The Road

by Hilaire Belloc

Welsh Section, Holyhead Road

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Next, we may presume (for evidence is lost, especially under the later Roman work) there was a track towards the centre of Norfolk. Next there was some great road going northward east of the Pennines, following the dry land which skirts the Fens and reaching the great fertile plain of York, and so on northward through Durham up to the crossings of the Tyne. Where this original main track went we cannot say. We know the trace of the Roman road which followed it. We may presume that the divagations and modifications of this road of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, which ultimately built up our main road to the north, reverted in some degree to the original track. But the whole thing is guess-work. One thing seems fairly certain: this eastern road to the north (the twin to the great north-western road by Chester to Lancashire) must have split about half way to York, one branch making directly to the plain of York itself, the other obviously running along the inevitable ridge which points right north through Lincolnshire to the Humber. There is here no bridge possible. It is not too broad for a ferry. But though the Roman road, superseding the earlier trackway, went on northward, it is a fair guess that the original trackway stopped at the river.

Of cross roads we have fragments, of course, in the Pennines, but we know nothing of their history. It is clear that the main cross communications between the peopled area of the Yorkshire Plain and that of the Lancashire Plain must have gone over by Shipley—the obvious gap in the chain. But more we cannot tell. That is the natural way, and there was, so to speak, no avoiding it. What was mainly used further south we cannot tell. It was a tangled land. There is no clear and certain trace of cross communications which must have existed across the Midlands south of Trent. We do not know what great patches of wood may here have determined the windings of an original road. There are no serious obstacles (it is high land and dry, with no marshes or large watercourses), but there was less reason for continual traffic here from east to west than there was for traffic from north to south; therefore there was less “potential” than was created by the traffic on cross communications further south.

The original system of tracks radiating from Salisbury Plain was simple. They led, in radiating lines straight and curved, directly to the lower Thames, to the ports of the Channel, to the southern estuaries, to the north-east—that is, to the Wash—and to the north direct by the Cotswolds. But true cross communication was lacking to this set, and was provided by the great road from the Exe to the Humber, which still survives in the form of the Fosse Way. It runs throughout the whole of our history, from very long before the first records nearly to the present day, and is to-day traceable throughout, and used in many places as a hard road. This main track was one of the dominant factors in the character of English travel. It has decayed under modern conditions because its “potential” has gone. There is no driving power to-day urging travel from south-west to north-east, and it is only in partial experiments and the linking up of separate lines that even our railway system serves that end. But before modern times the Fosse Way played a very great part. For some reason there was a perpetual necessity for passing from the south-west—Devon and Dorset—to the north-east coast. Two permanent potentials, that between north and south and that between east and west, help to explain the Fosse Way.

England has always tended to fall into two cross divisions—a northern and a southern one, separated at first by climate (the northern more rude, the southern more gentle), then by agricultural conditions, the northern far less peopled, the southern more peopled and more wealthy; and to an eastern and western division separated by type of landscape, to some extent by climate, always to some extent by soil, difference in race, emphasized whenever an invasion came from the Welsh lands on the one side or from the North Sea on the other. The Fosse Way broke both those cross divisions and was a sort of “reinforcement” (as they say in modern concrete), taking the strain of cross tension across the island.

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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.