Wade’s Causey, also called Wade’s Causeway, is a stone road across the moor toward Pickering, locally said to have been built by the giant Wade for his wife Bell, who travelled there to milk her giant cow. The road and the legends around it embody a tension between historical remains and imaginative reinvention: stones associated with Roman construction become part of a tale populated by giants, while archaeology is altered or lost through later practical use.

The Road and Its Legendary Builders

Wade and Bell belong to a local tradition that makes them builders of monumental works for ungrateful men. The account compares them with the Hrimthurse who built the wall of Asgard and with the fairy Melusina. Wade’s Causey, described as a regular road of stones laid over a stratum of gravel or moor sandstone, is explained as a practical undertaking: Wade made it so Bell could cross the moors to milk her giant cow.

The legend gives the surrounding landscape a domestic as well as monumental scale. Bell’s cow is imagined as so enormous that one of its ribs was displayed at Mulgrave Castle. The supposed relic was, in fact, a whale’s jawbone, a material fact that both punctures and sustains the story: an unfamiliar fossil becomes evidence for the giant world the legend has made imaginable.

Stones, Graves, and Reused Matter

The moorland tumuli, or houes, are also absorbed into the story of Wade and Bell. They are said to be heaps of boulders Bell carried in her apron, whose strings sometimes broke. A huge boulder on Sleights Moor was attributed to Bell’s giant child, who had thrown it and dented it with her iron ribcage; the boulder was later broken up for road-mending. In another account of the road’s material history, stones from its Roman construction were taken to build dry-stone walls. Such reuse preserved practical boundaries for sheep while damaging the archaeological record.

These stories coexist with other accounts of the region’s past. The surrounding moors hold barrows and ancient graves, while a stone row at Sleights was thought to mark part of an avenue belonging to a stone circle. The road’s Roman origin, its connection to the Saxon worship of Thor near Thordisa, and its proximity to prehistoric burial sites place successive histories beside one another without resolving them into a single authoritative explanation.

Local Myth and the Imagination of History

Wade has been proposed as a name for the ancient god Woden; Thor, meanwhile, was certainly worshipped in Saxon times at the village of Thordisa, near the head of Eastrow Beck. In the giant legend, these religious and historical traces mingle with Roman military construction, a whale’s jaw, Pickering Castle, and the tombs of ancient Britons and Saxon chieftains. The result is not a reliable chronology but a local imaginative synthesis, in which distinct remnants are refashioned into a story of Wade and Bell.

Wade’s Causey matters as both a physical route and an illustration of that process. Its stones can be moved, broken, and reused, while the stories attached to them make the past newly present in the landscape. The road thus carries a double history: material evidence that can be diminished by later use, and a mythic account that adapts surviving objects into a continuing local memory.