Wade's Causeway is the name most commonly given to a sinuous, linear monument up to 6000 years old that lies within the North York Moors national park area in North Yorkshire, England. The name may refer to either scheduled ancient monument number 1004876—an extant length of stone course of just over one mile in length on Wheeldale Moor, and that is known locally as the Skivick—or to a postulated greater original extension of this structure to the north and south for up to 25 miles. The extant, visible course on Wheeldale Moor consists of a modest embankment of soil, peat, gravel and loose pebble 0.7 metres (2–3 feet) in height and 4–7 metres (16–26 feet) in width. The gently cambered embankment is capped with unmortared and loosely abutted flagstones. Its original form is somewhat uncerta
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| - Wade's Causeway is the name most commonly given to a sinuous, linear monument up to 6000 years old that lies within the North York Moors national park area in North Yorkshire, England. The name may refer to either scheduled ancient monument number 1004876—an extant length of stone course of just over one mile in length on Wheeldale Moor, and that is known locally as the Skivick—or to a postulated greater original extension of this structure to the north and south for up to 25 miles. The extant, visible course on Wheeldale Moor consists of a modest embankment of soil, peat, gravel and loose pebble 0.7 metres (2–3 feet) in height and 4–7 metres (16–26 feet) in width. The gently cambered embankment is capped with unmortared and loosely abutted flagstones. Its original form is somewhat uncerta
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| Built
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| - James Patterson, Oxley Grabham, Tempest Anderson, James Rutter, Raymond Hayes, J Ingram, A Precious, P Cook
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| Name
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| Type
| - linear monument, possibly road or dike
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| Alternate Name
| - Wheeldale Roman Road; Goathland Roman Road; Auld Wife's Trod; The Skivick
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| epochs
| - Variously contended to be Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman or Medieval
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| management
| - North York Moors National Park Authority, in cooperation with English Heritage
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| abandoned
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| Condition
| - ruined, overgrown, heavily robbed
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| imagealttext
| - Photograph of Wade's Causeway, taken in approximately 2005, showing the stone surface now almost completely hidden underneath vegetation
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| Builder
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| Source
| - —George Young, 1817
- —Thomas Bulmer, 1890
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| public access
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| Quote
| - pernicious... contemptible... our venerable military causeway has been unmercifully torn up...It is almost enough to break the heart of an antiquary, to see a monument that has withstood the ravages of time for 16 centuries wantonly destroyed, to erect a paltry dike
- [Wade] is represented as having been of gigantic stature... His wife... was also of enormous size, and, according to the legend, carried in her apron the stones with which her husband made the causeway that still bears his name.
- I was surprised when I first mett with it distant about two miles from any town or dwelling, of the common stone of the countrey, fit enough for the purpose in a black springey rotten moor which continues about six miles to near the Sinus
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| Location
| - Egton Parish, North Yorkshire, England
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| abstract
| - Wade's Causeway is the name most commonly given to a sinuous, linear monument up to 6000 years old that lies within the North York Moors national park area in North Yorkshire, England. The name may refer to either scheduled ancient monument number 1004876—an extant length of stone course of just over one mile in length on Wheeldale Moor, and that is known locally as the Skivick—or to a postulated greater original extension of this structure to the north and south for up to 25 miles. The extant, visible course on Wheeldale Moor consists of a modest embankment of soil, peat, gravel and loose pebble 0.7 metres (2–3 feet) in height and 4–7 metres (16–26 feet) in width. The gently cambered embankment is capped with unmortared and loosely abutted flagstones. Its original form is somewhat uncertain since it has been greatly weathered by nature and subjected to extensive damage by man. The structure has been the subject of oral folklore in the surrounding area for several hundred years and possibly more than a millennium. Its construction was commonly attributed in folkloric tales to a giant known as Wade, thought to have been a mythological figure of Germanic or Norse origins. It was not until the 1720s that the causeway was mentioned in a published text, after which it became known outside of the local area. Within a few years it became of interest to a number of antiquarians who visited the site and exchanged commentary on the structure's probable historicity. These early historians interpreted the monument as a causeway across marshy ground, most commonly attributing its construction to the Roman military in the first or fourth centuries AD. This explanation went largely unchallenged throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The extant length of the causeway on Wheeldale Moor was cleared of vegetation and excavated in the early twentieth century by a local gamekeeper with an interest in archaeology. Historian Ivan Margary, an authority on Roman roads, agreed with identification of the causeway 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 then the subject of further excavation and extensive study over the course of a decade by archaeologist Raymond Hayes in the 1950s and 1960s, partially funded by the Council for British Archaeology. The results of his investigation, which concluded that the structure was a Roman road, were published in 1964 by the Scarborough Archaeological and History Society. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the identification of the structure as a Roman road has been questioned by academics, and a variety of alternative interpretations suggested for the causeway's purpose and date of construction. The site's co-managers, English Heritage, in 2012 proposed several avenues of research that might be used to settle some of the questions that have arisen regarding the structure's origins and usage.
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