The Flint Road

Flint’s the stuff of roads and hard journeys, exacting penance from the feet of pilgrims:

O Kathaleen Ni Houlihan, your road’s a thorny way.
And ‘tis a faithful soul would walk the flints with you for aye,
Would walk the sharp and cruel flints until his locks grew grey"
(Ethna Carbey, The Passing of the Gael 1902)

Well-cobbled streets were laid with stones so small that each could fit into the workman’s mouth, or so the story went:

"I can still faintly re-experience the disagreeable sensation of choking and heaving that I suffered as I formed an imaginary picture of men forced to carry out this test on every one of the stones that were so uncomfortable to my small feet" (Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land 1951:136)

Knaps and chips: The stones themselves travelled far, and there’s been much speculation about the routes that ancient peddlers took. Alfred ‘ley-line’ Watkins suggested that the old straight tracks were peddlers’ paths; they met at hills named knaps: "the earliest trading points". Knap, he explained, "is an onomatopoetic word - created by the sound of the action it describes"; just like chip, indeed - "and both signify the same action". From chip came chepe, "a sale or bargain", and all those "Chipping" place-names, a network of flint-trading places linked by old straight tracks (Watkins, The Old Straight Track (1925), pp 95-6). Improbable ? Probably. But it’s true that flints flew around like currency, along routes perhaps that became hallowed by the practice. Some claim that a flint-route shadowed the Icknield Way from Grimes Graves through to Pangbourne. The Pudding Stones at Nettlebed, a breccia of flint cobbles, where once thought to be marker stones along this route. Ironic, if this was true, since Nettlebed, although it sits on the edge of a great grand stonefield, the wide-open skies of the Ipsden Country, became the hub of a big brick industry.

Artefacture