The Road

by Hilaire Belloc

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To the next physical factor modifying the formula of the Road we have given the name: Differences of Surface other than Marsh and Water Courses. The differences of surface other than marsh or water courses affect the trajectory of a road in several ways: first and originally in its passability to human travel on foot or with beasts of burden, or later with wheeled vehicles, and here the two factors were hardness and evenness. But there was a great contrast in the obstacles of the North and the South of our civilization. In the North, and especially in England, damp was the enemy. For a trajectory to be used in all seasons and in all weather sand and chalk at once suggested themselves. Clay can be used only in the dry season. The various soils determined the first trackway and impose themselves visibly upon the map of our oldest roads.

For instance, the road down the upper Wey to Farnham is, in its oldest form, a deliberate picking out of long gravelly stretches in the bed of the valley. On a geological map you can trace this road picking its way from gravel patch to gravel patch almost as a man crosses a stream by stepping stones. It leaps, as it were, from one gravelly stretch to another, and in each keeps to the gravel as long as it can. For the same reason a primitive road will follow the South, or sunny, side of a wood or of a ridge of land, so that the surface may dry as soon as possible after rain.

When the use of artificial material for the surface of the track became common this question of quality of soil was somewhat modified, but its essential was retained; for what made bad going (in the North, and particularly in Britain) being heavy soil, that same kind of land, which interfered with foot or pack-horse travel, swallowed up material. It was a less grave inconvenience than in the times before artificial material was used, but it was still an inconvenience expressed in the shape of expense; and nearly all the original trackways continued to take account of this factor long after the use of artificial material had been introduced. The earliest of all, of course, follow the dry ridges, and in particular the chalk.

One may say, with slight exaggeration, that the chalk was the essential factor in the building up of British communications before the Roman civilization came. If you take a geological map of England you may see the great chalk ridges radiating in a sort of whorl from a centre in Salisbury Plain, and providing dry going to the Channel, the Straits of Dover, and across the Thames valley at Streatley right on to Norfolk.

Another example of a road taking advantage of dryness of surface is the straight line leading to Lincoln northwards, everywhere following that peculiar isolated ridge, with low-lying ground upon the left and marsh upon the right. Another very striking one is the Hog’s Back, where from one low-lying point to another (Guildford to Farnham) the primitive track deliberately rises and follows the summit of a high hill between rather than the wetter ground upon the slopes, though here there is an alternative upon the southern, or sunny, slope where the trackway leads through to St. Catherine’s Chapel. This is a modern example of the way in which a primitive track imposes itself upon posterity. To this day your motorist climbs up that roof of a house out of Guildford and goes down the steep on to Farnham because countless generations ago his ancestor could only be certain upon that height of dry ground.

In the South (which does not concern this essay) the great obstacle in the way of soil is not marsh, but sand. That is something of which we have here no experience, but the tracks of nearly all Western Islam are dependent upon it. Drift sand is not so impassable as marsh by any means, but it is terrible going. North and South of Atlas the knowledge of how this kind of soil may be avoided is half the business of establishing a primitive road.

An interesting case of surface (but one which is rarely met with in this country) common in dry countries where the rare rainfall is sudden and intense, and where temporary water courses carve out the friable soil, is the inconvenience due to what are called in some parts of the East “nullahs”—that is, the dry beds of such water courses or the sudden depressions made by what were formerly water courses now dried up through a change of climate. The banks of these are often so steep and their depth so considerable that the making of a plain, straight trajectory across such a country would, even under modern conditions, not be worth the labour expended. It would mean continual bridging, or continual embankment. One of the effects of this type of surface is the inordinate winding of all the roads, and even, alternatively, the absence of roads perpendicular to the fall of the land, and the establishment of communications along the line of fall rather than across it. One can see this very conspicuously in Morocco, where there are whole districts, a couple of days’ march across, the trails of which are determined by this accident. A special example of the same kind of thing is to be found in any hill range where a number of narrow spurs project towards the plain. The Road hardly ever runs parallel to the range across these spurs. It nearly always runs down the valleys or along the plain at their foot, and that although there be, as there usually are, in each valley centres of population which need to be linked up with the neighbouring parallel valleys.