Green Lanes

A few weeks ago I went back to my home town of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk for the weekend, and spent a day investigating a few green lanes, of which there are many in Suffolk. Quite a few lie to the NE of Bury, where the arable landscape - largely devoid of habitation save for a few farmsteads and small villages - is intersected by ancient trackways.

A green lane is an unofficial term, but is used to characterise an unmetalled road, whether a footbath, bridleway, restricted byway or BOAT (Byway Open to All Traffic), that is bounded on both sides by ditches, walls or hedgerows - hence use of the word 'green'. More often than not, these lanes are rich with flaura and fauna, and provide lovely environments for escaping the noise and hassle of everyday life.

Many green lanes have an ancient provenance, being old drover's ways, saxon boundaries or medieval roads. What attracted me to them in the first place was their enigmatic nature; they exist alongside our modern road network, yet are concealed from view, veiled behind rampant undergrowth. And instead of connecting areas of population density, they connect points of history and memory. Like ruined buildings, they no longer have a functional purpose; rather, their significance is determined by other criteria: uniqueness, mystery, atmosphere, aesthetics. Rediscovering these hidden trackways is exciting and addicitve, as is the process of walking them.

On this occasion, I planned a route using an OS Explorer map (211) and a copy of Suffolk's Ancient Sites and Ancient Places - a gazeteer for establishing which trackways still exist from antiquity. I've since put the route on Wayfaring, which can be explored below. I've also embedded some photos from Flickr in the map markers (click a push-pin to view):