The Hidden Ways: Scotland’s Forgotten Roads

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Across Scotland, Alistair Moffat follows the traces of movement that still lie quietly in the ground. He walks Roman roads once shaken by marching feet, then turns onto byways and pilgrim routes, drove roads and railways, turnpikes and sea roads, each one a line drawn by need, belief, trade, or power.

These are not just ways through the land, but records of what has passed. As he retraces the paths of people long gone, the landscape begins to read differently: hills and crossings, coasts and corridors, shaped by choices made centuries earlier. The journey becomes a way of listening, of noticing what remains when stories have thinned and names have slipped away.

Step by step, Moffat charts a history that feels close to the surface, marked into Scotland’s contours and carried forward in the routes we still take.