many of the corpse roads have long disappeared, while the original purposes of those that still survive as footpaths have been largely forgotten, especially if features such as coffin stones or crosses no longer exist. fields crossed by church-way paths often had names like "church-way" or "kirk-way field", and today it is sometimes possible to plot the course of some lost church-ways by the sequence of old field names, local knowledge of churches, local legends and lost features of the landscape marked on old maps, etc. one of the oldest superstitions is that any land over which a corpse is carried becomes a public right of way.