Start with the boundaries

Most walkers look at the view. The better ones look at the edges. A field is a fairly recent idea — its shape has been redrawn by every generation that farmed it — but the hedge, the wall and the sunken lane around it often survive far longer than the crop inside. Those boundaries are documents. Read them and the countryside stops being a pretty backdrop and becomes a record of who worked here, what they kept, and where they were going.

You need no special equipment for this, just a willingness to slow down at gateways and ask why the line runs where it does.

Hedgerows and the arithmetic of age

The old rough rule, attributed to the ecologist Max Hooper, is that the number of woody species in a thirty-yard stretch of hedge approximates its age in centuries. Pure hawthorn might mean a couple of hundred years. Find hawthorn, hazel, field maple, dogwood, spindle and wild service tree in the same thirty yards and you may be standing beside a boundary that long predates the Enclosure Acts.

Treat it as a rule of thumb, not gospel. Soil, management and the history of the surrounding land all muddy the arithmetic. But it is a useful starting point, and it gives you something to count while you catch your breath.

Look at the ground beneath the hedge as much as the hedge itself. Where a boundary once edged ancient woodland, woodland flowers often linger in the verge — bluebells, wood anemone, dog's mercury — long after the trees have gone. Where a hedge sits on a bank with a ditch alongside, the ditch usually faces the neighbouring parish. Parish boundaries were often doubled up, with each side maintained by different people holding different views on neatness.

• Species count — more woody species in thirty yards generally means an older hedge.
• Relict woodland flora — bluebells and wood anemone suggest the hedge is a fragment of something much older.
• Laying and neglect — a laid hedge shows stems cut partway and bent over; a straggly line full of holes has been flailed and forgotten.

Dry stone walls

West and north of the country, stone takes over from thorn. Walls run across the limestone of the Cotswolds and the Yorkshire Dales, the gritstone of the Peak, the granite of Dartmoor and the slate of Wales. Many are products of enclosure, built between roughly 1750 and 1850, though on Dartmoor and parts of the uplands you can walk beside field banks that are considerably older.

The details repay a pause. Throughstones, sometimes called bond stones, run right through the wall to tie the two faces together. Coping caps the top — cock-and-hen in Yorkshire, vertical stones in the Cotswolds — and sheds water away from the core. Look for squeeze stiles, narrow gaps built for people, and sheep creeps, low square openings that let sheep through while holding back larger stock. A wall that bulges and wanders has settled, or was built on ground that never stopped moving.

Holloways: paths worn down to the bone

The most evocative old routes are the ones that have sunk. A holloway — sunken lane, hollow way, or whatever the local name happens to be — began as a track and ended up as a trench, worn by feet, hooves, cartwheels and, above all, running water. Some run two or three metres below the fields on either side, tree roots exposed in the banks, ferns and moss along the bottom, hazel arching overhead.

They cluster where routes were fixed: between villages, up to a church, along a ridge, down to a river crossing. The map names give them away — Hollow Lane, Coffin Lane, Packhorse Lane, Drove Road. In winter they hold mud; in summer they are cool, green and faintly strange, and worth lingering in.

Reading a route as you walk

• Check the base of hedges and banks — that is where the oldest plants and the oldest evidence sit.
• Notice width — a broad green lane between two hedges was usually a drove road, wide enough to move stock.
• Read the names on the map — Green Lane, Long Lane, Hollow, Slait and Drove are clues, not decoration.
• Watch the ditches — on parish boundaries, look for doubled hedges with a ditch between them.
• Look at gateways — worn thresholds and widened gaps show where traffic actually went, whatever the map says.

Walking well among old things

Practical courtesies matter as much as interpretation. Use stiles, gaps and gates rather than climbing walls; dry stone is fragile, and damage from a scrambled boot can take a skilled waller a day to put right. Close what you open, keep dogs on leads around livestock and ground-nesting birds, and stick to the path across growing crops. In wet months, holloways and clay footpaths want boots rather than trainers.

None of this demands specialist knowledge. It asks only that you wonder why the boundary runs there, why the path sinks, why one hedge holds six species and the next holds one. Do that often enough and the landscape becomes legible — a place with a history you can follow, step by step, under your own feet.