The Landscape’s Lines of Desire

On Green Lanes and Holloways

Of all the various roads and paths that snake their way through the countryside – A roads, B roads, byways and bridleways – it’s interesting to note that some ways are invested with more romance than the rest. By some ways, I mean green lanes and holloways.

While green lane is a catch-all for many different kinds of unsurfaced rural road or path – such as an old drove, a coffin road or a ridgeway – a holloway is a more specific term. It describes a sunken green lane, a track which was been worn down by the passage of thousands of feet, cartwheels and hooves over hundreds of years, even millennia. A holloway can form on the level or on an incline wherever the soil conditions allow it, but on a slope, the loosened soil is subsequently washed away by the next downpour. This is why the course of a holloway often becomes more pronounced on the side of a hill – the extra energy imparted by surface water run-off will carve a deeper furrow.

Holloways are common in lowland Britain with the greensands of the southern counties – Wiltshire, the Weald and the Chilterns – being particularly suited for their formation. Holloways form, too, on the old red sandstones of the Wye and Usk valleys in Wales and the Welsh Marches, while the new red sandstones of south and east Devon are also good examples, with many deep lanes abraded into their slopes.

Over time, as they are inscribed ever more deeply and the level of the lane lowers, they become more sheltered and trees arch over, creating a womb-like tunnel, an enclosed place of natural safety. So safe, indeed, that it’s only close to midwinter that the walls of foliage have died back enough to allow entry into some old holloways, long-since-abandoned by changing patterns of passage over the land, bypassed in favour of a better route.

Where holloways have fallen into disuse for even longer periods, they can be discovered anew – many centuries after they were last followed – by tell-tale shallow linear grooves through fields or woodland, though they can be easily mistaken as a short stretch of long-forgotten park pale or a defensive ditch, both of which will be accompanied by a bank above the natural ground level.

Holloways have their own atmosphere, an unexpected quality which cannot be explained away purely in terms of the local topography or geology. As ancient routes, they are the perfect expressions of collective will, tracks which share a common origin not only with other primeval routes but also with desire lines – those unpaved paths across city parks or shortcuts over open ground that urban planners never anticipated. As travelling long distances was more difficult in the past, the reasons were more keenly felt; every footstep has meaning on a pilgrimage and the burdens shouldered on a well-used coffin road were more than the purely physical.

Beloved of psychogeographers and academically credentialed travel writers slumming it in the English countryside, the holloway, worn down by aeons of laboured travellers and cattle led to market has had a spiritual make over for the last half-century or so. Their ethereal darkness in high summer gives way to a rib cage of gnarly trunks and twisted winter branches, deformed into squirms that seem to struggle and contort themselves into futile bids for freedom, unsuccessful trajectories of escape, stymied by the shallow, but profound roots of tradition.

It is perhaps the perfect allegory for the twentieth century’s obsession with escape from irrationality and ritual. But we should pay attention to that feeling, the intuition that the travellers on these tracks left something of themselves behind.