IEW #9: In the Footsteps of the Romans
This is the 9th of a series of 20 caches which takes you around some of the lovely countryside immediately to the east of Ilkley.
The cache is hidden just off the small trail across the northern edge of the golf course. The trail at this point follows very close to an ancient Roman Road designated RR72b which ran from Ilkley to Tadcaster. See for here more information.
See GC8PCW2 Ilkley East Wander #1: Intro and . . . Prick!? for information on the series and waypoints. See Gallery for an annotated map with cache locations and parking spots.
From IEW#8, return back through the gate, cross over Ben Rhydding Drive and retrace your steps up the lane coming from IEW#7 as far as the junction with the path from that cache @ N 53 55.037 W 1 47.230. Then pick up the small path to the right leading west to the cache location along the northern (lower) edge of the golf course.
According to the Roman Roads Research Association with edits and [additions]. . .
Although there are still many gaps in our knowledge [of this road] (especially at its eastern end), this is one of the best-preserved Roman roads in Yorkshire. Yet, despite this, very little of it was ever marked on Ordnance Survey maps, indeed the current 1:25,000 map only shows a short portion between Scarcroft and Tadcaster and half of that is probably wrong!
The road, which runs [for 24.6 miles] down Wharfedale from Ilkley maintaining a course along the southern side of the valley to Tadcaster, appears on John Warburton’s Map of Yorkshire (Warburton 1720), although as usual his drafting of the route is very vague.
Francis Drake also recorded it (Drake, 1736), although he seems to have relied on Warburton, stating that 'Mr Warburton who traced this road and has delineated it in his map of the county says its stone pavement is yet in many places very firm being 8 yards broad'. Almost two centuries passed before Percival Ross surveyed the road in detail - a work that still forms the basis of our current understanding (Ross, 1918).
For the first mile and a half, Ross’s description is quite vague presumably because the road wasn’t easily visible, taking the line [in central Ilkley] along Green Lane (now called The Grove) past the station then 'along a line of fences and short pieces of road to Ben Rhydding House'. This is probably represented by a line approximating to the B6382 Springs Lane and then beneath the modern housing estate. Where Ross first describes it in detail is just east of the modern estate, and sure enough a feature that looks like the remains of an agger (the raised mound on which Roman roads were built) can be seen on lidar emerging from beneath the clubhouse of Ben Rhydding Golf Club (fig.1).
The feature agrees perfectly with the line on the 1851 OS map (fig. 2), although curiously by 1895 the OS had removed it from the map, never to return. The road remains visible on lidar [this is the part closest to the cache location] until it crosses Ben Rhydding Drive at about SE14254677 [N 53 55.0129 W 1 47.072] which is a few metres north of the entrance to the new Clevedon complex - formerly Wharfedale Grange]. Ross lost it here as well, but picked it up again in Burley in Wharfedale, which is also where modern evidence starts to appear, a section being excavated in 1979 (Jones, 1980) at SE16354555 [N 53 54.351 W 1 45.157].