Sunken lane

Some are ancient, with evidence of Roman or Iron Age origins, but others such as the Deep Hill Ruts in the old Oregon Trail at Guernsey, Wyoming, developed in the space of a decade or two.

Because the roadway is restricted by the banks on either side, sunken lanes typically admit the passage of only one vehicle; that is, they are single track roads.

In The Making of the English Landscape, W. G. Hoskins explains the origin of some English holloways as a pair of matched earth banks marking the boundaries of two landowners' estates, as evidenced by the "two-fold ditch", twifealda dich in a charter of c. 1174 describing the boundary between the abbot of Tavistock's land at Abbotsham, Devon and Richard Coffin's land at Alwington and Cockington.

The German army used sunken lanes to implement strong points and defenses to stop the American troops on the Cotentin peninsula and around the town of Saint-Lô.

One of the largest networks of such routes in Germany is to be found in the municipalities of Alsheim and Mettenheim in Rhineland-Palatinate, where there they make up over 30 km of hiking trails.

[9] In Galicia and western Asturias (both regions of northern Spain) the sunken lanes are usually called congostras or corredoiras, from Latin coangusta 'confined' and curro, currere 'run', being a common and characteristic feature of rural areas.

[citation needed] In Syria, faint traces of hollow ways attest to a dense network of tracks or paths connecting Bronze Age sites with each other and with their cultivation zones in the fourth and third millennia BC, and thousands of kilometres of such routes have been surveyed.