The Wansdyke & District Forums

I will tell you a thing the young ones wont believe. When I was a boy you could still walk the droves the whole way and never touch a metalled road, off the down and down to the fairs, and the dust of it hung in the lanes an hour after the flock had gone by. There were drove roads wide as three of todays carriageways, grassed over now or ploughed clean out, and the old men knew them by names that arent on any map. The Ox Drove. The Lydeway. Names like that. I had them off my grandfather and I have nobody to give them to now, which is partly why I sit here typing at a machine I dont trust.

Give them to us George. That is what this whole place is for. My gran knew the Lydeway, she called going to market going up the Lyde, I never knew it was a real road until just now. Write them down here where they cant be lost. I mean it.

George I could kiss you. The minor drove names are exactly what falls through the cracks, the OS never caught half of them and the people who carry them are, forgive me, your generation. If you would set them down, even roughly, where they ran and what they were called, I will see they go in the society record properly, attributed to you. This is not nothing. This is the real thing.

Well. I had not expected to matter to anybody at my time of life. I shall do it then, a few at a time, when the knees let me sit. Nan you can check me on the Cannings end, your people will have had their own names for the same tracks. Funny to think of it, two old fools three mile apart all our lives and never met but for this contraption.