Walking the Whinny-Moor: Corpse roads and pre-funeral death rituals in early modern England

This paper discusses the evidence for “corpse roads” in early modern Britain. Corpse roads were route ways used by funeral parties to transport the deceased from the place of death to the place of final interment. In some cases, some routes took on localised symbolic or folkloric significance, and in a few cases, this is preserved in the present day in contemporary route names, tourism and on modern maps. This paper reviews the evidence for corpse roads, and the methodologies needed to interrogate that evidence. These methodologies are drawn from folklore, ethnology, archaeology and history. The case of one corpse path, in Swaledale in northern England, is presented as a case study.