At Weedon the old Watling Street bids good-bye to the Holyhead Road for 71½ miles, and goes by itself in a route 75¼ miles long, rejoining the modern road at Ketley, near Wellington.
The meaning of the name “Watling Street” is sought under many difficulties, so many and so hazy are the derivations of it advanced. The Britons, it is said, knew the rough track crossing the island before the Romans came as the Sarn Gwyddelin, or Foreigners’ Road, along whose uncertain course came and went the Phœnician merchants who traded with Britain long before Cæsar had heard of this lonely isle; long, indeed, before he was born. According to Stewkeley, the name “Gwyddelin” stood for “wild men,” and this therefore was the Wild Men’s Road; the savages so named being the wild Irishmen from across St. George’s Channel. Camden and others boldly say the Romans named the road Via Vitellianus, or Vitelliana, an easy Latin modification of “Gwyddelin,” the name by which they heard the Britons call it. At any rate, it is to the Romans that its transformation from a mere forest track to a broad, well-engineered, and well-paved road was due. The work was not soon done, but when completed it took rank among the greatest of military ways.
The Romans engineered the road and did the skilled work; the Britons performed the carrying and the hard labour, forced to it by a thousand stripes and indignities. To them fell the clearing of the woods along the route, and the digging of earth and stone, and to Roman workmen the staking out of the way and the weaving together of those brushwood wattles that compacted the foundations in moist and boggy places. Some fanciful commentators find in those wattles the source of the name given to the road. Completed at length as a military necessity, and with much pagan ceremony committed to the care of the Lares Viales and the less supernatural custody of the road-surveyors, the Via Vitelliana was for over three hundred years a crowded highway, with busy towns and villages along its course; the palatial villas of wealthy Roman citizens peeping out from sheltered nooks. Then came disaster. The Roman garrisons withdrawn, successive waves of savage invasions wrecked the civilisation of that time, and only the burnt walls of towns and settlements remained to tell of what had been. It was not until another four hundred years had passed that the fierce Saxons, becoming tamed, began to rear a civilisation of their own. To this great road they gave, according to that monkish chronicler, Roger de Hoveden, the name “Waetlinga-street,” the Way of the Sons of Waetla, a legendary king; and the Celtic British whom they found in the country, talking what was to them a strange and uncouth tongue, they called, with all the arrogance imaginable, “Wealas,” or strangers, forgetting that they themselves were the strangers and the others upon their native soil. But as “Wealas” they remained, and as such they are still, for from that word sprang the name of the Welsh people, who as a matter of fact, style themselves “Cymru.”
A curious point to be noted is that this is by no means the only “Watling Street.” The name is found repeatedly in this country, applied locally to ancient Roman roads; but the Watling Street prominent above all others is this great way, which traversed Britain from its extreme south-eastern verge, over against Gaul, diagonally in a north-westerly direction for 340 miles, until it touched the sea at Carnarvon and Chester. From the three great fortified starting-points at Dubris, Portus Lemanis, and Portus Rutupis—severally identified with Dover, Lympne, and Richborough—it ran in triplicate to Canterbury, and thence, chiefly along the existing Dover Road, to London. By way of that thoroughfare still known as Watling Street, it traversed the City and emerged at Newgate through the city wall, and so into what were then swampy wildernesses on the line of the present Holborn and Oxford Street. At the Marble Arch it turned abruptly to the right, and thence went in a straight line along the course of the Edgware Road to the great city of Verulamium, adjoining the St. Albans of our own day.
From this point the Watling Street and the Holyhead Road are practically identical so far as Weedon Beck. Dunstable marks the site of the Roman market-town of Forum Dianæ, or Durocobrivæ, as it was also named; and Stony Stratford by its name proclaims its situation on the old route. It was the Roman “Magiovintum.” Towcester was the “Lactodorum” of the Itinerary. At Weedon the ancient road and the modern part company for 71½ miles, to meet again at Ketley railway-station, between Oakengates and Wellington.
XXX
It is this stretch of 75¼ miles that will now be explored. Bid farewell, traveller who would trace the Roman way, to the company of your fellow-men, for this is no frequented route, and towns and villages are few along its course. It begins by climbing out of Weedon and up to a gate, where those who will may trace it across a field. For those others who will not, an ancient divergence, forming a kind of elbow, preserves the continuity of roadway and brings the route over the Grand Junction Canal to Welford Station and Watford Gap, where the old route of the London and Coventry coach from Northampton to Hillmorton and Coventry, travelled by Dugdale in the seventeenth century, crosses this Roman way. The “New Inn” mentioned by him still stands here, but is now a farmhouse. The name of “Gap,” as applied to cross-roads, is very ancient. Curiously enough, a “Watford Gap” is to be found in Staffordshire, on the Birmingham and Lichfield Road.
Few houses are glimpsed in these first nine miles of the Watling Street. At a grim crossing of two high roads near Crick station, but with an appearance as solitary as though many miles remote from villages or railways, it suddenly ends, or continues only as a formidably rugged, grass-grown track. Here the explorer either finds himself daunted, or proves his mettle by plunging boldly forward, reckless of what may betide. For one thing, the telegraph-poles are faithful to the track, and where they lead who shall fear to follow? They conduct, in fact, steadily downhill along this green alley, and in a mile and a half, crossing two fields, bring one out to a flat and low-lying country, and to what the country-folk call the “hard road” again. Three miles of this, and a rise, with a cross-road to the right, leads to Dove Bridge, spanning the Warwickshire Avon. All around, here, there, and everywhere—at Lilbourne, Catthorpe, and Cave’s Inn—are speculative sites of the Roman station of Tripontium. For the last three miles the Watling Street has formed the boundary between Northants and Warwickshire, and henceforward, for eighteen miles more, it performs the same office for Warwickshire and Leicestershire. On the Leicestershire side, where the ground rises steeply beyond the little river, is a mysterious mound, called by the villagers of Lilbourne “Castle Hill”—an odd, evidently artificial hill, with two beech trees growing on its summit. Whether it be a Roman speculum, or look-out hill, or the grave-mound of some tribal king, ancient even when the Romans came, who shall say? “Tripontium” was named from three bridges that then crossed the Avon somewhere here, but they and their sites have vanished. Lilbourne itself lies down the right-hand lane, and is a village on the hither hillside, with a very dilapidated church by the little river, and a great huddled mass of grass-grown mounds in the water-meadows opposite. Within sight is the wayside railway station of Lilbourne, incongruous amid these forlorn relics of the past in this out-of-the-way corner of the country. Let no one think these mounds „to be the remains of a Roman camp: they are the only vestiges now left of the once proud Norman castle of Lilbourne.
LILBOURNE.