Snickelways

The snickelways are a series pathways through cities like York that combine shops and houses together in extremely narrow pathways with weird names like Mad Alice Lane and Finkle Street. At first the pathways were simply just normal streets until 1983 when Mark Jones wrote a book and used the term snickelways and the new vocabulary caught on. The word comes from the word snicklet which is a passageway between fences or other types of narrow alleyways. People believe that the snickelways have medieval origins and have survived for centuries.

There is hardly any documented history about what may have happened in the snickelways. There is a story about a building being lost in the snickelways, but besides that there are only facts about them being easy shortcuts for people who know there way around them through the years. However judging by the facts you can infer that people may have used them as getaway routes or someone may have gotten lost. When you look at pictures of York, you'll see that the city is surrounded by a wall, and these snickleways cut through the city in unusual ways, creating shortcuts and secret passages throughout the town.