SOME years ago I had a phone call from an enthusiastic young reporter who wanted to write an exposé about “the murder that took place in the countryside on the outskirts of town”.

Rather puzzled, I asked for more clues and he referred to a “terrible deed that must have occurred in Cut Throat Lane”.

There is, indeed, an ancient, secluded thoroughfare that many of us still know as ‘Cut Throat’.

It runs eastwards from Manor Road, Woodham Walter, to Abbey Turning, in the Maldon hamlet of Beeleigh, and dissects an intriguing, almost forgotten landscape that includes the Georgian Doric-columned Woodlands Lodge and, sitting on the boundary, 19th-century Northall Cottages.

Referring to it by that tantalising name is clearly not a new thing and goes back well over a hundred years.

Writing in 1894, that master of the Maldon scene, Edward Arthur Fitch (1854-1912) gives directions to “take the first turning to the left past Guys (formerly East Bowers) into Cut Throat Lane, which leads out near the top of the Beeleigh road, just before it joins London Road”.

In those days (and for many centuries before that) milestone-lined London Road was the main highway in and out of Maldon. What Cut Throat offered was literally a short cut, as the name is derived from Cut-A-Thwart, or to cut across.

It is an unusual, albeit not unique, title (there is another one in nearby Witham).

However, our example is at least 15th century that, in the language of Middle English, joins “A” with “Thwart” to give us “crossing from side to side”.

Even our local seafarers would have been familiar with the term while sailing on the Blackwater, as it was used by them to indicate crossing the line of a ship’s course.

Back on dry land and the physical appearance of Maldon’s Cut-A-Thwart Lane suggests it pre-dates even that place-name evidence.

In parts, the road surface is significantly lower than the fields on either side and there are patchy hedgerows and the remains of high banks.

This phenomena can be the result of a combination of erosion by water (the lane is still regularly waterlogged), traffic (carts and the feet of humans and animals pounding away at the surface in the days before asphalt was laid) and the digging of banks to mark boundaries of estates (Beeleigh Abbey lands were defined from 1180 and the Fitzwalter’s adjacent park by 1237).

All in all, this has resulted in a route that appears to be sunken – a “hollow way”, from the Old English “hola-weg”.

The countryside historian, Oliver Rackham (1939-2015) cited 38 mentions of hola-wegs in Anglo-Saxon charters.

We shouldn’t be surprised by that, because the place name ‘Beeleigh’ is in itself of 10th-century origin, meaning “a clearing in the trees where beehives are kept”.

So did those early settlers, the resident bee-people, use that track and, crucially, was it old even when they were there?

Fitch hints that it was when he says “opposite the lane is a gate leading into ‘Mount Field’, a fine tumulus (in other words, a prehistoric burial mound)”.

But history can be full of surprises, for the tumulus was excavated in 1966 and turned out to be the base of a post-Medieval windmill.

However, some prehistoric material was unearthed in the field and so the theory put forward by antiquarians like Alfred Watkins (1855-1935) that these hollow ways were etched as prehistoric notches to give sightlines to and from hilltop settlements (like Maeldune) could easily apply in our case. There is a final, perhaps more tangible, chapter in this landscape story.

In the summer of 1550, the Princess Mary (Mary Tudor, later Queen Mary I) was under virtual house arrest at the now long-gone Woodham Walter Hall.

Her agents hatched a plot to smuggle her on board a merchant ship moored at Maldon’s Hythe, so that she could escape to the relative safety of the Netherlands.

Elaborate plans were made, including stowing her belongings for transportation in hopsacks and following some kind of “secret way”, avoiding the main road.

In the end the idea was aborted and the rest, as they say, is history, but there is one obvious contender for that royal route – Cut Throat Lane. So from misconceptions about a murder, to monastic boundary, Saxon walkway and potential royal escape route, Cut-A-Thwart has the lot and all these centuries on we can still travel along its length today.