If your village lies near the track of some Roman road, many pleasing surprises may be in store for you. Oftentimes labourers unexpectedly meet with the buried walls and beautiful tesselated pavements of an ancient Roman dwelling-place. A few years ago at Chedworth, near Cirencester, a ferret was lost, and had to be dug out of the rabbit burrow. In doing this some Roman tesserae were dug up; and when further excavations were made a noble Roman villa with numerous rooms, artistic pavements, hypocausts, baths, carvings, and many beautiful relics of Roman art were brought to light. Possibly you may be equally successful in your own village and neighbourhood.
If you have the good fortune to live near a Roman station, you will have the pleasing excitement of discovering Roman coins and other treasures, when you watch your labourers draining the land or digging wells. Everyone knows that the names of many of the Roman stations are distinguished by the termination Chester, caster, or caer, derived from the Latin castra, a camp; and whenever we are in the neighbourhood of such places, imagination pictures to us the well-drilled Roman legionaries who used to astonish the natives with their strange language and customs; and we know that there are coins and pottery, tesserae and Roman ornaments galore, stored up beneath our feet, awaiting the search of the persevering digger. Few are the records relating to Roman Britain contained in the pages of the historians, as compared with the evidences of roads and houses, gates and walls and towns, which the earth has preserved for us.
Near your village perhaps a Roman road runs. The Romans were famous for their wonderful roads, which extended from camp to camp, from city to city, all over the country. These roads remain, and are evidences of the great engineering skill which their makers possessed. They liked their roads well drained, and raised high above the marshes; they liked them to go straight ahead, like their victorious legions, and never swerve to right or left for any obstacle. They cut through the hills, and filled up the valleys; and there were plenty of idle Britons about, who could be forced to do the work. They called their roads strata or streets; and all names of places containing the word street, such as Streatley, or Stretford, denote that they were situated on one of these Roman roads.
You may see these roads wending their way straight as a die, over hill and dale, staying not for marsh or swamp. Along the ridge of hills they go, as does the High Street on the Westmoreland hills, where a few inches below the grass you can find the stony way; or on the moors between Redmire and Stanedge, in Yorkshire, the large paving stones, of which the road was made, in many parts still remain. In central places, as at Blackrod, in Lancashire, the roads extend like spokes from the centre of a wheel, although nearly eighteen hundred years have elapsed since their construction. The name of Devizes, Wilts, is a corruption of the Latin word divisae, which marks the spot where the old Roman road from London to Bath was divided by the boundary line between the Roman and the Celtic districts.
In order to acquire a knowledge of the great roads of the Romans we must study the Itinerary of Antoninus, written by an officer of the imperial Court about 150 A.D. This valuable road-book tells us the names of the towns and stations, the distances, halting-places, and other particulars. Ptolemy’s Geographia also affords help in understanding the details of the Itinerary, and many of the roads have been very satisfactorily traced. The Romans made use of the ancient British ways, whenever they found them suitable for their purpose. The British roads resembled the trackways on Salisbury Plain, wide grass rides, neither raised nor paved, and not always straight, but winding along the sides of the hills which lie in their course. There were seven chief British ways: Watling Street, which was the great north road, starting from Richborough on the coast of Kent, passing through Canterbury and Rochester it crossed the Thames near London, and went on through Verulam, Dunstable, and Towcester, Wellington, and Wroxeter, and thence into Wales to Tommen-y-Mawr, where it divided into two branches. One ran by Beth Gellert to Caernarvon and Holy Head, and the other through the mountains to the Manai banks and thence to Chester, Northwich, Manchester, Ilkley, until it finally ended in Scotland.
The second great British road was the way of the Iceni, or Iknield Street, proceeding from Great Yarmouth, running through Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Bucks, and Oxon, to Old Sarum, and finishing its course at Land’s End. We have in Berkshire a branch of this road called the Ridgeway.
The Ryknield Street beginning at the mouth of the Tyne ran through Chester-le-Street, followed the course of the Watling Street to Catterick, thence through Birmingham, Tewkesbury, and Gloucester, to Caermarthen and St. David’s.
The Ermyn Street led from the coast of Sussex to the south-east part of Scotland.
The Akeman Street ran between the Iknield and Ryknield Streets, and led from what the Saxons called East Anglia, through Bedford, Newport Pagnel, and Buckingham to Alcester and Cirencester, across the Severn, and ending at St. David’s.
The Upper Saltway was the communication between the sea-coast of Lincolnshire and the salt mines at Droitwich; and the Lower Saltway led from Droitwich, then, as now, a great centre of the salt trade, to the sea-coast of Hampshire. Traces of another great road to the north are found, which seems to have run through the western parts of England extending from Devon to Scotland.