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| Sunken section of White Cross Road at Copse Hill, looking north towards Greendale Business Park. |
With many hedges now cut back and road verges trimmed, this is a good time for noticing the characteristic features of our lanes. Their courses and alignments become clearer, with their seemingly erratic, winding nature and inexplicable right-angle bends.
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| Right-angled bend in Stony Lane |
Lanes are an integral part of the landscape that have evolved through immense social and agricultural changes over many centuries. It is easy to overlook the fact that they are often among the oldest historical man-made features of a locality.
The acclaimed landscape historian and Devonian, WG Hoskins, suggested that the present network of lanes largely emerged between about 1150 and 1350, during the Medieval colonisation of Devon and the reclamation of waste- and heath-land. Across Devon at that period, lanes linked thousands of new farms to each other and to the main highways, and gave access to cultivated areas. They ran between small irregular fields, great hedge-banks, and isolated farmsteads. This picture certainly fits our own local history, and still determines the pattern of our landscape today.
Oliver Rackham, another important countryside historian, relates how users of these lanes were often obliged, over long periods, to avoid obstacles such as fallen trees, or holes in and along the highway, so that these 'diversions' then became the permanent, winding ways.
[Information sourced from W G Hoskins, Devon, and The Making of the English Countryside. See also Francis Pryor, The Making of the British Countryside]
Sunken lanes : "Landmarks that speak of habit,
rather than suddenness."*
Sunken lanes, or holloways, are roads or tracks which are significantly lower than the land on either side. Generally they result from centuries of erosion of unpaved roads on soft underlying soil and rock. Their development depends partly on topography - they form most easily on slopes - and partly on geology. Sunken lanes are usually of very great age - well-developed holloways take at least 3oo years to form, according to Oliver Rackham. Over time, the traffic of humans, animals and vehicles loosens the surface of the track and prevents vegetation from holding it, and rainwater carries away the debris.
The particularly Devonian feature of hedge-banks also add to the sense of depth of sunken lanes. Such banks often date from the same Medieval period of colonisation, but some may be even earlier, alongside ancient trackways. They will be discussed more fully in the next blog post.
Good examples of such stretches of road are Stony Lane and Dog Lane, the part of White Cross Road known as Copse Hill, and Deepway on the road to Woodbury.
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| The field level behind the hedge along White Cross Road at Copse Hill (indicated above) is almost at head-height, with the hedge itself adding to the overall depth of the lane. This hedge is also very thick (see below at a field entrance), which suggests great age.  |
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| Stony Lane is clearly below the level of adjoining fields at the White Cross Road junction, and also has hedge-banks. 
A length of fence above head-height indicates the depth of the lane.
In places the bank is topped with gorse. This is an indicator of
great age, as it was planted for animal feed centuries ago.
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| The entrance to Dog Lane from White Cross Road is also well below the level of the adjoining fields, as shown by the height of the maize crop above the hedge-bank.  |
In his book The Wild Places, contemporary nature writer Robert Macfarlane writes lyrically about such holloways:
"I find holloways humbling, for they are landmarks that speak of habit rather than suddenness. Trodden by innumerable feet, cut by innumerable wheels, they are the records of journeys to market, to worship, to sea. Like creases in the hand, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair, they are the consequence of tradition, of repeated action. Like old trees - the details of whose spiralling and kinked branches indicate the wind history of a region, and whose growth rings record each year's richness or poverty of sun - they archive the past customs of a place. Their age chastens without crushing."
Such 'landmarks of habit', are noticeable everywhere. Field entrances are often very good examples....
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| A field entrance on Dog Lane at the junction with Walkidons Way,
showing the difference in level between the lane and adjoining farmland.
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... as are animal tracks, too!
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