Wade's Causeway

Wade's Causeway is a sinuous, linear structure of human construction located in the North York Moors national park in North Yorkshire, England. Its origins, age, purpose and extent are subject to ongoing research and debate and have not been reliably established. The name may be used to refer specifically to scheduled ancient monument number , a length of stone course just over long on Wheeldale Moor. It may be also be applied more broadly to include an additional postulated extension of this structure, incorporating ancient monuments numbers and which extend to the north and south of Wheeldale for up to . The visible course on Wheeldale Moor consists of an embankment of soil, peat, gravel and loose pebbles in height and in width. The gently cambered embankment is capped with un-mortared and loosely abutted flagstones. Its original form is uncertain since it has been subjected to weathering and human damage. The structure has been the subject of folklore in the surrounding area for several hundred years and possibly for more than a millennium. Its construction was commonly attributed to a giant known as Wade, a figure from Germanic mythology. In the 1720s, the causeway was mentioned in a published text and as a result became more widely known outside the local area for the first time. Within a few years, it became of interest to antiquarians, who visited the site and exchanged commentary on its probable historicity. They interpreted the structure as a causeway across marshy ground, attributing its construction to the Roman military, an explanation that remained largely unchallenged throughout the remainder of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The stretch of the causeway on Wheeldale Moor was cleared of vegetation and excavated in the early twentieth century by a local gamekeeper interested in archaeology. The historian Ivan Margary agreed with its identification as a Roman road and assigned it the catalogue number 81b in the first edition of his Roman Roads In Britain (1957). The causeway was further excavated and studied by the archaeologist Raymond Hayes in the 1950s and 1960s, partly funded by the Council for British Archaeology.