It is a perfect miniature prose-poem of a book, beautifully printed and published, and co-authored with his friend and travelling companion Dan Richards. I always thought I was alone in finding such roads so resonant of the past, until I came across the latest work from Robert Macfarlane. Occasionally I came across a fragment of Whitby jet that I thought might be a Neolithic arrowhead. I scrabbled away with my trowel, trying to unearth the bones of wild animals – I felt sure that elk and wolves and even mammoths had passed that way. These were bells that some of the more imaginative inhabitants claimed they could still hear booming over the Rye valley, even though they were melted down at the time of Henry VIII.ĭown in the depths of the holloway, you could see neither metalled roads nor telegraph poles, nor even the most distant glimpses of the outsized golf balls of the early warning radar up on Fylingdales.

I used to imagine the hooded figures – choir monks and the lay brothers who ran the monastic granges and sheep shearing stations, with their brindling flocks and their creaking wagons – passing solemnly and silently up the track as the great bells of Rievaulx tolled below. Nowhere I had ever been seemed more medieval, or even, in the right weather, primeval. But mostly I loved the track because it was so clearly and profoundly haunted. Partly this was because the country it passed through was some of the most beautiful I had ever seen: great sweeps of rolling moorland and pasture dropping from the crags of Sutton Bank and then slowly diminishing over hills and dales, as it ebbed down to the chequerboard of valley-bottom strip-fields, and hence to the banks of Rievaulx's former millrace, the Rye.

It is almost certainly of prehistoric origins, but its heyday was the high middle ages, when it linked two of the greatest Cistercian abbeys in the land: Rievaulx and Byland.Īs a nerdy, archaeologically obsessed 16-year-old, I became fascinated with this old holloway running both over and under the moors. Although it looks a little like a railway cutting, or some other prodigy of eccentric 19th-century rural improvement, this track predates the Victorians by hundreds, if not thousands of years. H igh on the North York Moors, winding through the wild sheep tracks between Peak Scar, Cold Kirkby and Gormire, there is a holloway, or sunken path, cut so deeply into the limestone that at first sight you might take it to be a work of Victorian engineering.

Fatal Games by Bruce Richards