ROMAN ROADS

INTRODUCTION

21^st Century Britons live in an age of unprecedented mobility. Never before have people - other than the rich and powerful – been able to afford their own transport, and been able to use it to travel so far or so fast.

We demand more, wider and faster roads. Yet what is provided never seems adequate. It is tempting to ask whether there was ever a time when roads were so good that they could cope with the traffic which used them without today’s frustrations.

The Romans were famous for their roads and were the first civilisation to build a properly engineered road system in Britain. But did travellers during the Pax Romana after 43 AD fare better than we do today? Did the roads go where people wanted to travel, were they well constructed and maintained, and were there delays because of road-works, congestion or bad weather? How did travel times compare with those of today, and were there places to stop and get refreshment? Unfortunately, there is little hard evidence to go on beyond the 6 000 miles or so of physical roads that the Romans left behind in Britain.

THE ROMAN NETWORK

The roads of the Romans set the pattern for today’s A-road network, radiating from London ( Londinium ) to all parts of Britain with a few roads cutting across country. We do not know whether these roads had Roman names, so we rely on names given them later by the Anglo-Saxons.

The Ermin Way runs from Gloucester ( Glevum) to Cirencester ( Corinium ) and beyond to the Ancient British Ridgeway on the Wiltshire Downs while Ermine Street runs north from London to Lincoln ( Lindum ). Watling Street runs all the way from the Kent coast at Richborough, across the Thames to London, then north-westward to St Albans ( Verulamium ) and Wroxter ( Viroconium ). The Fosse Way, meanwhile, starts in Devon and cuts across England in a north-easterly direction, linking up with Ermine Street south of Lincoln. The combined road heads north by way of a Humber ferry to York ( Eboracum ). Other roads from London include Stane Street to Chichester and the Devil’s Highway to Silchester ( Calleva )and from there to western England and Wales. Two roads go north parallel with the Pennines, past Hadrian’s Wall to the other Roman barrier, the Antonine Wall on the Forth-Clyde isthmus. The more important of these routes, on the east side, is called Dere Street.

The Romans clearly needed to connect their main military sites, such as Colchester ( Camulodunum ), Exeter ( Isca ), Gloucester, Caerleon ( Caerleon Isca ), Wroxter, Chester ( Deva ), York, Lincoln and – most northerly – at Inchtuthill near Perth in Scotland. However, the long, straight roads also linked sea ports such as Dover ( Dubris ), Chichester, Poole and Ravenglass along with trading bases on the Humber, Severn and Thames and civilian centres such as Silchester and Cirencester. In turn, minor roads linked these strategic highways to smaller forts, villas and industrial sites.

Although many of today’s A-roads – such as the A417 from Gloucester to Cirencester – are so straight as to be obviously Roman in origin other sections of imperial highway have been relegated to minor thoroughfares or even buried under fields during the last 20 centuries.

One example can be found in the Forest of Dean near Blackpool Bridge ( SO 652087 ) two miles north of Blakeney and 150 yards from the B4431. This preserved, alleged Roman road is claimed to have linked iron mines at Lydney with smelting furnaces at Ariconium ( SO644236 )

BUILDING ROMAN ROADS

Before the Romans, travellers had to rely on tracks of beaten-down soil which could become very soft and wet in low lying areas – often forcing them to divert to higher, steeper and less direct routes in winter. Despite such rare structures as The Sweet Track - a 5 000 year old raised wooden walkway discovered in the peat of the Somerset Levels and the World's oldest constructed road - the great advantage of Roman roads was that they provided reliable and widespread connections at any time of year.

Archaeology has taught us that Roman roads were characterised by side ditches defining layers of stone and gravel metalling across a central cambered mound known as the agger. This combined efficient drainage with a road surface that would spread the weight of vehicles and marching soldiers and so avoid damage to the underlying soil. Roman roads also featured pavements built over the side ditches 18" higher than the gutter level of the agger, so that carts could not roll into pedestrians. There was even an early kind of zebra crossing with protruding stones that would slow down carts and animals, allowing people to cross safely.

However, Roman roads differed from their modern counterparts in the material used for the road surface. The bituminous or concrete surfaces we are familiar with today are designed to cope with the wear of heavy motor vehicles running on pneumatic tyres, whereas the Romans used small stones or gravel to support horse or ox drawn vehicles with hard tyres and limited suspension. In fact these "loose" surfaces were well suited to such vehicles. The rigid wheels tended to split many of the stones at the surface into smaller fragments, which lodged between larger stones and eventually formed a hard, smooth surface. Today’s travellers would no doubt find such surfaces muddy in winter and dusty in summer, but the Roman style of road surface was serviceable enough for the time, and the same approach to road building was used by engineers such as Thomas Telford and John McAdam 1 300 years later.

ROAD MAINTENANCE

Roman roads were reasonably well maintained. Gravel was smoothed and relaid at regular intervals, ditches and culverts were cleaned, and encroachments of buildings and vegetation restricted.

The Roman Army departed Britain in about 410 AD, leaving a legacy of good roads. Though people undoubtedly continued to use many of them, there seems to have been little attempt to maintain the roads, let alone build new ones. Archaeologists excavating sites where a Roman road was later overlaid by new road layers often find a thick layer of soil, probably blown or washed on to the site, representing a period of centuries when the route reverted to no more than a track of beaten earth. Also, culverts could get blocked in later centuries, causing water to accumulate and render the road impassable.

It was not until the 18^th Century that roads received serious attention once more, culminating in the famous coaching era of the first half of the 19^th Century, when coach travellers could average 10 mph for journeys right across the country. Another period of neglect was caused by the coming of the railways: while the rise of the motor vehicle led to the development of the road network that we know today.

However, from the earliest times until the age of Stephenson and Brunel, only a tiny proportion of the population ever went anywhere in a wheeled vehicle, and until the 16^th Century even well-off people travelled on horse back. Everyone else made all their journeys, however long, on foot – while goods were often carried by pack animals. The main stress on roads comes from wheeled vehicles, so if hardly anyone uses them, why bother with good roads? Conversely, does this indicate that the road traffic of the Romans was conspicuously composed of carts?

ROMAN ROAD TRAFFIC

The answer is that Roman road traffic was mixed. Well-off people travelled on horse back, or perhaps on a litter carried by slaves, but most civilians and soldiers walked and marched. However, good metalling was needed to support vehicles carrying freight – everything from army rations to building materials. Most of these wagons were slow moving four wheeled vehicles, although the Imperial Post ( cursus publicus ) sometimes employed lighter two-wheeled wagons for transporting important packages.

Indeed, the cursus publicus and the road network helped each other to develop. Settlements that grew up near the safety of the Emporer’s highways could offer food and lodgings for long distance travellers and also supply fresh horses and repair wagons. Similarly, roads defined the countryside and were able to provide an accurate address system, not least because journeys on any Roman road could be calibrated by milestones. The distance between points on roads could be measured by a system of gears linked to the wheel of a cart. After the wheel had travelled a mile, the gears would allow a stone to drop from a full box in the cart to an empty one below. In this way the number of stones in the lower box would correspond to the number of miles in a journey.

In addition, roads could be mapped and early travel guides such as the Antonine Itinerary included journey plans showing landmarks and towns on the roads and the distances between them.

CONGESTION

Speeds on the open road were of course limited by human and animal muscle power and straight roads also meant traffic climbing and descending steep slopes. Military traffic also had priority over civilian, while fords and town traffic would further reduce speeds. Indeed, just as today, not all road maintenance could be carried out at once. Perhaps this is why Candidus, writing from the Roman fort of Vindolana to his friend Octavius, used the state of the road to Catterick as a reason for not collecting a wagon load of hides!

FOUNDATIONS OF HISTORY

For all its limitations though, the Roman road network served its Empire well and even created favourable conditions for future change. Just as Mahatma Gandhi used the British-built Indian railways to spread his message of non-violent civil disobedience, so Paul and other Christian saints were able to spread their Good News around the known world. The chariots and goods wagons of Rome also soon standardised the ruts that they made in their roads at four feet eight and a half inches apart :– a convention retained on the colliery plateways of North East England when George Stephenson built his first steam locomotives in the early 19^th Century. Despite the best efforts of the more scientific Isambard Kingdom Brunel, 4’81/2" remains the British standard gauge of railways to this day!

MAPPING BRITAIN, FINDING ROME

The Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain was first published in 1924 and sold out within a few days. The second edition, published in 1928, was more detailed and was intended to form part of a map of the Roman Empire, an international project that never came to fruition. The map was the idea of O.S. G. Crawford, an archaeologist and pioneer of archaeological aerial photography, who joined the OS in 1920. He was appointed following criticism of the standard of archaeology on the maps. Today, map users in Britain expect to find "antiquities" on maps of all scales. The monuments, from prehistoric settlements to churches and castles, are as much part of the mapped landscape as the railways, roads and rivers.

Britain is unique in this. No other national mapping agency has achieved the same high standard and comprehensive coverage as the Ordnance Survey. Detail on maps is determined by the function for which that map is created and, because maps are very costly to produce, by the paymaster. In some countries there is an emphasis on geological maps for the development of resources, in others maps are conditioned by settlement and land administration. These determine not only the content but also the scale and uniformity of the maps. In Britain, the original driving force behind the mapping was military with an emphasis on terrain and lines of communication – and the man responsible was amateur historian General William Roy.

In the decade following the 1745 Rebellion, General Roy systematically mapped Scotland with the aim of helping fellow redcoat commanders pacify the Highlands. However, he became fascinated with the Roman remains that he discovered and indeed wrote

"That works of this very temporary nature, after so many centuries elapsed, should be found anywhere to exist, is truly singular, and seems almost incredible."

As early as 1763 William Roy made a proposal for a National Survey at public expense for the purposes of military defence but it was not until 1791 – a year after his death – that the Ordnance Survey was founded in response to the threat of invasion from France. The early surveyors adopted Roy’s map making principles, including the surveying of antiquities – labelled in Gothic text.

In 2005 the Southampton based Ordnance Survey collaborates with the National Monument Records of England, Scotland and Wales to produce Roman Britain which is now in its Fifth edition.

LINKS

www.romans-in-britain.org.uk

www.rcahms.gov.uk