Pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes, drongs, sarns, snickets — say the names of paths out loud and at speed and they become a poem or rite — holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, halterpaths, cartways, carneys, causeways, herepaths….
In the Netherlands there are doodwegen and spookwegen — death roads and ghost roads — which converge on medieveal cemeteries…. In Scotlands there are clachan and rathad — cairned paths and shieling paths — and in Japan the slender farm tracks that the poet Basho followed in 1689 when writing his Narrow Road to the Far North.
— The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane