledge of an area, and above all imagination, can help to expand the sum of human knowledge. A car and a pair of hiking boots are also a great help! The present author’s interest grew from the combination of a love of fell-walking and an academic interest in old maps and medieval England. It will soon become obvious that there are large gaps in our knowledge of Lakeland roads, which can only be remedied by local research, perhaps dealing with only one or two parishes. Such work will start to give a much more detailed picture of the development of the road system. References are given throughout the book, both to aid the general reader who wants to know more on a certain topic, and to give some idea of the wide range of source materials to those who may wish to do some detailed local research. In addition, the local record offices and local history libraries at Carlisle, Whitehaven, Kendal, Barrow and Preston are repositories of vast amounts of unworked material. At the very least the archivists will be glad to see someone who has not come in to trace their family roots!

After the initial research in the library and archives comes the rather more energetic part of research - getting out into the countryside to follow old routes, whether on foot or by car, in order to see for example why the Romans or the turnpike surveyors chose a particular route, why a packhorse route or drove road went a particular way, or why another route has shifted its course over the years. What may be unclear from the map or the historical record may be stunningly clear on the ground.

There is little or no evidence for any roads in Cumbria before the Romans arrived; there were only a few people living in the area then, and any tracks which they created have not survived, or have not had any apparent effect on later roads. Prehistoric people certainly inhabited parts of Cumbria, but virtually all they left behind are groups of cairns and stone circles. The only slight clue to a prehistoric route is connected with the ‘axe-factories’ known to have existed in and around Langdale - the rough axes were probably taken to the coast for polishing, and then on by sea to the rest of Britain. It would be fatuous to draw a line on a map and call it an ‘axe route’, though no doubt someone will eventually do just that. Devotees of Alfred Watkins and his ‘ley lines’ will be disappointed to find no consideration of his theories here, for any objective study of his curious ideas reveals only random alignments and associations, and his notions of a race of stone-age road builders are best forgotten. Instead, we must turn straightaway to consider the achievements of the first Lakeland road builders - the Romans.