What happens?
There remained no reason for using the Stane Street as a continuous line. It now led nowhere. When it meets with its first great obstacle going north, the woods near Eartham, it makes for the next centre of population—Petworth, where there was a fortified post going back to some very early time. The wood deflects the road towards Duncton Hill (I have quoted this example in my section on vegetation in the earlier part of this essay). Beyond Petworth it had little function, so this first ten miles of the Stane Street becomes the parent of the local Chichester-Petworth road which grew up out of it, leaving a gap where the woods intervened. Next you must note the local roads beyond this gap. Pulborough Bridge probably survived, but the causeway could not be kept up, or was ill kept up. In its original line, when it served the camp at Hardham, it ran over a wide part of the marsh. In the Dark Ages men picked their way over the narrowest part of the marsh and then followed the hard bank above the Arun-flooded levels, linking up the villages as far as Bignor. But there the use of the road ended. The “potential” was from Pulborough to the nearest seaport, which was then Arundel. And all that the Roman road did in this section was to throw out this bow or curve of lateral road eastward between Pulborough and Bignor, the line of main local travel being diverted from Bury over Arundel Hill and so seaward.
In the section north of Pulborough the Roman road still served a few scattered homesteads in the Dark Ages up to Billingshurst at least, but again it led nowhere because the bridge at Romans Wood was broken down and the high weald beyond was a mass of scrub growing on stiff clay. The road petered out and began again with harder going near Ockley. But it was not used over the shoulder of Leith Hill, because that trace subserved no local use and yet compelled the traveller to steep gradients. Travel was deflected round the base of the hills to Dorking, linking up the more populated part where the water springs were. This new trace, growing up obviously out of the Roman road, opens up to the eastward for a mile or two of the way until it joins up in the heart of Dorking itself, where the third camp was, out of which the town of Dorking has grown, and where in the churchyard the Roman road can still be traced passing through. From Dorking onwards one might have imagined that it would have survived all the way to London. Why did it not do so?
It was a matter of gradients and of centres of population. In the Dark Ages, when there was little necessity for making a direct line between Dorking and London—no continual marching of great Roman forces, no conveying of orders from a centralized government—men took the easier way. They abandoned the up-and-down of the spur of land lying immediately north of Dorking and went round by its base to save the trouble of the little climb. They used the Roman bridge (which apparently survived at Burford), but the very steep leap up on to the Epsom Downs they abandoned, especially as the further progress of the road over the chalk connected no centres of population. The way curled round by Michelham and Leatherhead and came round to Epsom—all places suitable for centres of population with low water levels and no heavy gradients in between. The Roman road on the high waterless chalk above was left abandoned.
What happened between Epsom and Merton has been already described. There is only one divergence in this section, which is where the road of the Dark Ages deflected somewhat to the left and was used to avoid the low wet ground below Clapham Common. For the rest it maintained its use.
Ermine Street near Royston
(3) The best example I know, as I have said, of a Roman road the evidences of which have nearly disappeared, but round which local roads have grown and which can still be identified as the core of these, is the short cut between Penkridge and Chester. It is very puzzling why the Roman road should here have disappeared. It is perhaps best to be explained by the continual fighting between the Eastern and the Western troops, which must have ravaged all that country between the first of the raids and the full conversion of England to civilization and the Christian religion which was the work of the seventh century.
But, whatever the cause or circumstances, the phenomenon is quite plain. The local roads developed for purely local purposes on either side of the original Roman line, and that line, since there is no longer required any continuous traffic along it, disappears.