Hitchin Nub News aims to support our community, promoting shops, businesses, charities, clubs and sports groups.

We profile some of these businesses and organisations regularly in a feature called 'Up Close in Hitchin' while also encouraging opinion pieces from our readers and trusted contributors, including the brilliant Sparky.

So, read on for Sparky's Hitchin View: Roots, Rock and Rebels: a walk back in time on the Icknield Way

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There is a near-inaccessible scree-filled ravine high in Cumbria's Langdale Pikes where the volcanic greenstone rock is exceptionally hard.

Between 4000 to 6000 years ago, members of a local tribe clambered up the couple of thousand feet from the valley floor and then, either by accident or design, located this very localised vein and promptly got to work.

In time this vertiginous gully became the site of one of Britain's largest and certainly best-known sites for the quarrying, shaping and polishing of that most useful of Neolithic tools: the stone axe head.

And they weren't just making them for their own needs; this was a quality product fashioned to be both used and also to be traded.

And in time it became the polished stone axe head to own: high quality, distinctive and a desirable item of significant value…

Back here in modern Hitchin, some 270 or so miles south, we are fortunate to have an ancient archaeological site right here on our own doorstep.

But this one is long, thin and very much at ground level and you are positively encouraged to stomp around on it as much as you like and get right back to your own prehistoric roots.

The Icknield Way

Originally starting at Wells-next-the-Sea on the north Norfolk coast, this ancient trackway initially heads south then south-west across East Anglia, eventually passing through our area and the Chilterns before reaching the Thames at the Goring Gap.

From there onwards it is known as The Ridgeway. But that's a whole different story.

The route of the Icknield Way has now been taken over in parts by roads, such as the A11 in Norfolk and Suffolk and by our very own A505.

Where the Way is buried under tarmac the present-day explorer is offered safer passage on alternative routes, invariably referred to on signs and maps as the 'Icknield Way Path'.

But what of that name, 'The Icknield Way'?

In the late Iron Age (c100BC to 100AD) the Iceni were one of the largest of the tribes in the east, their capital being at Venta Icenorum, some five miles south of modern-day Norwich.

Although granted 'client king' status by the Romans following the invasion in AD43, this initially peaceful relationship turned sour following the death of their leader, Prasutagus.

Matters soon worsened considerably and the king's widow was driven to lead a bloody revolt against the invaders, resulting in the sacking, looting and burning of a couple of their towns, including Verulamium- modern day St Albans- in AD61.

Losses were high on the Roman side until the rebels were eventually met in pitched battle and thoroughly defeated.

It was this act of doomed and bloody rebellion that earned the Iceni and their warrior queen their everlasting place in our history.

Her name? Boudica.

The earliest recorded use of the name 'Icknield Way' didn't come about for another 900 years after this and it is clear that it was certainly a very well-established trade route well before the Iceni made use of it.

Little did they know that their name would live on for eternity as a place for us to walk in their footsteps and take leisure in far more peaceful times.

But how old is it then?

In his 1979 book 'The roads and trackways of Britain' the esteemed archaeologist Christopher Taylor suggests that the Way, together with many other pre-historic routes, may well have started as tracks frequently used by animals.

As late Mesolithic man (c5000BC) tracked these herds of undomesticated cattle they too would have trodden the same way repeatedly and in time paths for us humans were born.

The 'new stone age', or Neolithic Period that followed, saw man settling down and using an increasingly wider range of more sophisticated tools to tame and work the land.

Fashioned from high quality flint, chert and other rock, these axe heads were attached to wooden handles and were often obtained by barter if no suitable rock was to be found nearby.

And this is where the true antiquity of the Icknield Way as a trade route becomes apparent: not only have many examples of flint tools made at the Grimes Graves workings near Thetford been found at settlements on or near our trackway, but we also have one of the UK's greatest concentration of finds of those Great Langdale axe heads right here in our region.

Think about this: over 5000 years ago many examples of that ancient tool- fashioned by so-called 'primitive man'- perched in a gully a couple of thousand feet up a Cumbrian mountain- found their way to the forests, marshes and hills of East Anglia.

And a map of these finds, shared by Taylor in his book, shows a clear correlation with the route of the Icknield Way.

In short, the Icknield Way was already several thousand years old when the tribe that eventually gave it its name started using it.

A truly ancient trackway indeed

My pictures were taken earlier this week on a stunning stretch of the 'real' Icknield Way (not one of the diversionary routes of the 'Icknield Way Path') near Telegraph Hill. Truly gorgeous.

I hasten to add that I have nothing against the diversions of the Icknield Way path- it is certainly safer than strolling along the hard shoulder of the A11, for example- but in my opinion it is on these original sections that you get a proper feel for this ancient route and the important relationship between it and the landscape.

Search these sections out. The walk to Wilbury Hill from Ickleford ('Iceni ford') via Cadwell is another fine and even more local example. And all are great throughout the year. Enjoy!

And one final thought: do you know what the symbol of the modern Icknield Way Path is?

Why, it's a stone axe. Of course it is.