iv
In this short sketch of what were in some cases certainly, in others only presumably, the original British main tracks we have to note three factors which have always determined travel in Britain: the centres of internal economic production, the ports, and the Channel crossings.
Before the modern industrial system the economic centres of production were the wheat lands, and these were the open land of which Winchester was the centre, the Dorchester centre, Somerset, certain separate centres in the Midlands (separated by great woods which have disappeared and their exact site not certain), the Cheshire Plain, the Lancashire Plain, the great Yorkshire Plain, and last, and most important of all, East Anglia—the central Eastern plain (Essex in particular) was the granary of the early time in England. Tracks connected all these places: they also connected the centres of population with the ports. Every one of the tracks makes ultimately from port to port. You have a connection through London (earlier perhaps, as we have seen, through Lambeth) between the port of Kent and the north-western ports (of which Chester is the great original example and Liverpool the modern); between the north-eastern ports of the Humber and the Tyne, and the south-western ports at Southampton Water and Poole (which was of great early importance, and whence we shall find a Roman road starting). Further west the mouth of the Exe was a more important approach to Britain in the past than it is now. You have also the estuary of the Severn, ill provided with natural harbours but forming in its upper reaches a harbour of its own, with the peculiar advantage of the lower Avon, with a secure pool at Bristol approached by the curious and exceptional gorge at Clifton.
Lastly, you have the great port formed by the crossing place at London, made, as we have seen, by the tendency of early travel, right up to the appearance of railways, to penetrate a country as far as possible by its waterways and to carry cargoes well inland, because water carriage was so much cheaper than land transport.
The third factor—that of river crossing—also has its effect, though a lesser one, upon the trace of the old British ways. If, for instance, you carry along any one of the tracks which follow the chalk you will see how carefully the water crossings were picked. It is the characteristic of chalk that the rivers lie transverse to it, cutting gorges through the hills, and each of these crossing places was chosen where hard land approached from either side. The chalk (and the sand associated with it) provides at certain points in the valleys twin spurs approaching the water on either side; hence you have the track along the north downs crossing the Wey at St. Catherine’s Chapel (and alternatively by Guildford); and, again, the Mole at Pixham, near Dorking, and the Medway at Snodland (with an alternative at Rochester). The southern track along the Hampshire and Sussex Downs takes the Arun at a similar advantage and opportunity at Houghton, and alternatively at Arundel. It takes the Adur at Bramber, the Ouse at Lewes.
This vague sketch of the old trackways is all that we can lay down so far as their main lines are concerned, and it is very imperfect, but we must bear it in mind in order to understand the Roman system, which was largely based upon those trackways and which superseded them.
There was one kind of soil, and one only, which could compete with the chalk as good going for primitive travel, and that was sand. Had we sand in continuous lines in Britain it would have given a dry passage for the trackways, and here and there advantage is taken of it by such trackways. But sand, in point of fact, is not to be found in these continuous lines. It comes in patches, and hence we cannot talk of any one of the great trackways as dependent upon a sandy soil. The chief exception that I can call to mind in this respect is the run of the old Pilgrims’ Way—a prehistoric track from the neighbourhood of Farnham to the crossing of the Mole, near Dorking. Though chalk lay on the main direction, it seems to have preferred the southern dry sand to the chalk immediately north of it, and it keeps to the sand until the cessation of that formation a short distance west of the Mole. There is here a curious piece of political geology which has been, I think, of great effect upon the history of England. Had the ridges of sand through the weald of Sussex been continuous, the weald would have been developed early. Its iron industry would have furnished a basis for export, and it would have become one of the centres of population. There are ridges of sand which you can trace all the way through the weald from close by the Hampshire chalk in the neighbourhood of Midhurst right away to the valley of the Rother. But they are not continuous, and the interruptions are formed of deep clay, impossible to pass in winter. The result of that lack of continuity has been that no such track ever developed through the weald of Sussex. Sussex, therefore, owing to the stiff clay of its weald, remained cut off from the rest of England, and that throughout all the Dark Ages. It falls out of the national history. Indeed, the linking up of Sussex with the north was only effected by the Romans at the cost of great labour through the artificial causeway of the Stane Street between Chichester and London; and after the breakdown of western civilization in the fifth century there was no regular approach to the southern coast from the Thames valley in a direct line. The traffic either went westward down towards Southampton, Hampshire, Dorset, and Devon or eastward to the Straits of Dover. The Norman Conquest and the rule of the Angevins restored Sussex to something of its rightful place in English communications because the coast of that county lay immediately opposite the centre of the foreign region which then governed England, but the interlude was not lengthy. In the later Middle Ages and on to quite modern times (to the middle of the eighteenth century) the interruption due to the clay made itself felt again, and only the railway and great increase of population have been able between them to restore direct and frequent communication between the Thames valley and this part of the southern coast.
CHAPTER XI
THE MAKING OF THE ROMAN ROAD
The Great Initiative: The Mark of the Roman Military Engineer: The Theory and Practice of the Straight Line: Modifications of the Straight Line: How it was Carried Out: The Method of Odds and Evens.