Landscapes for the Dead Part 2: Corpse Roads - TPM 37

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3:07Welcome to The Past Macomb, where we journey through history to uncover how our relationship with death reflects the values, fears and hopes that shape the world. I'm your host Stephanie Rice. Thank you for joining me for episode 37. Landscapes for the Dead Part 2, Corpse Roads. In the last episode, we began exploring landscape archaeology. We've been exploring landscape archaeology for the past three years. We've been exploring landscape archaeology for the past three years. In the last episode, we began exploring landscape archaeology and how looking beyond the burial itself can reveal the ways that people understood the wider world around them and move within it. We saw how the tombs of Bruno Boyne were positioned to be seen from the river Boyne, how Norris burials in western Norway and Iceland were placed along paths and boundaries, and how a Japanese cofoon could overlook an important maritime trade route.

4:08In all of these examples, the dead weren't randomly placed on the landscape. They were positioned intentionally to either be visible from or have visibility over the pathways that people took during their lifetimes. In this episode, we're going to shift the focus on to the pathways that were specifically meant for the dead. Now, why do we care to identify these pathways? Because they reconstruct the journey and not just the destination. A grave tells us where a person was buried, but a corpse road or funeral path can provide hints about the labor and the physical mobility, as well as the social organization and beliefs of the ordinary rural populations whose histories were very rarely written down. In this episode, we're going to take a look at the corpse roads that are specifically located in the United Kingdom, Scandinavia and the Netherlands.

5:11Some of these examples are from the early middle ages. Most of the examples are going to be from the high middle ages, and all of these are kind of the product of the medieval church, and obviously the need to bury the dead. So if you're ready to join me, let's explore the corpse roads of medieval Europe. C corpse roads aren't really lost or secret history. Some are still visible on modern maps, and some have been preserved as public footpaths, but they also aren't widely known beyond the local community or well studied within academia. They're not really something that most of us would recognize if we happened to walk a long one. Except for the very rare preserved examples, most don't have signs that say that they're corpse road or the pathway to the church yard or anything like that. A corpse road might just look like an ordinary old country lane, or even just a muddy track across a field that's been worn down by hundreds of thousands of feet.

6:16There might not be anything really particularly eerie about it at all, but for generations, people walked that path carrying their dead. And over time that pathway and the landscape that it went through and the stories around it all became intertwined into cultural memory. Scholars generally agree that these routes were shaped by several different forces working together like the medieval church economy, the practical difficulty of transporting a coffin, laws concerning the land and rights of way throughout medieval Europe, local geography, and eventually a whole collection of superstitions and folklore. The interesting part about sitting corpse roads is figuring out which came first and which parts shaped which other parts. For example, there's some lore that indicates people assumed that right of way laws in the UK, as we know them today, were actually established because of these corpse roads.

7:22There's no text evidence of any laws or regulations stating that that's the case, but that remained in the cultural memory for centuries. It even led to court cases that were brought up in the early 20th century and into the late 20th century. Now having a funeral procession to the cemetery is by no means new or a European tradition, but these specific examples in this episode that I refer to as corpse roads came about with the spread of the church in Europe during the high middle ages, which was about the 11th to 13th centuries CE. During this period, it was a law that people had to be buried on consecrated ground that was attached to the church, but the population was expanding a lot during that time, especially in the UK and Scandinavia and the Netherlands. There were more and more hamlets and villages and townships that were being pushed further and further out from where the parishes had originally been established and where these consecrated grounds were currently kept.

8:29Individual churches actually made quite a lot of their operating money from the fees that people had to pay in order to bury their dead there, so they weren't going to allow new churches to start popping up that would take money from their pockets. Instead, they enforced the law that people had to be buried in the consecrated ground no matter how far away they lived and to do that people eventually had to either commandeer or create pathways that led from their remote settlements directly to the church. Generations of people walked the same path for centuries in order to do that and that impacted the physical landscape. And so this is where physical landscape archaeology becomes particularly useful to help us locate them because we can use LIDAR to see any subtle features that might still be hidden beneath vegetation that reveal older trackways or even sometimes what's known as a hallway where the pathway has been traversed for so long it's actually sunken into the land.

9:33GIS can be used to model possible routes through a landscape to help with finding places where archaeological surveys can take place on the ground to try to identify these places. And one of those analyses is known as the least cost path analysis and this would calculate a route based on a lot of different factors of the landscape such as slope distance, the difficulty in traversing the terrain. Each of these various factors are given essentially a difficulty rating and then the computer calculates what would be the easiest path between point A and point B in order to get to where you need to go. That's often used for identifying trade routes but it's not always that simple when identifying these corpse roads. Even though many of them weren't only for funerals the pathways became associated with them deeply but some of them were actually created specifically for this purpose. I'm Livy Dunn, all American gymnasts and V-Ori athlete. When you travel in train as much as I do you find happiness where you are.

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13:06Not every corpse road actually follows the least cost path according to analyses that have been done on them. Some of them seem to indicate that they may have been a little bit more inspired by folklore and superstitions instead of just taking the easiest path in order to get the deceased from their settlement to the churchyard. In some cases, the corpse roads developed a folklore and superstition of its own after it had been used for funerals for centuries. And in other cases, it seems that maybe the pathway was actually chosen because of other folklore that already existed. Not every corpse road follows the expected least cost path. And this is where looking into old local land ownership documents or laws and learning about local folklore or superstitions can come in handy whenever you're trying to identify where a corpse road was. One of the beliefs in pre-modern Europe was that the spirits preferred to travel in straight lines and they would fly very close to the ground.

14:10So any winding paths or pathways that had fences blocking them were thought to confuse a spirit or it would leave it trapped in the fields or the village and it would be stuck haunting the local area. Because of this, it said that some corpse roads cut as straight as possible across the countryside and right through property lines in order to help make sure that the deceased would make it for the entire journey to join their body at their final resting place instead of sticking around somewhere. But in some cases, there's evidence that these straightways were pretty easily explained by documentation that landowners left a straight line of unplod field that would be available for the funeral procession because the funeral procession would reportedly take an inevitable shortcut through their land anyway and it would cause damage to their crops. So in those instances, the funeral procession had no choice and it was not a matter of whatever beliefs that they had about ghosts traveling in straight lines.

15:10It was a matter of practicality and land ownership. On the flip side, there are some regional traditions that indicate that maybe the path was intentionally a bit difficult because people wanted to confuse the spirits. One of the most famous examples of a corpse road that's still preserved in Cumbria today has a section where the corpse road has to go through an area that has some hills that have limestone, escarpments or essentially slanted cliffs. One escarpment has a natural formation that creates very narrow stairs. They're only about a foot wide that someone can use them to climb up if they're not carrying a coffin. It's now known as the fairy steps of Beatham fell and according to local legend, malicious spirits can't make it through those steps. There's also a local legend that if you manage to make it through without touching either side, then a fairy will grant you your wish. There's more that I've been told that are associated with this place. So there's lots of lore that's been associated with it over the years.

16:16So it's really, really hard to sort out what came first the pathway or the story. Now at the cliff side, there's evidence of iron rings that are hammered into the limestone that would support a pulley system that people use to lift coffins up and over this spot. There's a lot of historical documentation that claims that very thing. And this escarpment is not huge. So it would only take a little extra time to go around it, probably a lot less energy. But for some reason, people still chose this path repeatedly for funeral processions. That gives a little bit of evidence that maybe there was some sort of intentional choice there to confuse the spirits or for some reason make it a little bit harder for that funeral procession to be followed. There are similar cases where corpse roads would take a funeral procession across a stream or river out of necessity, but then others that would intentionally move to cross water.

17:16There are a lot of ancient beliefs that held that spirits were completely incapable of crossing moving water. So it's entirely probable that this inspired those directional choices. By ensuring that the corpse road crossed a river or stream, they would use either a bridge or stepping stones. It's not like they're waiting these rivers all of the time. The living would effectively lock the spirit on the cemetery side of the water once everything was all said and done. One of the most famous examples is the likeway in Dartmore, like is another term for body and this route intentionally crossed multiple fast flowing rivers instead of just taking a straighter route that wouldn't have crossed as many. Now whether or not extra steps were taken to confuse the spirits, the physical toll of these journeys was always immense. You're going to have paul bears who are carrying a body and a coffin and you're going to have a funeral procession of varying mobile ability following alongside.

18:24And all of these people had to stop and rest. Here too, folklore became intertwined with these actions so we don't really know exactly which came first, but it's widely believed that the corpse or the coffin must never touch the bear earth during this journey. If it did, the spirit might become unbound or the ground itself could become cursed. This superstition might have come from a logical reason such as not wanting to risk damage to the coffin from many insects or boister on the ground. Or it is possible that the superstition actually did inspire this choice, but whatever the case, communities established coffin stones that were these large flat rocks positioned every few miles along these coffin routes. And they provided the necessary relief for the paul bears to safely both spiritually and physically set the coffin down, take a break.

19:24And in some cases, there's documentation that people would actually also stop and sing hymns throughout the funeral procession whenever they did stop at these spots. In places that had multiple settlements that would eventually have corpse roads converging towards the same chapel. These would be placed at places where other members of communities could come and meet the procession along the way in order to basically join in as they were making their way to the final funeral spot. Now, because the dead rested here for long periods of time, multiple times for centuries, these coffin stones have actually become associated with the thinning of the veil or places where you can more easily see some sort of ghostly funeral procession. And it's said that these get more and more frequent if you are sitting on a coffin stone anytime close to Halloween. I'm Livy Dunn, all American gymnasts and Vyory athlete. When you travel and train as much as I do, you find happiness where you are.

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21:37A bill for a limited time of participating restaurants tax not included not valid for use within a combo or in combination with any other offer or discount. Parents, have you heard your kids say, I'm not a math kid. Well, with Mathnasium, every kid can be a math kid. They customize their math instructions so kids who are struggling are able to catch up and get ahead. And advanced kids are challenged to reach higher. Mathnasium makes math fun so kids learn to love it. Parents say that Mathnasium has not only improved their kids' grades, it's given them a new level of confidence. In math and in school overall, visit Mathnasium.com to find a location near you. Once these pathways became so deeply associated with death, it probably shouldn't surprise us that people began telling stories about supernatural things that happened to anyone who traveled these roads after dark. Apparitions like small blue candle flames are often associated with corpse roads in both England and Wales. They can be reportedly seen if you walk at night along the old corpse roads.

22:41And you may also hear the faint echoes of footsteps walking beside you or at the distant sound of morning that never changes in volume no matter how far you walk along the road. Sometimes the stories are of what happens to places that end up being built along or sometimes on top of these corpse roads. In the village called Huda Gaurip in the Netherlands, there's the story of a mansion that's called binima state that was built in the 17th century right on top of one of the old corpse roads. It was built over a century after the last funeral had used the route, but the gate for the mansion would never stay closed no matter how many chains or locks the owners put on the gate. It would always swing open at midnight on the dot, even with no one close enough to touch it. Anybody who went up to look would see it happening. And this reportedly carried on for centuries, even though the estate was sold to different families over the years.

23:43There were even reports of the gate swinging open in the 1960s, though not as frequently as every night like the older folk tales implied. But it would seem that the dead refused to allow this corpse road to be blocked nor forgotten, even though it was no longer in use for many, many centuries by this point. And to make things even spookier, in some regions, the corpse road wasn't just a path for remembering the dead or where that previously deceased would return, it could become a path that welcomed the harbingers of death. Imagine walking down a narrow country lane late at night, you're trying to get home, and then you see somewhere ahead of you a funeral procession. Except there's something a little bit wrong with it. It's silent despite all the movement and you can't quite make any details out for many of the people who are walking along. You think to yourself, maybe you were just too far away and you try to rush home and get indoors before it gets too late.

24:46But then sometimes later, someone in the community dies. And the funeral path that all of you take ends up following the same route that you saw the Phantom procession traveling, and then you get a sense of deja vu. According to Welsh folklore, people with the gift of second sight could sometimes see a Phantom funeral procession that they call the tweeley. These spectral processions would happen days before anyone had actually died, and they would follow the same corpse road that the real funeral would eventually take. A version of these ghostly funerals exists in Flimish and Dutch folklore as well, but in their version, the Phantoms would physically push you off the corpse road if you failed to move for their eerie procession, even if it was completely invisible to you. But just seeing or feeling in this case, the procession wasn't enough to count as a death omen in the Netherlands unless you recognized any of the members in the procession.

25:46Even if they weren't the one being carried in a casket, any person that you recognized who is part of these Phantom processions would be dead within the year. Another version of this in Scandinavia was actually intentionally sought out. So the corpse road in Scandinavia was central to rural folk cosmology and divination practices during liminal nights like Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve practitioners would undertake what they call the arsgang or the year walk. They would traverse these corpse roads in the dark through the wilderness and towards the parish churchyard in order to hopefully gain visions of the future. In preparation and during their walk, the walker would fast and they would never look back and they intentionally wanted to encounter these Phantom funerals because that would allow them to predict who in the parish would die in the upcoming year.

26:56And outside of these divination practices, people might also encounter mysterious blue flames here that hover over the paths or what's known as a curcogrim, which is the church grim, which is a large black dog that patrols the churchways and it protects the consecrated ground. And also usually only seen by somebody who is going to die soon, unfortunately. But sometimes it wasn't seen necessarily by the person who was going to die and sometimes it could indicate just a death in the community was coming soon. The idea that corpse roads can be used to predict death, whether by accident or intentional divination, reflects a part of the grief process and a fear of mortality that is pretty universal. Death is inevitable, but also frequently unpredictable and people have always sought ways to bargain against it or prepare for its arrival. Corpse roads became an important part of the morning process for many medieval European communities and studying them using landscape archaeology allows us to preserve more than just fragments of cultural memory.

28:09In the next episode, we'll be moving on from landscape archaeology, but stay on the subject of hauntings. We'll explore what's known as hauntology and some of the anthropology based studies about why specific places and people become haunted. So thank you for joining me for this episode. Until next time. Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe to keep up with new releases. Please leave a rating in a comment that helps the show reach others who may be interested in the past Macabre. For access to bonus content from all archaeology podcast network shows, become a member at arcpodnet.com slash members. That's ARCHPODNET.com slash members. You can find show notes for this and other episodes at arcpodnet.com slash TPM and follow past Macabre on Instagram. That's P-A-S-T underscore M-A-C-A-B-R-E.

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