The Road, the Line, and What Stopped Coming

Kentish road law still distinguishes turnpike, parish road and ancient ridge way, but travellers classify a route by what they may expect from it. A Lantern Road is maintained, travelled and attended enough that a stranger may reasonably expect stages, help and a record of who passed. A Backway is recognised and used, but a party is largely on its own. A Fallow may be an old road, lane, track, drove or remembered line that nobody now maintains or guards; the ordinary advice is simply not to go there. Feral is stronger. It is said of passage through country no dependable human authority claims to keep, where calling what lies ahead a road would itself be optimistic.