Quando nei secoli passati in Europa la popolazione aumentò, le operazioni di sepoltura divennero più complesse. Si rendeva necessario trasportare i morti su lunghe distanze, attraverso terreni difficili, utilizzando delle vie che collegassero i luoghi remoti con le chiese e i loro cimiteri, che detenevano i diritti di sepoltura. 

In Gran Bretagna queste vie prendono il nome di “Corpse road” : ne parla il blog MessyNessyChic, in un articolo corredato di molte fotografie, suggerendo di camminare lungo questi itinerari durante le escursioni, in alternativa ai più conosciuti percorsi panoramici.

Walk with us, as we follow ancient trails where the living once carried the dead. We’ll be traversing Europe’s rural landscapes via a network of so-called “corpse roads”, occasionally marked with crucifixes and low stone benches, cutting across windswept hills, overgrown pastures, gushing rivers and rocky brooks. In Britain alone, 42 of these little-known funerary ways are documented in 19th-century Ordnance survey maps, literature, and memoirs, and those are just the ones we know about. Of course, when you have a network of roads trodden into the countryside just to transport the dead, folklore and legend will follow not far behind. Even in Shakespeare’s most magical story, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck pays homage to the corpse roads in his quote: “Now it is that time of night, that the graves all gaping wide, every one lets forth his sprite, in the church-way paths to glide.” 

A queste vie sono associate un gran numero di leggende e sono parte del folclore locale: sebbene si ritenga che la loro costruzione risalga al medioevo, ci sono evidenze che alcune possano risalire addirittura al neolitico.

Although many believe coffin routes tend to be medieval in origin or even more recent, some clues show the tradition could even date back to Neolithic times. Archaeologists have found a few funerary routes in northern Europe that lead to Bronze Age burial grounds. In Britain, some burial mounds have been found to have neolithic earthen avenues, called cursuses, that run in straight lines connecting funerary sites – just like the corpse roads. In those days, you didn’t have the church or the need for consecrated burial grounds, so the reason behind their original pagan purpose is still a bit murky, but one possible explanation is they were used as a spirit-way function. Some may have even had stone rows lining them. There have also been archaeological findings in Somerset, where straight tracks made out of timber dating back some 4000 to 6000 years were found in bogs and likely used as causeways to transport to the dead.