thumb|300px|Icknield Way near [[Lewknor in Oxfordshire]]

thumb|300px|The same view of the Icknield Way near Lewknor from 2005 before the byway was restricted to exclude motor vehicles

The Icknield Way is an ancient trackway in southern and eastern England that runs from Norfolk to Wiltshire. It follows the chalk escarpment that includes the Berkshire Downs and Chiltern Hills.

Background

It is generally said to be, within Great Britain, one of the oldest roads the route of which can still be traced, being one of the few long-distance trackways to have existed before the Romans occupied the country. However, this has been disputed, and the evidence for its being a prehistoric route has been questioned.

The "Four Highways" of medieval England

The Icknield Way was one of four highways that appear in the literature of the 1130s. Henry of Huntingdon wrote that the Ermine Street, Fosse Way, Watling Street and Icknield Way had been constructed by royal authority. The Leges Edwardi Confessoris gave royal protection to travellers on these roads, and the Icknield Way was said to extend across the width of the kingdom. Geoffrey of Monmouth elaborated the story by saying that Belinus had improved the four roads so that it was clear that they were the protected highways.

Many modern roads follow the Icknield Way, such as the B489 from Aston Clinton to Dunstable and the A505 from Baldock to Royston. In some places, especially from the east of Luton in Bedfordshire to Ickleford (so named from the Way crossing a stream) near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, the route is followed by minor roads, and is not distinguishable at all in many places, except by landscape features such as barrows and mounds which line the route, and indentation presumably from ancient and frequent use. It could be described as a belt studded with archaeological sites found at irregular intervals.

The Icknield Way used to form part of the boundary between Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire, and at one time Royston was cut in two by this boundary. Royston is where the Icknield Way crosses Ermine Street.

In the south-west some writers take the Way to Exeter, while others only take it as far as Salisbury. To the north-east, Icklingham, Suffolk, and Caistor-by-Norwich, Yarmouth and Hunstanton, Norfolk, have all been proposed as the destination.

The combination of the Wessex Ridgeway, Ridgeway, Icknield Way and Peddars Way, together with the Cranborne Droves Way and Sarsen Way, is promoted as a family of routes called the Great Chalk Way. The author Ray Quinlan calls a similar route the Greater Ridgeway, with a length of approximately from Lyme Regis to Hunstanton. One of the best known literary travellers of the Icknield Way is the poet Edward Thomas, who walked the path in 1911 and published his account in 1913. Thomas was interested in ancient roads and inspired by Hilaire Belloc's Old Road and other travel memoirs published by Constable written by R. Hippisley Cox, Harold J. E. Peake and others. Although the book takes the form of a single 10-day journey, Thomas wrote the book in stages over the course of a year. He was often joined by his brother Julian, both rising at 5 am or 6 am to walk a day. Although more interested in poetic description, his publisher directed him to give more concrete details of his route, thus the book is closer to being a guidebook than Thomas' earlier, more poetic, travel books. Inspired by Thomas's journey, contemporary British nature writer Robert MacFarlane begins his book of walking ancient paths, The Old Ways, by walking the Icknield Way, "hoping to summon him [Thomas] by walking where he had walked". George R. R. Martin used the "Four Highways" as the model for the Kingsway in his A Song of Ice and Fire novels. The first episode of the 2016–17 documentary series Britain's Ancient Tracks with Tony Robinson was about the Icknield Way and included drone views of the trail.

See also

  • Roman Britain
  • Roman roads in Britain
  • Neolithic Age

References

</references>

  • Icknield Way Association