One of these old ways, a unique survival from Roman or even prehistoric times, is now under threat. The Whole Way, which links the Cambridgeshire villages of Barrington and Harlton across the top of a chalk ridge, rises between raised banks and descends north across open fields, a short cut between two lines of Saxon villages hugging the base of the hills on either side.

Christopher Taylor, formerly head of Archaeological Survey for the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and author of Roads and Tracks of Britain, said: “The Whole Way is first recorded by the name Holeweye in about 1252: the name is a corruption of ‘holloway’, the form that it takes in places as the result of centuries of traffic along it. The southern part in Barrington parish was realigned in the 1790s during the enclosure of the medieval fields there.

“Although long known as a medieval road, recent research has led to its recognition as a much older track: it is the only surviving example in southwest Cambridgeshire of a group of tracks of Roman or even earlier date that bounded and gave access to contemporary fields. These tracks were all either destroyed or altered out of recognition in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Whole Way is the only one of these tracks to remain in anything like its original form. As such it is a most important survivor of a very ancient landscape.”

A cement company, seeking a massive expansion of the Barrington quarry, now wants to remove this link with the past. CEMEX says that for its operation, which includes a new chimney higher than the hill itself, to go ahead “the Whole Way has to be diverted”. “The proposed ‘diversion’ would mean that the character of this track, exhibiting as it does more than 2,000 years of history, would be lost,” Mr Taylor says.

During his time in the archaeology department at University College Cardiff Evans’s first book, The Environment of Early Man in the British Isles, and its successor, Introduction to Environmental Archaeology, became standard works in defining the subject, while his final book, Environmental Archaeology and the Social Order, in 2003, brought ancient peoples’ perception of their world into the equation. Avebury, with Silbury Hill nearby and the neolithic enclosure of Windmill Hill above, is a peculiarly appropriate place to remember him.