The Oldest Road: An Exploration of the Ridgeway

Overview
Fay Godwin's The Oldest Road: An Exploration of the Ridgeway (1975) is a contemplative visual journey along one of Britain's most ancient trackways. The book moves along the Ridgeway's chalk escarpments, downland, ancient barrows and hedgerows, presenting black-and-white photographs that register landscape as both geography and memory. Sparse, carefully placed text accompanies the images, guiding attention to place without overwhelming the photographs' quiet insistence.

Landscape and History
The Ridgeway is presented as a palimpsest where prehistory and modern life meet. Photographs linger on burial mounds, standing stones, and the scars of old boundaries, but also on working farms, gates and solitary figures who animate the vast open spaces. Godwin treats the route as a living archive: traces of human activity accumulate, erode and reappear under changing light. The past is not treated as distant museum material but as something embedded in the contours, tracks and vegetation of the land.

Photographic Style and Composition
Godwin's photographic language is austere and exacting. High-contrast black-and-white images emphasize texture, silhouette and horizon, with compositions that balance open sky against textured ground. Empty expanses, dramatic skies and the repeated motifs of fences, tracks and lone trees create a sense of continuous line and rhythm appropriate to a road that has been followed for millennia. Her framing often reduces human presence to small, significant marks on a larger stage, highlighting scale and solitude.

Themes and Tone
Time, continuity and the interplay of nature and culture are central themes. The Ridgeway appears as both route and record: a pathway for movement and a surface that records centuries of use. Weather and light are active elements; mist, wind and low winter sun transform features, making monuments alternately conspicuous and elusive. There is a quiet melancholy in many images, a recognition of change and loss, but also a persistent sense of endurance, of features and landscapes that remain legible across generations.

Experience and Readability
The book invites slow looking. Sequences of images work like footsteps, each frame offering a new perspective or a more intimate study of texture and form. Captions and short passages provide orientation, place names, landmarks, occasional reflections, without dictating interpretation. That restraint encourages readers to build their own sense of the Ridgeway as both a real itinerary and a collection of resonant moments.

Legacy and Importance
The Oldest Road helped establish Fay Godwin's reputation as a rigorous and poetic chronicler of the British landscape. Its approach, combining documentary attention with formal composition and an emotional register, has influenced later photographers and writers concerned with place, memory and the human imprint on the countryside. As a record of a particular route and as a meditation on landscape, it remains a compelling example of how photography can attend to the deep time of ordinary places.