Here is a story that piques my interest in hiking and my love for ancient history.  The New York Times Travel section features England’s Ridgeway Trail, which is “at least 5,000 years old, and may even have existed when England was still connected to continental Europe, and the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine.”

It’s hard to beat a hiking path that predates the very shape of the world.

Here is my favorite passage from the article:

Every so often we pass one of the distinctive clumps of beech trees that dot the landscape. There’s something about these copses: when you’re in one, its whistling shade is eerie and beautiful, steeped in a sense of another time, of history, of the age of the landscape. They have something of the dense atmosphere of a graveyard … The grasslands up here, beloved of sheep and horses, curve away in sculptural lines, creating deep bowls and broad gullies. It’s a landscape that exhales prehistory, littered with burial mounds, standing stones and hill forts thousands of years old.

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