Month: February 2023

Reinventing the wheel?

On By SteveIn Prehistory, Road users1 Comment

The wheel is often cited as a critical invention in the development of our civilisation, and today wheels are so abundant it is difficult to imagine life without them. Yet they arrived in Britain relatively late – Stonehenge was built by a wheel-less society. The earliest wheel found so far, in Flagg Fen in Cambridgeshire, dates from about 1,600 BCE and is a solid wooden disc. The wheel above, from a museum in Avila, Spain, is over 3,000 years newer, and illustrates the complexity of making wheels almost without metal. It consists of five curved wooden sections, reinforced by a rim of five narrower pieces, all held together by ten spokes radiating out from a wooden hub strengthened by iron bands. Clearly the use of spokes makes for a much lighter wheel, reducing the effort for the carthorse.

These iron wheel rims were found in a chariot burial in northern Greece. They are thought to be Thracian, dating from the Roman period, and, remarkably, the skeletons of two horses were found in the tomb, buried in a standing position. The wooden part of the wheel has disappeared, but traces left in the soil show that it had spokes. Similar chariot burials have been found in Britain, notably in East Yorkshire, where a site at Pocklington in 2018 yielded the remains of a high-status burial of a chariot, thought to belong to the Iron Age (roughly contemporary with the Greek tomb), containing a man’s skeleton, along with the bones of two horses.

Wheeled vehicles such as carts, waggons and coaches were historically less common in north Derbyshire, due to the steep, poor roads and use of packhorses. However, for working lowland farms and for market journeys carts were more efficient than packhorses, needing only one horse to carry a ton of goods. With the improvements in road surfacing brought about by turnpike roads in the second half of the eighteenth century, all major Derbyshire towns were connected by regular coach services by the early nineteenth century. The picture above shows a passenger-carrying brake or charabanc outside the Sun Inn at Buxton, perhaps waiting for a tourist party to finish their lunch?

Salt

On By SteveIn Places, Prehistory, Road usersLeave a comment

Saltways in central and northern Derbyshire (Dodd & Dodd, 1980)

Today salt is cheap and easily available, so it’s easy to overlook its vital importance in the past. It was critical for the agricultural economy, since before freezers were available it was used to preserve the meat that had to be stored over the winter, owing to the lack of winter feed. But in addition to preserving meat (and fish) salt was essential for baking bread (a large proportion of the common diet) as well as flavouring many dishes. From the seventeenth century salt was also used in the Midlands to produce salt -glazed pottery, in which salt was added to the kiln to create an attractive finish.

19th century Derbyshire salt-glazed coffeepot

In the past salt was produced by evaporating coastal salt pans, or by mining rock salt. The nearest source to Derbyshire were the Cheshire ‘wiches’: Northwich, Middlewich and Nantwich, and routes, often called saltways, led east from there to towns such as Sheffield and Chesterfield. Using the plentiful ‘salt’ road names such as Saltersford and Salterslane historians such as David Hey have tried to reconstruct the routes the packhorse trains would have taken. Clearly these tracks would have been used for carriage of other goods, but demand for salt, especially in autumn when livestock had to be salted for winter, must have ensured a fairly regular salt trade. The journey from Cheshire to Chesterfield, where Saltersgate is one of the main streets, leading to the medieval market place, must have taken about three days.

Salt mining in 19th century Cheshire

Salt production and transport has also left a mark on the map of Europe. Salzburg was a major centre, and from there the ‘golden route’ went north east into Bohemia. In Roman times the Via Salaria ran from the Adriatic coast to Rome (but the often-repeated claim that Roman soldiers were paid in salt, hence the word ‘salary’, is false, as common sense should tell us!).

Sources:

Hey, D. Packmen, Carriers and Packhorse Roads (2004)

Dodd, AE & Dodd, EM Peakland Roads and Trackways (1980)

http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.html

The romance of the road

On By SteveIn PeopleLeave a comment 
Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway nigh me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river,
That's the life for a man like me,
That's the life for ever.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his poem The Vagabond in the 1870s, influenced by a mid-nineteenth century enthusiasm among some intellectuals for the open road and the free life. Before this only the poorest travelled on foot, but now writers began singing the praises of walking, and even mixing with nomadic outcasts such as gypsies. Stevenson reinforced his poetry with experience, his pioneering Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879) is his account of a 12-day hike through the hills of this French region, sleeping rough and struggling to control his animal.

George Borrow

Twenty years earlier, the less well-known but probably more remarkable George Borrow had published his autobiographical novel Lavengro (1851), based on his wanderings in England and Wales and his meetings with gypsies, whose language (among many others) he claimed to have learned. Borrow was certainly physically remarkable, a tireless walker who went on to work for the British and Foreign Bible Society in their quixotic attempt to bring the Word to Spain. His account of his travels, published as The Bible in Spain, reveals a man of considerable stamina, riding around (Carlist) war-torn Spain with a donkey-load of Bibles while maintaining his flirtation with the world of Romany.

Mathew Arnold, swinging between poetry and philosophy

Another key work on this theme is Mathew Arnold’s The Scholar Gypsy of 1853. The longish poem tells the story of an Oxford student who becomes disillusioned with academia and joins a band of local gypsies, hoping to learn their secret lore:

The story of the Oxford scholar poor,
Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,
Who, tired of knocking at preferment's door,
One summer-morn forsook
His friends, and went to learn the gypsy-lore,
And roam'd the world with that wild brotherhood,
And came, as most men deem'd, to little good,
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.

Although it seems unlikely that Arnold took to the road himself, the poem expresses the doubts that were beginning to emerge about the destination of Victorian society, and the fascination with apparently more primitive or ancient cultures. In this sense Arnold was well ahead of his time, with these concerns becoming more prominent in the twentieth century. Writers such as Walter Starkie, an Anglo-Irish academic, who reprised Borrow with his wanderings in Hungary with the gypsies in the 1930s, as described in Raggle-Taggle (1933), continued this theme, while more recently there has been a positive flood of writers taking to the hills, tracks, lanes and even rivers in their eagerness to escape from the contemporary world.

Starkie in full flow