I should probably explain why I am pottering around Nottingham and its western suburbs, rather than roaming the Derbyshire countryside. It's not just the abundance of paved paths, although that certainly helps - I recently went on a country walk across a cow field and found myself tiptoeing gingerly across boggy mud cratered with six-inch deep hoof holes. Then I was confronted by a sign which said: Private Property, Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. I congratulated myself on being on a public right of way, then, a few steps on, consulted the map and realised I wasn't. The path was across a completely different field.
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| nice scenery, though |
I digress. Apart from the absence of cows and angry landowners, the reason I am walking around Nottingham is that it's the start of the Portway.
There is a blog called The Old Roads of Derbyshire, written by a man named Stephen Bailey, who has also published a book of the same name. I can't remember now whether I came across the book first, or the blog. The blog is still updated occasionally; unfortunately, when I asked at Scarthin Books, they said the book was out of print, so I had to buy a secondhand copy online.
Stephen Bailey has a general interest in roads and paths of all sorts, but his big project was tracing the route of the Portway. This was an ancient long-distance route which took a diagonal line across the southern Peak District, from the Hemlock Stone in Nottingham to Mam Tor, near Castleton. There are placenames along the way, such as Alport and Alport Height, which suggest where the path lay, and a stretch of road near Holbrook which is still called Portway.
The route, Bailey considers, was probably in use between 3000 and 4000 years ago. At this time long-distance tracks tended to stick to high ground, for reasons with which I can sympathise today: to avoid muddy valleys, and to get better warning of an attack (and possibly stay clear of angry landowners, though this was some years before Right to Roam).
The challenges of walking have stayed the same for thousands of years, and, in this case, so have many of the paths. The Portway, amazingly, is still walkable on public rights of way for much of its length. Walking Englishman provides a map, though it doesn't quite coincide with Bailey's directions.
Interestingly, Bailey suggests that "the 'port' refers to a shelter or 'harbour' where travellers could spend the night." Undoubtedly these would be necessary. He lists a number of possible sites, all six to eight miles apart. But port also means carry - the word portable is the most obvious connection - so it seems to me that a portway would be a path along which things were carried. A motorway with truck stops, essentially, even though the trucks were packhorses and the service stations were hillforts.
Wherever the name derives from, and whatever the likely accuracy of the route, it sounded like an interesting path to follow. And the bottom end almost touched the River Trent, along which I was currently walking. In fact, I discovered that Bailey had extended the route as far as Sneinton Hermitage, just to the east of Nottingham city centre. I didn't quite get that far, but I joined it at St Mary's Church and went from there, as you can see from the map of my previous walk (the green line shows the Portway).
I won't get as far as Mam Tor. Possibly I'll finish at Winster, where the Portway overlaps with the Limestone Way, or maybe a little further north. We'll see. At the moment I'm being tempted by the Erewash Valley Trail too, so diversions are always possible.
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