Sunken lanes under bare trees: Gaume lays open its oldest roads

A geology visible only in November

In summer, no one notices them. The sunken lanes of Gaume vanish beneath the canopy of hedges, the shade of hornbeams, the saturating green of ferns. You have to wait for the last November leaves to fall before the wall is exposed, ochre and striated, like a slice of cake left in the ditch.

These deep ruts are no accident of terrain. They are the fruit of centuries of passage — ox-drawn carts, marl tumbrils, iron-rimmed wheels, snow sledges, bare feet of children running to class. Every journey hollows the soft earth a little more. Every rainstorm washes away a layer. Over two hundred years, sometimes three, the patient grind of wheels has carved a corridor into Gaume marl.

Under the bare trees, you can now make out the strata: beige, reddish, sometimes a thread of grey limestone. The geology reads like a book no waymarked trail ever thought to edit.

Walking inside, walking through time

Taking a sunken lane north of Latour or on the heights above Sommethonne, on a November Saturday, means stepping into a half-opened vegetative tunnel. Brambles have reclaimed the bank. The beech, stripped bare, weaves a grey net overhead. The ground still keeps, sometimes, the double trace of wheels, sharp even after three winters without a plough on that stretch.

There is a particular quality of silence in the Gaume walk of this season. The sunken lane absorbs the noise of the main road. You hear a trickle of water in the bottom rill, the knock of an acorn on a dead leaf, the sound of your own boots on the wet clay. Nothing else. Gaume, here, does not show itself: it whispers.

What remains when the ground cools

Farmers no longer use them, most of them. Modern machinery found other access, wider and flatter. The sunken lanes have become remnants to cross for pleasure, or not at all. They bury themselves back under vegetation every year the sky refuses a long enough frost to scour them clean.

And yet. In the late afternoon, when the raking light of November enters the corridor horizontally, the walls catch fire. The marl blushes, the lichen yellows, the moss at the foot of the elms takes on an improbable fluorescent green. Gaume, under those twenty minutes of tilted gold, recovers all the splendour we credit it with in summer, in the flowered meadows or the wine-bearing slopes.

You simply need to not look at the map. You simply need to turn your back on the tarmac and walk where the earth, for far too long, still waits to be trodden on foot.