were usually careful to keep along the higher grounds; but, to
prevent those horsemen who departed from the beaten track being
swallowed up in quagmires, beacons were erected to warn them
against the more dangerous places.*[2]

In some of the older-settled districts of England, the old roads
are still to be traced in the hollow Ways or Lanes, which are to
be met with, in some places, eight and ten feet deep. They were
horse-tracks in summer, and rivulets in winter. By dint of
weather and travel, the earth was gradually worn into these deep
furrows, many of which, in Wilts, Somerset, and Devon, represent
the tracks of roads as old as, if not older than, the Conquest.
When the ridgeways of the earliest settlers on Dartmoor, above
alluded to, were abandoned, the tracks were formed through the
valleys, but the new roads were no better than the old ones.
They were narrow and deep, fitted only for a horse passing along
laden with its crooks, as so graphically described in the ballad
of "The Devonshire Lane."*[3]

Similar roads existed until recently in the immediate neighbourhood
of Birmingham, now the centre of an immense traffic. The sandy
soil was sawn through, as it were, by generation after generation
of human feet, and by packhorses, helped by the rains, until in
some places the tracks were as much as from twelve to fourteen
yards deep; one of these, partly filled up, retaining to this day
the name of Holloway Head. In the neighbourhood of London there
was also a Hollow way, which now gives its name to a populous
metropolitan parish. Hagbush Lane was another of such roads.
Before the formation of the Great North Road, it was one of the
principal bridle-paths leading from London to the northern parts of