THE PEDDARS WAY

In Norfolk and East Anglia, the Peddars Way is an immediately recognisible 'brand,' being a sinuous footpath, sometimes continuous, running from the Brecks to the north Norfolk coast. It smacks of walking and pedlars, and even sheep droving. What is more difficult to explain is where the name actually came from, or what it once meant.
If the Romans had a name for this road then, irritatingly, they did not leave behind any written record or inscription. Or if they did, it has not been found or recognised. In any event, the Peddars Way is not mentioned in the Tabula Peutingeriana (the Peutinger Table), or the Antonine Itineraries, both of which are listings of Roman highways which, regionally, tend to concentrate on London to Caistor St Edmund (Venta Icenorum) routes.
Because of this, and in terms of meaning, it has been all too easy to fall back on rather obvious ped/pedestrian or ped/pedlar connotations, and indeed, there may be a grain of truth here somewhere. But the situation is more complicated than this, as I discovered in the early 1980s while writing the first guidebook for the then proposed long-distance walking route from Knettishall to Cromer.
It soon became obvious that this was a trackway which has had many names, including Stretegate, Ridgerow Road, Ridge or Ridgeway Road, and Deal Row. But these, it became clear, were purely local names for particular stretches of the Way, and not names for the Way as a whole.
Then I came across a reference to the fact that CH Lewton-Brain, the West Norfolk historian, had discovered on a 1580 estate map of Flitcham a mention of a road named as 'Street Way alias Peddars Way.' Later, another researcher found various spelling variations of the same or similar names recorded in documents from 1423 to 1561.
What did it all mean? Might other routes aside from the Peddars Way road, and in different localities, have shared the same name? This is what seems to have happened. And when the matter was mentioned in the Eastern Daily Press several readers wrote to say they knew of roads or trackways in their area which also had the name Peddars Way. Places or localities as diverse as Beachamwell, Thurlton, Harpley, Christchurch Park (Suffolk), Lessingham, Cawston, Haddiscoe, Beccles, Fulmodeston, and even Mousehold Heath, on the Norwich fringe.
Even now the matter is not entirely clear. But what we can say is that the name Peddars Way is not Roman, and that in the past it was not exclusive to this particular route. Indeed, there is the possibility that it might even have been in fairly general use from, for example, circa AD1500s onwards.
The name seems to have described a route for foot traffic (pedlars, people selling or carrying goods or produce, or even sheep walks or sheep droving), and may have been in use for several hundred years. Gradually, however, it seems to have dropped out of fashion (except in one or two pockets) and then gradually retreated to become the only recognisible name on this one particular road.
The Peddars Way, I think, has much more than a Roman history.