Making Tracks

One spring day in 1927, by a road near the River Dart, a passer-by noticed a tin cup hanging from a stick. Inside was a handwritten poem commemorating Weary Rosser - a former soldier turned tramp, crowned by his peers as 'King of the Dossers'. That fragile roadside memorial opens the door to a Britain we rarely see: a country shaped not only by those who settled, but by those who never stopped moving.

In Making Tracks, bestselling author Charlie Connelly uncovers the hidden, itinerant history of Britain, bringing to life the people who lived on its roads, waterways and margins. Tramps and drovers, pilgrims and pedlars, showpeople and canal families, herring lassies and Roma communities emerge from the shadows to reveal a nation built in motion. Their footsteps became tracks and roads; their labour underpinned economies; their cultures left marks still etched into the landscape.

This is history discovered by walking it. Cattle drovers’ routes still wind across hills and fields, their presence lingering in inns, place names and overnight pastures. Canals tell stories of whole families living in narrowboats, hauling cargo through an engineering marvel carved by navvies. Fairgrounds and market squares echo with the lives of travelling entertainers, whose precarious existence combined hardship, ingenuity and spectacle. On the coasts, the herring lassies arrive in their thousands, spilling from trains each autumn to gut fish from dawn to dusk with astonishing speed and stamina. Once famous across Britain, their annual migration - and the industry that sustained it - has almost vanished from memory.

Threaded through these journeys is the elusive figure of Weary Rosser himself, glimpsed in records but fully alive in the affection shown by those who remembered him. His story reflects a wider truth: Britain has always contained a community within a community, bound by movement, mutual care and survival. Seen this way, the map of Britain becomes fluid rather than fixed — a living record of centuries of wandering, work, faith and curiosity, still waiting to be followed.