THE Ridgeway is a tremendous seagull of a road, one of the oldest and greatest in Britain. Not actually a road as such, it is a prehistoric trade route that can be traced for 400 kilometres, from the English Channel to the North Sea.
The English pastoral poet Edward Thomas wrote: ''Some roads creep, some continue merely. Some advance with majesty, some mount a hill in curves like a soaring seagull.'' The Ridgeway soars like a seagull.
If you walk the Ridgeway you walk back into Britain's ancient past, one marked by burial mounds, hill forts and monuments at least 4,000 years old. The coast-to-coast highway served as the main artery in a communications system dating back thousands of years, perhaps even before the Ice Age.
Like the Silk Road of the East, it served not only as a trade route (for everything from flints and precious metals to coal and cattle) but also as a channel and meeting place for the influential cultures of the Neolithic people whose twin ritual centreswere at the stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury.
Today's officially sanctioned Ridgeway Long Distance Path covers 145 kilometres of the original ''green road'' from Overton Hill near Avebury in Wiltshire to Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire. You must be a serious long-distance walker to do it all in one go, but the River Thames marks a convenient goal, 90 kilometres from Avebury: a four-day amble through some of Britain's loveliest, strangest countryside.
It was the spaciousness that hit me first: fields of corn rolling down to Avebury from a treeless ridge dotted with grassy burial mounds. Just south of Avebury's stone circle squats Silbury Hill, the biggest prehistoric man-made mount in Europe. A huge, old mystery, nobody knows why it was built.
