Roads, ancient British, [22]; Roman, [139], and [footnote]; they and bridges circulate all the strife in the overland enterprise of mankind, [4], [14-52]; types of society are as old as their systems of circulation, just as women and men are as old as their arteries, [13]; mediæval roads in England, [51], [52]. Many of them were a survival of the Roman empire, in which the construction of highways was a military and political necessity. The genuinely mediæval roads connected new towns with the main or ancient thoroughfares, which had traversed Roman Britain from her principal colonies, London and York, to the other settlements. “The roads of England,” says Thorold Rogers, “are roughly exhibited in a fourteenth century map still preserved in the Bodleian Library, and are identical with many of the highways which we know familiarly. In time these highways fell out of repair, and were put in the eighteenth century under the Turnpike Acts, when they were repaired. But comparatively little of the mileage of English roads is modern. What has been constructed has generally been some shorter and easier routes, for in the days of the stage-coaches it was highly expedient to equalize the stages.”

Ross-on-Wye, Wilton Bridge, an Elizabethan structure with ribbed arches and angular recesses for pedestrians, [94], [182], and [footnote]. Recently, I regret to say, this beautiful old bridge has been attacked by the highwaymen called road officials; and now she is horribly scarred all over with “pointing,” just like the mishandled Roman bridge at Alcántara. A new bridge of ferro-concrete, suitable for motor lorries and the like, would have cost the county less than this uneducated trifling with a genuine masterpiece.

Springing of an Arch, the plane of demarcation between the ring and the abutment is called the springing. In other words, the springing marks the place where a ring of voussoirs starts out on its upward curve from a pier or from an abutment.

Verona. The fine Veronese bridges are not mentioned in this monograph; they passed from the text in a revision; but pontists know them well, and set great store by the charming Ponte di Pietra, and by the old sloping bridge with forked battlements that swaggers picturesquely across the Adige from the Castel Vecchio. The Ponte di Pietra rises from ancient foundations and she still retains two Roman arches, certainly often restored; the other spans are gracefully architectural. A circular bay for the relief of floods tunnels the spandrils above the cutwater of the middle pier.

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