Maud Heath's Causeway
Maud Heath's Causeway is a pathway in rural Wiltshire built along the floodplain of the Avon on sixty-four brick arches. It carries no grand highway but an undistinguished country road between Bremhill and Langley Burrell. It was built in the fifteenth century.
The causeway was the gift of the eponymous Maud Heath, a wealthy widow. A sundial on the spot reports that she made her fortune carrying eggs to market at Chippenham. She was a widow and childless, and when she died "in the year of grace 1474, for the good of travellers did bestow in land and houses the sum of eight pounds a year foreer to be laid out on a causeway leading from Wick Hill to Chippenham Clift", which was the path along which she had tramped to market several times a week for most of her life. Over five hundred years later, the charity still maintains the path out of her bequest.
The Langley Burrell terminus - at Wick Hill - features an inscription in stone "From this hill begins the praise/ Of Maud Heath's gift to these Highways"'. Further up the Hill is a statue of the lady, erected on a high column in 1838 looking out over the Chippenham mud flats. The statue, in a bonnet and authentic plebeian clothes from the reign of Edward IV, was erected by the great Whig Henry Petty-FitzMaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne and features a poem by the critic William Lisle Bowles, who was vicar of Bremhill at the time, which reads:
"Thou who dost pause on this aerial height
Where Maud Heath's Pathway winds in shade and light
Christian wayfarer in a world of strife
Be still and consider the Path of Life."
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