It was 10:00 before I saw another person, a lone dog walker in the vicinity of Barbury Castle, an Iron Age hill fort that sits commandingly atop a rise on the Ridgeway, an 87-mile prehistoric trackway widely recognised as Britain's oldest road.

I'd set off more than two hours earlier from Avebury in Wiltshire, revelling in my newfound solitude while, at the same time, finding it increasingly difficult to believe that I was walking through such a densely populated region. From the backseat of a car, England's southern counties resemble an untidy muddle of motorways, high streets and housing estates. But up on the chalky heights of the North Wessex Downs, I was being treated to an infinitely more tranquil view.

As I progressed north-east along the rounded ridgetops, I gazed out over distant villages, bushy hedgerows and rolling green pastures interspersed with yellow rapeseed fields. A red kite soared overhead, and a cool breeze ventilated the earthen ramparts of 2,500-year-old Barbury Castle. It felt as if I'd serendipitously walked into the eye of a hurricane and found calm amid the chaos. The silence was therapeutic.

The Ridgeway is an ancient path that cuts diagonally across the chalk downs of southern England linking Overton Hill, a site of special archaeological interest in Wiltshire, with the prominent 233m summit of Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire, a mere 33 miles from London.

Part of a much longer trading route that once connected the coasts of Dorset and Norfolk, the trackway follows a chalk escarpment that acts as a natural dividing line between low-lying vales and river headwaters. Used as a protective bastion and lookout during the Iron Age, it later became a military road for Saxon armies and a farm track for medieval drovers and herders. In 1973, the path was designated a National Trail and recently celebrated its 50th anniversary with a special walk and a year-long treasure hunt that highlighted the Ridgeway's top-50 features, from its inspiration to writers such as JRR Tolkien and Thomas Hardy to its appearance in the 2019 Star Wars film The Rise of Skywalker.

Proof of its antiquity is everywhere. The Ridgeway is littered with Neolithic burial mounds, Iron Age hill forts and, most famously, a giant 3,000-year-old chalk etching known as the Uffington White Horse that is emblazoned across a grassy escarpment in Oxfordshire like a primitive Picasso. Historical evidence suggests it has been in regular use for at least 5,000 years, conceivably making it the oldest continuously utilised path in Europe. With few 21st-Century interferences to distract me, I clicked my phone into silent mode and pictured myself walking in the footsteps of Celtic druids, Saxon kings and Victorian poets.

A short walk from the starting point at Overton Hill, I began my quest with a stroll up to one of Britain's oldest gravesites, the West Kennet Long Barrow, a chambered burial mound built around 3650 BCE by some of Britain's earliest farmers. Nearby in Avebury, where I spent my first night in a comfortable B&B and dined in a supposedly haunted pub, I wandered around a Bronze Age stone circle contemporaneous with Stonehenge and a giant manmade mound called Silbury Hill that's as large as Giza's pyramids and nearly as old.

For walkers, the Ridgeway is a journey of two distinct halves divided by the River Thames at a natural gap in the hills called the Goring Gap. To the west rise the North Wessex Downs, an elongated chalk ridge topped by four pre-Roman hillforts – Barbury Castle, Liddington Castle, Uffington Castle and Segsbury Camp – and two notable geoglyphs, the Uffington White Horse and Hackpen White Horse. To the east lie the more wooded Chilterns where tracts of ancient beech forest are embellished by bluebells in spring and dotted with houses built with local flint stone.

[Disponível em https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240723-the-ridgway-hike-the-5000-year-old-pathway-thats-britains-oldest-road]

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