It says something about the stability of England that the charity she established still keeps up the pathway. An inscribed stone declares: “From this hill begins the praise / Of Maud Heath’s gift to these Highways”. In 1838, the 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne, a politician and local landowner, erected a pillar bearing a statue of Maud Heath and her basket, with verses beneath that include the couplet: “Christian wayfarer in a world of strife / Be still and consider the Path of Life.” The sensibility might be that of the early 19th century, but the thought would not have been foreign to a late‑medieval pilgrim.

Sally Badham cites a Middle English poem, The Orchard of Sion, which develops an idea of St Catherine of Siena (1347-80) of Christ himself as a bridge. Eamon Duffy, in The Stripping of the Altars (1992), warns against regarding legacies to bridge-building as evidence of any late-medieval secularisation. It had a status as a good work (which could gain a church indulgence, the remission of penance due for sin, as in the case of donors for the building of a bridge in 1233 at Wetherby, over the river Wharfe like Tadcaster’s), almost on a level with the corporal works of mercy such as feeding the hungry or visiting prisoners.

Bridges often had a chapel. Walter Gervas, before his death in 1258, left money for a bridge at Exeter, asking that his wife, father and mother should be remembered at an annual service in the bridge chapel celebrated by a special chaplain. Such chapels survive at Wakefield, Bradford-on-Avon and St Ives, Huntingdonshire.

The bridge chapel at Rochester once held a list of benefactors, starting with Sir John Cobham in 1391. Though his bridge was demolished in 1856, with the help of the Royal Engineers, to make way for a bridge of iron to let through river traffic in the age of steam, the Rochester Bridge Trust that he set up exists still, even if no one is now enjoined to pray for his soul.