One of the most difficult aspects of researching old roads is the issue of dating. The stretch illustrated above is now a footpath, but has clearly been a lane at some point, as the stone walls are 10 - 12 feet apart, wide enough for a cart. But how old are the walls? If the surrounding fields were created during eighteenth century enclosures, they will be about two hundred years old. But the track, or the route, may be much older. How can we be sure?
Appearances can be deceptive, and what looks like an old lane may have been created in the nineteenth century or even later. So there are really only two reliable methods of dating. The first, searching maps, is only effective for the past 250 years or so, since the first fairly accurate map of Derbyshire was drawn by Burdett in 1767. The second method, excavation, apart from being difficult to carry out, is only useful if there is something to find. Only Roman roads were properly engineered with layers of stone, gravel, ditches etc, so there is unlikely to be any physical evidence of an earlier trackway.
The section of the Portway shown above, called Islington Lane, running north between Winster and Elton, is shown on Burdett's map as a major route, and moreover a lead mine is shown by the road called 'Portaway'. This suggests that the mine was called after the road.
In addition, near here a cross-section of the track has been excavated by members of the Wirksworth Roman Project, who found strata suggesting a properly built road about 6 metres wide. If, as seems likely, this shows Roman construction, the question remains whether they built the road on virgin land or were improving an existing, possibly Bronze Age, routeway?
This enigmatic lump of sandstone, the Hemlock Stone, found on Bramcote Hills west of Nottingham, was the starting point for my 2008 guide to the Derbyshire Portway. I suggested that it was both a route marker and a boundary stone, being near the Nottinghamshire/ Derbyshire border. From this point I followed a route northwest into the Derbyshire Peak District, a route which had been pioneered by Cockerton in the 1930s. After about 45 miles the route reached Mam Tor in the White Peak, which is where my research finished.
But clearly the Portway must have had a continuation at both 'ends', as well as branches east and west. Having reached the Trent valley it may well have linked with the River Trent to the east of Nottingham's Trent Bridge, which has been a barrier to navigation for over a thousand years. At the northern end it seems likely that a major route would cross the Pennines in the direction of Manchester, which was the course of a well-known Roman road.
So both these areas require more investigation, and each has its own challenges. Today Nottingham obviously has a heavily urbanised landscape with scant evidence of prehistoric pathways, while the Woodlands Valley to the northwest of the Ladybower Reservoir is high, bleak moorland with little documentation or mapping. Although roads rarely have a clearly-defined starting or stopping point, I feel confident that researching these two different regions will give a better understanding of how and when the Portway functioned.
This roadsign at Coxbench in Derbyshire, on the road to Holbrook, is the only 'official' recognition of the Portway's existence - the Ordnance Survey map also uses the name for this stretch of road.
The road name 'Portway' is found is various parts of England, and seems to be Saxon in origin. There has been much discussion about the meaning of the name, but most agree that it seems to have been used for main roads or routes in the early medieval period. One suggestion is that 'ports' were principal towns linked by this road, or that 'port' refers to carrying goods.
However, as the Derbyshire Portway runs through very few towns, I suggest that 'port' has a meaning similar to 'harbour', in other words a place where travellers can rest in safety. The harbours en route were similar to caravanserai: defensible sites, probably on hilltops, where travellers could camp overnight, possibly within a stockade. This theory is strongly supported by a number of sites along the Portway with suggestive names e.g. Harborough Rocks near Wirksworth and Arbour Hill near Dale.
