Well worth their salt: Peakland’s packhorse trails

Packhorse bridge

In the second of our series on the history of the county’s highways and byways, Deborah Barham Smith looks at the development of Derbyshire’s packhorse trails and jaggers’ causeways.

MAN’S ASSOCIATION with equids (the family that includes horses and donkeys) goes back more than 40,000 years, evidenced by early Neanderthal cave art in northern Europe. Horses were first hunted for food but domestication and their later use as draught animals evolved around 5,000 years ago in the Bronze Age…