Maud Heath's Causeway is a pathway in rural
Wiltshire, England, which rises above the
Avon floodplain on sixty-four brick arches, as it carries an undistinguished country road between
Bremhill and
Langley Burrell.
The causeway is the gift of the eponymous Maud Heath; 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. Five hundred and some 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 Maud Heath's Monument, a statue of the eponymous 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
Lord 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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