Old, abandoned roads may not have the appeal of a ruined temple, but I find them strangely appealing. Many of these old roads were important for family farmers.

In Europe, carts and plows have been pulled by cows and oxen (castrated bulls) from Neolithic times, 8000 years ago, until the twentieth century. In the 1980s, when farmers in northern Portugal were trading their local breeds of work cows for Holsteins and tractors, the old farm roads were still clearly marked in local memory. Yellow work cows were still pulling carts down a few of these roads, and many abandoned ones still crisscrossed the forest between the villages. The old roads were designed to a standard width, which was just enough to let two oxen pass each other, pulling a cart. A bit tongue in cheek, the farmers called this width “de res a res� (from beef to beef). The passage of thousands of cart wheels had often carved deep grooves through the pine forest.

European settlers in North America also left the remains of narrow roads. After the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was created in 1934 in Tennessee and North Carolina, smallholder farmers were gradually squeezed out. They left behind churches, cemeteries (still visited by descendants), log cabins (some maintained by the Park Service) and old, rutted roads, carved through the low hills. Unlike the churches and cabins, the old roads are largely ignored.

This last week in Belgium, I noticed traces of other old roads, when Paul Van Mele showed me around the countryside that he loves in Limburg: a gorgeous patchwork of fields and small forests of oak and ash trees. One of these woods was Duivelsbroek (the Devil’s Swamp), between the villages of Ellikom and Erpekom. Boardwalks now made it easier to walk through the muddier places, and a sign, which Paul translated for me, explained how the Devil’s Swamp got its name. It was too wet and the soil was too thin to cultivate. People didn’t want to farm this rough bit of wetland. The devil could have it.

And yet there on a little rise in the Duivelsbroek was an old road for ox carts, and, like the Portuguese paths, wide enough for two oxen to pass in opposite directions.

Charming public information signs explained the landscape for the hikers and mountain-bikers, who now travel through the forest, but as near as I could tell, no sign mentioned the old roads. By contrast the old stone grain mills had been graciously restored and turned into restaurants.

Oxen are strong, but slow. The farmers leading the little carts would have been eager to find the shortest way from home to field, which is one reason they made roads through inhospitable places, like Duivelsbroek. The shortest route from hearth to field was often through a forest.

As machines replaced oxen in Europe, farm roads became wider, and paved, with fewer roads than before. The new roads were expensive to build and maintain, but also faster to travel, so people could take a slightly longer way home on their tractor than they had on their ox cart.

Previous generations left behind not just the rubble of their buildings, but also traces of their roads, often still visible in the forest. The old roads remind us that farmers have always had to think about getting to the field and bringing the harvest home.