The Road

by Hilaire Belloc

i

The next phase in the development of the English Road is the very gradual breakdown of the great Roman ways. The Dark Ages—that is, the 500 or 600 years between the fifth and the tenth or eleventh centuries—formed the period during which this process took place.

The Roman Road in England suffered the fate of all our ancient civilization. It very slowly declined and coarsened, but it remained the one necessary means of communication. We have no dates and no contemporary record after the fourth century for Britain, but we have the analogy of Northern France, in which we know that the upkeep and repair of the great Roman roads continued until well into the seventh century, and we have the evidence of the Roman roads as they now stand before us, with the result of their very gradual and only partial breakdown in a use of centuries. We have also the fact that much the most of the great battles took place on or near the Roman roads until the twelfth century, that most of the new great monastic and other houses were built near them, or on them, and that the ports most commonly used in the Dark Ages were nearly always ports with a Roman road serving them. We can thereby roughly judge (although we have no direct evidence) what happened to the system.

In the first place, the Roman Road was so solidly built that centuries of neglect did not entirely destroy its usefulness. Sections of each road disappeared: some from causes which are easily explicable, some under the most obscure conditions the causes of which it seems impossible to discover. Every great Roman road in Europe, and even those in Britain (which are better preserved than those in the most part of the Continent) shows these gaps. Sometimes a whole great section of road will almost entirely disappear—more often it is a stretch of a few miles. Thus the whole of the short cut through Penkridge to Chester, which certainly existed and some elements of which can be reconstituted, has disappeared; so that most maps of Roman Britain erroneously mark the connection between London and Chester as going round by Shrewsbury. As an example of a short part utterly disappearing, one can take any one out of hundreds; the best example near London (typical of many others) is the gap in the Roman road between the Epsom racecourse and Merton. The road is evident as a clearly marked high embankment above the steep rise at Juniper Hill near the Dorking road to within a mile of Epsom racecourse. Then it suddenly ceases. There is no change in the soil. It is on chalk before and after its disappearance; and yet, just here, at about a mile from Epsom racecourse, it completely and totally disappears. There is no trace even of its foundation left from thence onwards northwards until you get to the site at Merton (which was state land and almost certainly the last camp and halting-place on the road before London).

How the road crossed the marshes of the Wandle we can only conjecture, as we can only conjecture where it lay exactly between Epsom and those marshes. Why it should disappear in the marshes is evident enough. The causeway sank in. Why it should disappear under the plough to the south of the marshes, as Roman roads nearly always do on arable land, can also be explained. But why it should wholly disappear on the last mile or two of chalk is inexplicable. One theory put forward is that in the great wars of the Dark Ages portions of the road were deliberately destroyed to impede the progress of an enemy, just as a railway may be destroyed in modern warfare. But this theory will hardly hold water. The gaps that have disappeared thus, often come just where you have the best soil for marching independently of artifice, and where, therefore, an interruption of them would least incommode an advance. For instance, they are perpetually found on high chalk; and, further, the disappearance is hardly ever connected with a defensive position.

From the point of view of the development of the English road system much the most interesting point in the fate which befell the Roman roads is to be found at the crossings of rivers, especially of rivers which have marshy banks or flow through wood or sodden valleys. The neglected Roman embankment across the marsh fell out of use in the Dark Ages. Probably the bridge first broke down, and the barbarous time had not the energy or skill to repair it; then the mere process of time caused the swallowing up of the Roman viaduct, unrelieved by repair, in all marshy land. It is difficult to affirm a negative, but I can recall not one example of a long Roman viaduct still wholly in use across such an approach to water.

A Derelict Road
Scottish Highlands

What happened, then, in these sections was this. The bridge and the viaduct disappeared in the Dark Ages—that is, some time between the fourth and the eleventh centuries. Sometimes this gap led to the complete isolation of the district immediately concerned. The best example I know of this is the breakdown of the crossing of the Arun at Romans Wood, in the county of Sussex. There the Roman road was a hard causeway over very thick clay land, quite impassable for armies in winter, and rapidly overgrown by oak scrub and thorn when neglected. The result of the breaking down of the Roman bridge at the “Romans Wood” crossing was to isolate West Sussex. There was no other way from the north, for the clay and thorn scrub rapidly arose and obliterated the road. It was in use as far south from London as Ockley; but the breakdown of the bridge at Alfoldean broke the continuity further on, and that, I believe, is one of the reasons why Sussex was so isolated as only to be converted to the Christian religion a hundred years later than the rest of the country.

But to return to the behaviour of the Roman Road in the marshy approaches of a river. I say that the embankment having been swallowed up and the bridge broken, the men of the Dark Ages had to find for themselves some new way of crossing, and it is interesting to note that they here fell back upon the primitive methods common before Roman civilization came. They abandoned the straight line and picked their way by the driest bits they could find, so that the new crossing of the marshy district grew up sinuous and haphazard. Later, when the new road system developed with the Middle Ages, this new road was often straightened and a new bridge thrown across the river upon its line; but, save for a very few exceptions, the Roman approach had disappeared.

There are scores of examples of this up and down the country. The most prominent usually bear such names as Stamford, Stanford, Stafford, Stratford, Stretford, etc., all of which come either from the word “street” or the word “stone,” coupled with the word “ford.” They thus signify that in the valleys of the river the “going” or passage had been hardened artificially with stone derived from Roman work. A very good example of the way in which the newer track replaced the older one is to be found at Stamford, in Northamptonshire. The [accompanying sketch] shows the trace of the Roman road from its leaving Burghley Park to the old crossing of the river and beyond. There are still broken traces of the old embankment on the north side of the stream, but it is clear that this straight line across the marsh broke down, that a new way was picked out and slowly hardened, and a new bridge built to suit it. What the men of the Dark Ages did here was to keep to the drier patches to the east where a ford crossed the river, and then curve round again westward, again to join the road on the heights north of the river. This new passage took over the name of the “Stone” ford, where the old road had crossed. A bridge was thrown in due time across the new ford, and the town shifted towards the new bridge and acquired its new name from the crossing.

Part II, Sketch IX

One form of the Roman Road, and one only—a very rare form—never disappears: it is the cutting through hard sand. Here and there in England—I know not how often, but I have myself found few traces of them; I should doubt if there were much more than a dozen—you get a clear cutting upon a Roman road serving no modern or useful purpose, and almost certainly dating from the construction of the way. There is the trace of the one at Ashurst, near my home—that with which I am most familiar and which I have measured most carefully. If the cutting be made in dry sandy soil of fair consistency and hardness, it can remain almost indefinitely with an unmistakable outline. There may naturally have been many other cuttings originally in softer or more yielding soils which have got filled up, but the only ones I know are through sand, which soil also tends to form those sharp ridges through which a cutting might suggest itself as more economical than a too steep gradient.