My first discovery of a drovers’ road was last February (see also a terrific description by one of the History Girls). I think that I’ve just found another one in Gedling, plus an odd trackway nearby, plus a vast long Public Footpath, and a circular Plantation, all of which are most odd. However, one thing at a time, and for this diary entry it is to be the Public Footpath and a (possibly) unmarked Drovers Road.

The drovers’ road in Ware showed that, typically, Drovers Roads are marked as Public Byways on local signs. There is no such signpost for this one, which is why I keep using the words “if” & “possibly”. The field at the start of a very long Public Footpath [1+2+3+4+5] is most odd & when I saw it I went “THAT’S A DROVERS’ ROAD!!!”. See what you think:–

The original mapper was perplexed by what he saw & put in a fixme within the area (now removed):–

• “not sure of the tagging here - basically it’s just full of thistles and not crops”

Unfortunately he also used landuse=scrub (a common tagging mistake, it should be natural=scrub) but that is also wrong (‘Uncultivated land covered with bushes or stunted trees’), so I’ve changed it to natural=grassland which is probably the closest that we can get. At least it will all show correctly now within the other farmland.

This was one of those occasions where my spider senses started going bananas. That Public Footpath travels all the way from Lambley in the north entirely through farmland almost due south to a kissing-gate that opens at the top of a narrow gap between two bungalows on Almond Walk (no signpost, no warning of any kind):–

I did not walk the entire length of the footpath on this occasion — just to the top of the drover’s road — but the feeling of age & thousands of other feet treading that route is unmistakable (the Parish Boundary follows the footpath for some distance, which is another sign of age). It doesn’t even stop at Almond Walk. Directly south of the base of the footpath is a length of Yew Tree Lane and yet another footpath & another leading to Waterhouse Lane going south to Shearing Hill & Gedling Village centre, or to yet more footpaths leading in other directions.

It’s true what Tolkein said:– stepping outside of your house is a dangerous business; your feet could lead you almost anywhere.

Footnote

Gedling Access Road

The infamous GAR first turned up in these Diary notes in March 2017 IIRC. It sits heavy on the thoughts of many Gedling citizens, rather like that famous erotic painting The Nightmare. Shearing Hill, Arnold Lane & other central Gedling streets are undeniably thronged with heavy traffic, and the GAR is the latest proposal to relieve that traffic & thus to allow development to begin within a large number of other nearby areas (work on the GAR is due to begin this summer). In the process, vast swathes of housing are blighted and unable to sell their homes for decades, frozen in a perfect synonym of sleep paralysis.

The GAR passes directly above (north) of all of the housing that I’ve recently been mapping and specifically directly through the middle of today’s footpath (just a little above the mysterious field).

Update 4 July 2022

Mapillary has changed it’s download URLs & therefore all links within my diaries that used photos stored in Mapillary in the old format are broken. I’m slowly going through to update them. The new URLs are terrifyingly long, but show OK on my screen (and I hope also on yours).