The Road

by Hilaire Belloc

Of many of the features of the English Road we can determine the origins at once, for they are of common knowledge. The “blindness” of the English Road is due to the enclosures and the consequent increase in hedges since the seventeenth century, coupled, as I have said, with the dying out of “champion” or “co-operative” open-field farming. It is in part due, also, to that which has also been alluded to and has affected the English Road in all its aspects (surface, variation of gauge and gradient, tortuousness, etc.), the government of the squires following on the defeat of the monarchy nearly three hundred years ago. I shall touch on this again when I come to the history of the English Road.

But, apart from these obvious and well-known causes, two causes much less familiar—and yet of the first importance—two causes peculiar to this island in all Europe, have governed its development: waterways and domestic peace.

The English road system has been so powerfully affected by these two agencies—the one physical, the other political—as to have become wholly differentiated by them from the systems of the Western Continent. The natural feature then is the omnipresence of waterways throughout the island; and the political feature is domestic peace—that is the absence since the modern development of roads began (during the last 250 years) of strategical necessities on a large scale.

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I will take these two things in their order.

The way in which the whole history of England has been modified by the presence of water is a topographical point of capital importance to the understanding of the national life. There is no other large island in the world which has rivers in anything like the same proportion as we have, either in number or in disposition. Most of the large islands have no navigable rivers at all. Sicily has none, Iceland has none, nor Crete, nor Cyprus, nor Sardinia, nor Corsica. Not only have we a host of navigable rivers, but they are so disposed that they penetrate the very heart of the country. The Trent, for instance, is the most arresting thing upon the map. It looks almost as though it had been specially designed to make the inmost heart of England penetrable to commerce and travel in the east. The Thames, in the same way, goes right into the heart of southern central England; and even the Severn, the rapidity of which has militated against its modern use, had a considerable use in the past and was an artery in the Middle Ages, even for upward traffic, to the neighbourhood of Wenlock Edge.

The great rivers alone, however, do not account for the most of this character. It is the mass of small but navigable streams, both tributary to the main systems and isolated along the coast, which have so profoundly affected our history. If you take one of those outline maps of England with the waterways only marked, such as are sold for use in schools, and plot out the highest point upon a stream to which a fairly loaded boat can penetrate, you will be astonished to find how small a central area is left out. One might say that the whole of England, outside the hill country of the Pennines, the Lakes, and the border, is so penetrated by water carriage that if there were no roads at all its life could, under primitive conditions, be carried on by waterways alone.

Now this universal presence of waterways, which meant every opportunity for internal traffic and also for approach from outside the island, has had two effects upon the Road. First, it has made for diversion—that is, for the modification of the English Road from a direct to an indirect and sinuous line. Secondly, it has interrupted what would otherwise be main lines of travel in the necessity under which men found themselves of turning aside for the lowest bridge upon each stream.

As to the first of these points, it will at once be observed that unless you have some strong compelling motive for driving a simple straight line you will, in a country of many rivers, avoid such a scheme and seek for the cheapest crossing of each water. You must seek a ford, or narrow, or a place with specially hard banks, and not merely take haphazard that part of the stream which lies on your direct line, and seeing that such numerous waterways involve also long numerous flats along the streams, valley floors subject to flood or formed of boggy soil, the tendency to diversion in a road system under such conditions is intensified by the marshes which abound in a country so watered.

If you look at the Roman road system you will see how, for the considerations which I will deal with later, it usually; if not always, neglects special opportunities and takes the water as it comes, preferring an expensive straight line to a cheaper winding line; but everything done since the Roman road system has been affected by the perpetual consideration of the easiest river crossings inland, while the same influence has deflected the road round the greater estuaries and ports.