The Old Road

by Hilaire Belloc

2. When the Straits had been crossed and England entered, whither would the principal road lead? The conformation of Kent forced it westward, for the Thames estuary forbade a northern, the only alternative route.

One track of great importance did indeed go north and west, crossing near London. It was later known as the Watling Street; it was the artery which drained the Midlands; it became the connection with sacred Anglesey, ultimately the northern door into Ireland.

But no northern road—whether leading as did the Watling Street to Chester, or bending round as did the Icknield Way north-east after passing the ford of the Thames, or taking the island in diagonal as did the Fosse Way, or leading from London to the Humber as did the Ermine Street, or up at last to the Wall as did the Maiden Way—none of these could have a principal importance until the Romans invented frontiers: frontier garrisons to be fed, and frontier walls to be defended. Before their time this northern portion of England, split by the barren Pennines, hardly cultivated, leading nowhere, could not have been a goal for our principal road. That must have run to the south of Thames, and must have led from the Straits to the districts of which I have spoken—Hampshire, the Mendips, the Wiltshire Hills, Devonshire, and Cornwall.

3. The west of the island contained its principal supplies of mineral. Lead indeed was found and exploited in the north, but perhaps not before the Romans, whereas the variety and the amount of the wealth in the valley of the Severn and the peninsula beyond gave all that region an economic preponderance over the rest of the island. Tin, an absolute necessity for the Mediterranean civilisation, was certainly found in Cornwall, though the identification of the Scilly Islands with the Cassiterides is doubtful.

The Mendips formed another metallic centre, presumably richer than even the Devonian peninsula. Lead certainly came in early times regularly from these hills, and Gloucester remained till the Middle Ages associated with the tax on iron.

4. There is a fourth aspect of the matter: it is of a sort that history neglects, but it is one the importance of which will be recognised with increasing force if the public knowledge of the past is destined to advance. It is that powers mainly resident in the mind have moulded society and its implements.

That economic tendency upon which our materialists lay so great a stress is equally immaterial (did they but know it) with the laws they profess to ignore, and is but one form of the common power which human need evokes. A man must not only eat, he must eat according to his soul: he must live among his own, he must have this to play with, that to worship, he must rest his eyes upon a suitable landscape, he must separate himself from men discordant to him, and also combat them when occasion serves. The south-west of England has had in this region of ideas from the earliest times a special character and a peculiar value. It is one in spirit with Brittany, with Ireland, and with Wales; nor is it by any means certain that this racial sympathy was the product of the Saxon invasions alone. It is possible that the slower and heavier men were in Kent before Caesar landed, it must be remembered that our theory of 'waves of population' perpetually pressing aborigines westward remains nothing but a theory, while it is certain that the sheltered vales and the high tors would nourish men very different from those of the East Anglian flats or the Weald.

Now one of the forces which helps to produce a road is the necessity of interchange—what physicists call potential—a difference between opposite poles. Such a force is to be discovered in the permanent character of the west; its permanent differentiation from our eastern seaboard. Nor is it fantastic to insist upon the legends which illumine this corner of the island. Glastonbury was for centuries the most sacred spot in our country, and it was sacred precisely because confused memories of an immense antiquity clung round it. The struggle between the Romano-British princes and the heathen pirates, a struggle the main effort of which must have taken place much further east, is yet fixed by legend in that same land of abrupt rocks and isolated valleys which forms the eastern margin of the Bristol Channel, and Arthur, who was king if anything of the Logrians, yet has been given by tradition a castle at Tintagel.

To the west, then, would the main road have gone so far as the mind could drive it.

5. The eastern and western road would have been the main artery of southern England, just as the Icknield Way (the north-eastern and south-western one along the Chilterns) would have been the main artery from the Midlands and from the men of the Fens, just as the road along the Cotswold would have been the artery along the Severn valley and from the bend of this at the Wrekin on up into the Fells and the Pennines; and just as that along the Dorsetshire Downs would have been the great means of communication for the Devonian peninsula.