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My first thought was shoes, and it's still the biggest suspect. Running shoes are really only designed to hold up for about 500 miles, which includes walking. If your shoes are over 6 months old, and you ever walk anywhere in them, get a new pair. If they have discontinued the ones that you used to wear, find a runners store or catalog AND ASK. The wrong shoes can make all the grizzle in your legs very unhappy.
Stretching, as everyone else has said, is also very important. Lower thigh pain may just be the tightness moving up the same tendon, though. You need to make sure to stretch both sets of muscle groups on either side of the pain. That means calf, quads, hamstrings, hip flexors.
Running on gravel is a good change from concrete, but make sure that you're running in the center of the road, on top of the crown, if you can. Running constantly on a slant can do big damage, too. I know that from experience. If you were running on a concrete street with a crown, that could have contributed to the problem as well. Your "downhill" leg can get very angry at you.
Hopefully, the pain is gone and you're back to running. It's a great passtime, and it's probably the original sport. But that was back in the day when the loser gotten eaten by the lion.
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