Along the Roman Roads [2nd ed.]

Table of contents :
I. THE PORTWAY. Dorchester - Eggardun 9
II. THE FOSSE WAY I. Axminster - Cirencester 32
III. THE FOSSE WAY II. Cirencester - Lincoln 51
IV. ERMINE STREET. Lincoln - Royston 69
V. THE ICKNIELD WAY — THE RIDGEWAY. Royston - Gloucester 87
VI. Gloucester - Caerleon — HELEN’S WAY. Chester 104
VII. HADRIAN’S WALL 123
BIBLIOGRAPHY 143
INDEX 145

Citation preview

Roman r< been in existence in this country for over 2,000 years and thirty years is a very small part of this great span. Although the travels described in this book actually took place over thirty years ago, Mr. Boumphrey decided that he would leave his book as it was first published. The great spread in housing that has occurred during this period has inevitably pushed the fringes of the towns along the Roman roads a few miles further out, but great stretches of the ancient roads are much as they were, often remote from modem traffic. Badbury Rings still remain inviolate, and Icknield Way still winds along unspoiled by the spread of Luton and Dunstable. If you are a walker, a cyclist, a country lover, or just an ‘armchair traveller’, you will not fail to enjoy this charming book in which the author describes innumerable pleasant rambles along the 1,500 miles of Roman roads in England and Wales. ‘This is one of those books you must have if you are to know anything of England . . . as he walks Mr. Boumphrey describes the Roman scene and in a sentence or two bridges the centuries without a jar.’ Observer ‘Mr. Boumphrey is the most stimulating explorer I have ever read.’ Architectural Review Illustrated

A L O N G TH E RO M AN RO ADS

Other Books by the same Author

The Log of the Ark The Story of the Wheel The Story of the Ship The Week-End Cookery Book etc.

HADRIAN S WALL. NEAR HOUSESTEADS

Along the Roman Roads by

G. M . Boumphrey

London

George Allen

&

Unwin Ltd

Museum Street

FIRST

PU B LISH ED

SECOND E D IT IO N

IN I

I 935 964

T h is book is copyright under the Berne Convention. Ap art fro m any f a i r dealing f o r the purpose o f private study, research, criticism or review, as perm itted under the Copyright A ct, 1956, no portion may be reproduced by any process without written per­ mission. Enquiry should be made to the p ublisher.

©

George A llen & U nw in L td .

PRINTED

1964

IN G R E A T B R I T A I N BY O F F S E T UN W IN B R O T H E R S LIM ITED W O K IN G AND LONDON

FO R E W O R D T he small travels described in this book took place in 1932,

over thirty years ago— though to me it does not seem nearly so long. When this new edition was being discussed, the publisher suggested that I might like to cover the ground again and make any needful revisions. But I thought not: let the book stand as a period piece in its own small way. In fact the changes to be noted would not have been great. The roads I followed are nearly two thousand years old (some of them much older); and of that great span thirty years is a very small part. O f course there has been a great extension of housing, particularly in south-eastern England; but so far as this book is concerned its main effect has been no more than to set the fringes of the towns a few miles further out: the great stretches of ancient road between are much as they were, often remote from modern traffic. Badbury Rings remain inviolate, still sombre and haunting. The Icknield Way still winds along under Ivinghoe and Whiteleaf Cross, unspoiled by the spread of Luton and Dunstable. Last summer I made my way up to Eggardon Camp again (by no means for the second time only) and gazed westwards, with half Dorset spread at my feet, to the hills of Somerset beyond. Nothing has been spoiled of that great view— still the uplifting of heart it has always given. The year before I climbed up to Hadrian's Wall at Housesteads through a whistling south-wester— and I found myself sympathizing once again with the Roman soldiers who had to man that precipitous rampart in winters long ago. No change there in thirty years, but for some progress in excavation— and if any scenery in Britain can offer a more dramatic surprise than the sudden yawn of the Great Whill Sill at one’s feet, I have yet to see it. In Wales, too, the Sam Helen makes its way mostly through wild and beautiful country. One very recent arrival seems oddly in keeping. If you climb nowadays to the old remote fort of Tomen-y-mur and look south-westwards, between Snowdonia looming huge to the north and Cader Idris with its long line of precipices to the south, you will see the almost titanic bulk of the new Trawsfynydd nuclear power station nearing completion. No doubt there are those who feel it sacrilege to have put a modem industrial building in a place of such fine natural beauty. T o me its stark functionalism seems to match its surroundings. I feel sure the Romans would have approved of it. O f the Berkshire Ridge Way there might have been a

6

FOREWORD

sadder tale to tell had the Ministry of Transport persisted in its plan to carry the M4 motorway along the ancient route. But lovers of the Downs arose in fury to protest— and perhaps even the Ministry’s experts came to appreciate that a desolate upland, six hundred feet and more above sea-level, deep in snow or shrouded in mist and cloud for much of the winter, was not an ideal location. It now seems that a more southerly line is to be followed. No, the great change that the years have brought is rather to possible readers of the book than to its contents. Thirty years ago archaeology was very much a subject for the special­ ist. In the minds of most people it had somewhat musty associations. Today television and radio have made it of interest to many thousands who otherwise might never have glimpsed its fascination. These thousands, too, now have more leisure for exploring the countryside, and a far higher propor­ tion of them own cars, in which they can make their way to the remoter places. M y own experience has shown me what a great increase of enjoyment comes to those who can read the lines on the face of the land, even if their knowledge— like mine— is little more than superficial. When the B.B.C. origin­ ally invited me to make these trips along the Roman Roads I knew no more of Roman-British history than I had learned at school— and most of that, coming as it did from Caesar's De Bello Gallicoy was wrong. Blue-painted savages, indeed! After I had read a few preliminary books, however, I began to feel rather as though I had taken off a pair of smoked glasses. Unsuspected colours sprang into view and the whole look of things changed. Unnoticed marks on hill-tops, mounds or hollows in fields, took on meaning. I began to realize how much I had been passing by without seeing. Since then I have added considerably to those few preliminary books, and almost always to my later profit. I suppose most of us have sentimental leanings towards one period of history or another. Some would choose the elegance and bathlessness of the eighteenth century, some the cosy squalor of the Middle Ages, haunted by fears of pestilence and hell. But my choice would be Britain as it was when the Romans came, when men lived mostly in the high places, and left the valleys to swamp and scrub. We shall never know what life in those days was really like, of course; but I suspect that for most people it must have been better than what has followed. I should like to feel that here and there a reader may come to share my affection for the period. B lew bury

, 1963

CONTENTS CHAPTER

i.

PACE

TH E P O R TW A Y Dorchester-Eggardun

n.

9

TH E FOSSE W AY I Axminster-Cirencester

hi.

32

TH E FOSSE W AY II Cirencester-Lincoln

iv.

51

ERM INE STR EET Lincoln-Royston

v.

TH E IC K N IE L D RIDGEW AY

69 W A Y — THE

Royston-Gloucester vi.

Gloucester-Caerleon— HELEN’S Chester

vn.

87 W AY 104

H A D R IA N ’S W ALL

123

BIBLIOGRAPHY

143

IN DEX

145

LIST

OF

ILLU STR A TIO N S

HADRIAN’S WALL, NEAR HOUSESTEADS Frontispiece FACING PAGE

MAP SHOWING LOWED

ROMAN

ROADS

FOL­ io

ENTRANCE TO BADBURY RINGS, DORSET

28

VIEW OF A DISUSED SECTION ON THE FOSSE WAY AT LONG NEWTON, WILTS

48

NEWPORT ARCH, LINCOLN

72

ERMINE STREET, LINCS

80

LONDONTHORPE,

A ROMAN ROAD WITH ORIGINAL PAVING IN MONMOUTHSHIRE

104

ROMAN BATH-HOUSE AT NORTHUMBERLAND

130

CHESTERS,

ALONG

THE

ROMAN

C H A P T E R

TH E P O R T W A Y

ROADS

I

(D o r ch e ster - E g g a r d u n )

cannot lay claim to such magnificent Roman architectural remains as may be seen abroad; but when it comes to roads, we lead. Nowhere else can you find such stretches of unspoiled, almost untouched Roman road. Remove the turf off some of them and they might almost have been laid yesterday. There are one or two reasons for this lucky survival. The main one, I think, is the hap­ hazard way our roads have developed in England— out of the old green lanes that wandered from town to town and village to village. Since the Romans laid their carefully calculated network across the country, practically no planned roads were made until the 17th century. And until about the 12th you could say that almost no roads at all were made. For a thousand years the Roman roads served the purpose well enough and, in that time, as Hilaire Belloc says, they “ account for the site of most battles, of most great monasteries, of most marts, o f most palaces; for the development of all campaigns.” In later centuries the green lanes were patched up here and there as they were wanted (and water

E ngland

IO

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

transport helped them out a lot, of course); but nowhere were any big new road-systems built— of a kind to blot out the Roman roads, as modern road building blots them out— as many of the great Continental roads did several generations ago. After the Romans had gone, in a . d . 412, Britain was ravaged by invaders and torn by war after war. Almost everything standing was knocked down by someone or other; but even the most spiteful invader was not going to bother to pick a road to pieces because he disliked the people who made it or lived on it. A much more dangerous enemy from the road’s point of view was the man who wanted stone for a house or wall and who used the nearest Roman road as a quarry, picking it to pieces bit by bit. There has been a good deal of that in England. Another reason for the survival of the roads in England is that from Roman times right up to late yesterday the chief power in the country has been in the hands of big landowners. These have always tended to keep things as they were. No doubt they discouraged any big road schemes, if any were ever put forward, and they certainly did a great deal of good in preserving and improving the countryside. To-day, perhaps for the first time since the Stone Age, the big landowners are ceasing to exist. It may perhaps be a good thing from many points of view, but one has only to look at what is happening to the countryside to hope that those

MAP

S H O W IN G

ROMAN

ROADS

FO LLO W ED

THE PORTWAY

i

who arc beginning to own it will hurry up and develop some sort of sense of responsibility for its beauty. My own interest in Roman roads was aroused when I was about seventeen by reading the chapter on them in Kenneth Grahame’s Golden Age; and a good many years later, when I bought myself a caravan, one of the first places it came to rest on was a Roman road, running straight and high across the Berkshire Downs. I discovered later that it had been a road for two or three thousand years before Rome was ever thought of—but that did not really matter. I had had my thrill. I still have when­ ever I see that line ruled across the turf of the downs, straight to the skyline and far beyond. I walked that road again for this book, and saw the White Horse that lies beside it and the hill on which St. George killed the dragon, and a good deal more— but that comes later. My first walk was from Silchester, 8-| miles south­ west of Reading, where there are the remains of a Roman-British town, along the Portway, to Old Sarum. From there I made my way, still along Roman Roads, to Badbury Rings, and on to Dor­ chester and beyond. I shall not say very much about Silchester as a town here, because that will come better when we have worked up to it a little— and this walk takes us back to much older civilizations than Rome. When we have dealt with them, the Roman-British parts will fall into place more easily.

12

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

And there is not a great deal to see at Silchester. Most of the things found there when it was excavated are now in Reading Museum, and very interesting many of them are. You arrive at Silchester Ruins (as the site is called) along green lanes, and are confronted by a great wall of flint and stone, still from io to 20 feet high, and overgrown with trees and bushes and brambles. This wall runs right round a space of a ioo acres, an irregular shape, about 8oo yards each way. Four gaps show where the four great gateways were, at North, South, East and West; and at the South Gate there are still slight traces of the bastions that flanked it. Inside the walls are quiet fields of springing corn or plough, with nothing at all to show that a few feet below the surface lie long lines of walls, and the remains of mosaic floors. That is Silchester to-day, my starting point. For some miles there is so little to be seen of the Portway, the road I was to follow, that until lately it was thought to start from the South Gate, whereas it really goes from the West. I tried without much success to spot it where it is said to be visible in a dip between two woods i| miles away— but I did see a suspicious-looking ridge across a field some distance further on. It was almost hidden by grass then, but the farmer told me that later in the year it shows quite plainly because the grass over it turns brown before the rest of the field. This was comfort­ ing. However, I decided to do no more detectivework for a time, but to make for a place near

THE PORTWAY

i3

Kingsclerc, 5 miles away, where the Portway first begins to look something like a road. In Kingsclere I turned by the Church and took the road almost due south. As I topped White Hill and saw the strong lines of the downs ahead I seemed to be passing into an older England. The trees grew more sparsely and the chalk began to show through the plough. A mile ahead, at the foot of a dip, a long line of larch and pine trees slanted across the road and climbed the steep down on the right. Here, I knew, was my first real stretch of Roman road. The strip of wood, over 3 miles long, is called Caesar’s Belt— though I do not think we take the name very seriously. It looked very beautiful the other morning, the larch just out, showing a very pale green against the almost black green of the pines— and a little red weasel slipped into it just, as I got there, to show that there had not been too many people that way. A mile further on, at the top of the next hill, the modern road turned away south again and I was left to follow the Port­ way along Caesar’s Belt. It showed up quite clearly — a raised causeway, perhaps 1 foot high and 12 to 15 feet wide running along among the trees. Over the downs on the right two hills caught my eye: one had a big clump of trees on the top; the other was bare but curiously shaped along the crest. But they did not arouse my interest nearly so much then as they would now. At the Newbury-Winchester road all sign of the Portway was lost, so I cast round

14

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

by a pleasant little village called St. Mary Bourne, some 4 miles further on. Here I found the raised causeway again running through a hazel wood— but never a sign of it in the fields on either side. There is a real thrill about picking up an odd section of a road like this. You know from your map that you are more or less on the right line and you hunt about till a slight ridge meets your eye. Very possibly it is only the remains of a bank or something, but you dig your walking-stick into it, and, if it is the right thing, everywhere you prod you strike something hard a few inches down, whereas on each side of it the ground is soft. Across a few fields a modern road picked up the line of it and ran with it until almost into Andover. In one place ROMAN STATION was marked on my map in large letters, but there was nothing but green fields to look at— not even suggestive differences in level. I picked up the Portway again the other side of Andover at Hundred Acre corner, by the aero­ drome, and 5 miles ahead of me I saw, almost on the line of the road, a tall hill with a ring of Scotch pines on it, marked CAMP on my map. I made my way towards it, delighted to find that, for about a mile, the modern road turned away and left me in comfort on a broad grassy lane with turf to walk on, chaffinches to listen to and blackthorn to look at. Miles and miles of the Roman roads run along these grassy lanes at times, and I do strongly recommend them to walkers.

THE PORTWAY

15

When I got near to Quarley Hill, I saw that the Portway passed immediately to the south of it; and I also saw that right round the clump of pines ran a ring of turf-covered entrenchments. I decided to climb up and investigate, and see how much of my road ahead was in sight. The top was about £ mile away, mostly over short downland turf studded with junipers so thickly that in places I had to force my way through— and alive with rabbits. As I got near it I began to realize how very large the entrenchment round the top was: great ditches and banks, 15 or 20 feet high, running right round a space of perhaps 400 by 200 yards. It may seem foolish for anyone who had experience of the last war to be impressed by a prehistoric earthwork, but I defy anyone to climb up to one of those hill-top camps without a feeling very like awe. The sites are nearly always beautiful, with immense views all round, and the solitude is im­ pressive. One begins to feel very close to the past. What would it be like to try and climb those ramparts if the people inside did not want you to? How long must it have taken them to dig such ditches with the sort of tools they had? Who dug them— and who were the enemies that led to such immense labours being undertaken? Questions like these stream into your mind. Most of the hill-top forts belong to the Early Iron Age. Perhaps I had better give a very brief sketch of pre-Roman history in this country so far it is known. First of all there

i6

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

was the Old Stone Age or Palaeolithic, about which very little is known. It may have begun any­ thing from twenty-five thousand to one hundred thousand years ago. The people who lived then have left very few traces of themselves in this country: some roughly worked flint implements which were used without handles (and are, inci­ dentally, often too large for the hand of modern or even of a Neolithic man), some bones of the animals they ate— animals which are mostly extinct to-day— and some of their own bones. They lived in caves mostly— if they built huts all trace has been lost. They had no domestic animals and no agri­ culture. That is the Old Stone Age, perhaps fifty thousand years ago. Compared with that, the Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age, is recent and civilized, and we know quite a lot about it. It started in Northern Europe perhaps ten thousand years ago and went on until about 2000 b . c . The men of the New Stone Age had domestic animals, and they practised agriculture. They made rough pottery and baskets and wove cloth. And they made the most beautiful flint tools and weapons. Any­ one who is inclined to think himself superior to Neolithic man should go to the nearest museum and see some of the knives and arrow-heads that were made in the New Stone Age, and then think again. About four thousand years ago— 1000 or 2000 b . c . — the Bronze Age begins. Weapons and tools began to be made of bronze. As none of these

THE PORTWAY

17

have been found in hill-top forts yet, we conclude that the Bronze Age was a fairly peaceful time. Then, in about 600 b . c . the Iron Age began. Britain was invaded by a Celtic race who used iron. Caesar tells us that in 250 b . c . the Belgae crossed the Rhine into Northern France and South-East Britain, in both of which they ruled. By the time the Romans came, except perhaps for the most westerly and northerly parts, Britain was inhabited by these Belgae of the Iron Age. All these divisions into various ages are very rough, and they are sub-divided into many shorter periods by archaeologists; but they are near enough for our purpose. Old Stone Age anything from twenty-five to one hundred thousand years ago, New Stone Age ten thousand years ago, Bronze Age four thousand years ago, Early Iron Age 600. b . c . And this last is the age of the great hill-top camps— though just a few of them seem to have been built on the sites of earlier and smaller New Stone Age camps. It was these Celtic Belgae of the Iron Age that the Romans had to contend with when they conquered Britain. I do not suggest for a moment that the camps were built as defences against the Romans: they must have taken hundreds o f years to dig; and one can see, with some of them, how they were enlarged or altered and strengthened by successive generations. They must have been to a great extent refuges into which people could go with all their cattle and belongings in case of raids B

18

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

by other tribes, and they were certainly used as places for the safe storage of goods and perhaps as centres of tribal government. They can never have been meant to stand a siege because as a rule their water supply is not nearly good enough. Some of them had a dew pond or two— though I noticed nothing to suggest one at Quarley H ill; but for most of them the water must have been brought from a distance. No, I think the truth probably is that they were only meant to withstand casual attacks, and, for that, they must have been very well adapted. But it is time I got back to Quarley Hill again. I walked right round the earthworks— a grand view in every direction— and then took out my field glasses and had a good look at the Portway. Back over Andover, the way I had come, I could see it here and there for miles. The furthest skyline I am pretty sure was the ridge beyond Caesar’s Belt where I had first picked up the road as a road— nearly 20 miles back. In the other direction the spire of the Cathedral pointing up through a slight haze of smoke showed where Salisbury lay— and, just north of that, practically on the line of the Portway, I could make out the shapes of two great earthworks, the one on top of the other— Old Sarum. There is no doubt that from just below Quarley Hill the Roman engineer who made the survey for the road had taken these two points— the skyline 19 miles behind and Old Sarum 10 miles

THE PORTWAY

19

ahead, and had driven his road straight from where he stood to both of them. The proof of this is that just at this place the road makes a very slight change of direction. Most of the Roman roads were surveyed like this, in straight sections from skyline to skyline. As a rule the whole course of the road rarely goes more than a mile or so out of a dead straight line, except for quite local deviations round a particularly steep valley or something like that. But where it does alter its course, it does it on a skyline. In some places the remains of fires have been found by excavators, and these are perhaps the remains of signal fires that were lighted to guide the road makers. The whole way from Quarley Hill the road can be followed in a straight line to within \ mile of Old Sarum. It runs as a raised grass-covered cause­ way, 3 feet high in places— very good to walk on. In places, lines of Scotch pines keep it company; and for over 4 miles the Southern Railway runs, mostly in a cutting, beside it and sometimes en­ croaches on it. It runs along the high ground just to the south of the pleasant little valley of the Bourne and only once, at Idmiston, does it vary from the straight line for a hundred yards or so, crossing a dip. Three miles from Old Sarum, another hill-top camp, Figsbury Rings, lies within i j miles to the south. An interesting point about Figsbury is that the outer ditch is not complete there: the builders got most of their chalk for the parapet

20

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

from an inner ring ditch, and this seems to show that in these forts, it was the high bank that was the principal thing, rather than the ditch which usually lies outside it. Old Sarum is hugely impressive if you approach it as I did, with the sun sinking behind it. Imagine a great plateau, roughly circular and about 600 yards across, surrounded by two banks and a steep-sided ditch over 50 feet deep; and, rising up in the middle of this, a smaller higher plateau, over 100 yards across, also ringed with a deep ditch and banks over 50 feet high. Set the ruins of a Norman castle on top of this inner plateau, about 150 feet above the surrounding country, and you must admit you have an imposing sight. O f course Old Sarum is not only an Iron Age Hill-top Camp. The Normans did a lot to it— strengthened the outer earthworks and raised the inner mound as a base for the castle. But one can tell that it must have been a place of importance when the Romans came from the fact that Roman roads run to it from Silchester, Winchester, Dorchester, and pro­ bably from Marlborough and the Mendips also. And another one still is just being traced which seems to lead to Southampton. I can only give the briefest account of its history here— how it was originally the town of Salisbury with its cathedral on the outer plateau and how quarrels between the Army and the Church (in castle and cathedral) led to the founding of the present Cathedral some miles away in 1220, and how the town gradually

THE PORTWAY

21

moved after the Cathedral, until to-day Old Sarum is just a ruin. But it is a grand sight, with great trees growing up out of the earthworks and still only just managing to show their tops above them. In Salisbury Museum is a very good model of Old Sarum as it was in Norman times, and many of the things that have been found there— few of them Roman except the skeletons of twelve RomanBritish who were evidently hanged or beheaded by the oncoming Saxons— but that comes much later in my story. The Museum has also an interesting model of a Roman-British pottery found in the New Forest, with the site of a potter’s hut nearby, and some of the pottery he made, including a few little pieces for his child to play with. And there you can see, as I did, weapons and tools o f all the periods I mentioned: heavy flint hand-axes of the Old Stone A g e ; beautiful little arrow-heads of the New and some characteristic pottery; Bronze and Early Iron Age products— and a famous RomanBritish relic, the Wilton Bowl, one of the last Celtic products, made perhaps for a Saxon master. A thing that interested me, fresh from the hill-top camps, was to see the tools with which they must have been d u g : deers’ antlers for picks and the shoulder-blade o f a prehistoric ox for spade. It seems incredible — and yet metal must have been far too precious to use for such rough work. From Salisbury I picked up the road again just south of the river, where a ditch marked its course

22

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

to the Netherhampton-West Harnham road. From there it runs up the hill, past the club-house of the Wilton Golf Club, across the racecourse, over a lane, through a copse and then across open country for a mile or so till it dips into the Ebble which it crosses, or must have crossed, just by Stratford Tony. I used the bridge a few yards to the west. I do not know how it goes with other walkers, but I always find my spirits rising as I get away from a town. It was a grand morning as I took my last glance back at Salisbury Cathedral from the ridge beyond the racecourse. After Stratford Tony my way lay across open downs and the sky seemed full of larks singing. I felt rather like doing the same myself. But the road was going to do a rather unusual thing— I needed all my wits. A mile or two on, its straight course would have carried it down and up three very steep little valleys. It took a large swerve to the left, climbed on to higher ground and stayed there: off its course for a good 2 miles. It was not too easy to follow, though in places it stood up quite plainly— but there were other mounds about, and I was very pleased when I got near Knighton Wood to find that someone had been ploughing isolated furrows about in the turf. They seemed to run in the most haphazard way, almost as if someone had bought a new tractor and had been playing with it, though I suppose there was some reason for them. But what pleased me was that whenever they had cut through what I

THE PORTWAY

23

hoped was the road, the earth was full of flints for about 14 feet. To either side the furrow showed brown earth with hardly a stone in it. Through Knighton Wood stones were everywhere, great big ones many of them, and the old road was a high bank just to the right of my path, topped with hazels and elders and full of rabbit holes. At the entrance to the wood I crossed the O x Drove, a prehistoric cattle track between high banks— and the banks may have been needed, because we know from their bones that the cattle of those days were far lighter and faster than the slow-moving beasts of to-day. Out of the wood I crossed Grimm’s Ditch — or Devil’s Ditch as they call it round there— which also runs for miles. There have been differences of opinion about this, but it is generally thought nowadays to be a tribal boundary and nothing else. I wish I could hope to give some idea of the view as I came out of the wood. Cranbourne Chase— or the southern half of it— was spread out in front of me with its lovely woods and downs. Slanting across from Pentridge, half left, came Bokerly Dyke— a monster of an earthwork, which we shall meet in a minute; and, 5 miles ahead of me, my own road climbed over the downs to Harley Gap. I went down into a little valley between hazels and prim­ roses, where nightingales were singing their hardest although it was the middle of the day. I stopped and watched one for a minute or two. He did not seem at all nervous. I wonder if it has often been noticed

24

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

how much less afraid birds are when they arc singing? A blackbird, that would ordinarily rush screaming away if you came within 50 yards of him, will let you come quite close and even pass right underneath when he is in full song. Is it con­ centration or conceit? Just after Vernditch Wood the road became more perfect than I had ever hoped to see. It stood up above the down on either hand 5 feet high at times, and almost 20 feet wide. Beyond that again were the two ditches still quite plain to see. A mile further on, the main road from Salisbury to Blandford cuts into it and goes with it for i\ miles. Where it was cut a coating of gravel was shown almost three feet thick— and this must have been brought, when the Roman road was built, from Pentridge 4 miles away. Just at the junction of the roads the Bokerly Dyke also runs in. This huge ditch and bank, from 10 to 23 feet high, runs for 3} miles across the downs and high up the side of Pentridge Hill. There used to be various explanations of it given by archaeo­ logists. It was thrown up by the Belgae against the Romans, or it was just a boundary like Grimm’s Ditch. Excavations by General Pitt-Rivers in 1888-90 told the truth— it rests on the Roman road and so must be later, and coins found prove that it was thrown up by Romanized Britons at about the time when the legions were withdrawn for the last time, in a . d . 407. Bokerly Dyke represents a desperate attempt on the part of the inhabitants of Cran-

THE PORTWAY

25

bourne Chase to hold back the Saxons, pressing south-west from Salisbury through the gap in the woods of those days that it spans. The country on either side of the Roman road (which is called the Ackling Dyke here) has taught us a great deal about the Romanized Britons who lived on the pleasant downlands of Cranbourne Chase, and something of those before them. At its junction with the modern road, Ackling Dyke bends slightly southwards, and only \ mile further on, at Woodyates, Pitt-Rivers made a very complete excavation of a RomanBritish village. The interesting point about this village is that we learn from it about the lives— not of fully Romanized Britons, as at Silchester— but of Britons only slightly affected by the Roman occu­ pation. The light soil on the chalk uplands of Dorset and Salisbury Plain was easily tilled with imple­ ments too poor to deal with the heavier clay (and the trees and scrub that grew in it) of other parts of England. And so, from as far back as the New Stone Age, men had lived here and grown their corn and pastured their herds. On either side of the road the ground is studded and seamed with traces of them. You can see a good deal from the ground, but a great deal more shows up in aerial photo­ graphs. But I shall leave the lives of the Roman Britons, both here and at Silchester, until the next chapter, when I can deal with them at the same time as Bath and Cirencester. A mile from Woodyates, at Oakley Down, the

26

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

Adding Dyke passes close by what is perhaps the best group of barrows in England. Barrows are the great mounds of earth heaped over the tombs in which the early men buried their chiefs, and which Romans and Saxons also raised at times. There are two main types of Barrow— the Long and the Round. Long Barrows are the older. We know that they were made in the New Stone Age because no metal is ever found in them. Round Barrows are later. An easy way to remember the difference is that Long Barrows were made a long time ago. All the Barrows now to be seen on Oakley Down are Round, and they date from the beginning of the Bronze Age or from the Copper Age which came just before. I sat on the top of the highest, still about 8 or 9 feet high, and looked at them all. Some still had the circular bank and ditch which always encircles them; in others this had been ploughed away. Some were almost flat, and some could only be seen as strange circular patches of heather which grew just there where the soil had been disturbed and nowhere else near. I thought how curious it was that perhaps the most permanent memorial a man could have was a simple mound of earth, like the two Long Barrows I presently came to on Gussage Down. They have already lasted anything from five thousand to ten thousand years and will be still there, perhaps, when churches and cathedrals and even pyramids are far more likely to have been despoiled or crumbled away.

THE PORTWAY

«7

My way up to Harley Gap lay along the side of a belt of beeches, very lovely in their new leaves, and on the right Gussage Down ahead had patches of gorse in full bloom. From the top of the gap I caught my first glimpse of Badbury Rings, 7 miles ahead, a magnificent ring of trees on a hill— impressive even from so far away. After going across to have a look at the Long Barrows, I rejoined the road which ran down into the Gussage valley, tem­ porarily disguised as a country lane. It climbed up the steep hill opposite, allowing itself a zig-zag for a hundred yards or so, crossed Little Down and then lost itself, so far as I was concerned, in Crichel Park. I picked it up a mile ahead as a lane in Witchampton. There is a good story about Witchampton. A lot of Roman remains have been found there at different times, and last year a man living there dreamt that in his garden was a chest of gold. He got up at dawn and started digging, and after a time he found— not a chest of gold— but an almost perfect Roman vase. That is his story, but some of his neighbours would tell you that he was digging a hole for a wireless m ast! I shall leave you to judge who is right! Two miles of disused lane, hidden between trees and bushes, led straight towards Badbury. Near the far end I found I had been pursued for a long way by a keeper on a bicycle, who thought I might be after his pheasants’ eggs. I am not sure yet whether he thought better or worse of me when he found I

28

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

was only following a Roman road. As I came out of the lane through a little wood with an avenue of twisted old wych-elms, the great triple earthworks of Badbury loomed right above me. When you see it, you begin to understand the legends that have gathered round the place. That it is the scene of Arthur’s twelfth and greatest victory against the Saxons— the battle of Mons Badonicus, in which he received his death-wound. Again, that Badbury was the last nesting-place of wild ravens in England — though that is obviously wrong, since they still nest in various places. Perhaps this has some con­ nection with the Arthurian legend that “ his soul shall inhabit a raven’s body till Arthur shall come again.” Almost any of these things seem possible when you stand on the great rampart with the dark wood at your back. But it is almost as unwise to mention Mons Badonicus to an archaeologist as to question him about Druids — because very little definite is known about either. Badbury is unbelievably lovely, both in itself and in its views: north— Gussage Down and Cranbourne Chase; south— Creech Barrow on the Purbeck Hills, and right over Christchurch to the Isle of Wight. But I could talk for half an hour about Badbury Rings alone— its three Roman Barrows, its traces of pre-Roman cultivation, its roads to Hamworthy, the old port in Poole Harbour, and to Bath, as well as the road I had come by and the

ENTRANCE TO BADBURY RINGS, DORSET

THE PORTWAY

29

one that was to lead me to Dorchester. A little further on, this crosses a superb avenue o f beeches running for miles along the road from Wimbourne, and then merges into a lane and is lost. In a mile or two it reappears on the other side of the river Stour, near Shapwick, but after one field it vanishes again. I followed the line of it cross-country (and what country!) for 4 miles or so, and picked it up again as a footpath that became a lane and ran through Winterbourne Kingston and up onto Bere Down beyond. Here it showed up well in places, uphill and down. Once a small, metalled road kept us company for a hundred yards or so, across a stream, but it soon got tired of our straight­ ness and wandered off again. And so to Tolpuddle, where it got hopelessly lost and had to be picked up again in utterly different country of heather and pine and rhododendron on Puddletown Heath, 3 miles further on. Here the Forestry Commission has not improved it by planting Scotch pines all over it, as well as on a Round Barrow nearby. I wonder if this was really necessary? Just outside Dorchester it joined the main road, and high on the bank to the left I saw a weathered old stone which is said to be a Roman milestone. When the Romans first came, there was no Dorchester. The Belgae were living in a great hill-top camp 2 miles to the south-west. Maiden Castle is the biggest of our camps. It is a great oval, 900 yards long and 400 yards wide, surrounded by three and, in places,

30

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

four lines of terrific ramparts, with immensely complicated entrances. It is no wonder that when the Romans had once taken it, they preferred to run no risks for the future, but transferred most of its inhabitants to Dorchester. Roman Dorchester could fill a chapter by itself and here I can only mention its amphitheatre at Maumbury Rings, the biggest, I think, in the country, and recommend a visit to its museum. M y road lies out to the west, towards Eggardun Camp. No longer very straight, since we are getting near the limits of Roman Britain and the engineers were content to patch up an older road. For 3J miles it follows the modern main road, and then commences to climb the downs to the right. For 6 miles it goes on, rising steadily for the most part— and then great earthworks loom ahead. It was getting on towards sunset when I arrived there and walked across the length of the camp towards the west. I could have chosen no better time. When I reached the further rampart, it seemed as if whole counties were spread at my feet. For 600 feet the ground fell sharply away on three sides of me, and then ran away in chequered folds to Somerset and Devon. On my left Golden Cap, doubly true to its name in that light, stood out against the sea. Below me a tiny train wound its way along valleys to Toller Porcorum and Maiden Newton. Each camp I had seen— Quarley, Sarum, Badbury and the Maiden— had seemed the most beautiful, but as I

THE PORTWAY

3i

stood there, Eggardun seemed the best of all. Here to the very end of the chalk backbone of England the Roman roads had brought me— and it seemed a very perfect climax to all that had gone before.

C H APT ER

TH E FOSSE W AY I

II

( A x m in s t e r - C ir e n c e s t e r )

1 c h o s e the Fosse Way as the second of my tours because it draws such a useful sort of half-way line both across England and across the story of the Roman Conquest of Britain. And then, it is an amazing road in itself— over 200 miles long and practically dead straight from end to end. It runs from Axminster in Devonshire to Lincoln and never gets more than 6 miles off a straight line drawn between the two. There is a little uncertainty as to where it went southwards after Axminster, but I think the general opinion now is that it ran straight on towards Seaton— or rather to Colyton, 2 miles up the Axe, which was a good port until the river silted up. The road from Axminster to Exeter was probably a continuation of the Dorchester road, which I traced as far as Eggardun last week. The first few miles out of Axminster are rather dull, along a main road which has blotted out all trace of the original Fosse Way except in one place a mile out of the town, at Weycroft, where a very small section can be seen just to the west of the railway line. Now Weycroft used to be called Stratford, and whenever you come across the word “ strat” or “ street” in a place-name, you can be sure there was a Roman road, because “ strata” was the short

THE FOSSE WAY I

33

form of “ via strata” or “ paved street” in Latin. The modern road, too, crosses the river Axe at Stratford (or Weycroft), and if you will imagine me plodding along the main road for a few miles through places called Perry Street and even Street (just like that!), we will rough in enough of the Roman Conquest to see how the Fosse Way came about. 55 and b .c . 54: Julius Caesar arrived and did nothing much more. Next, Claudius coming, a .d . 48, First made of Britannia a real Roman state.”

“ b .c .

That is about as much as I learned of the Roman Conquest at school, except that at the time, Britain was inhabited by Ancient Britons who painted themselves with woad and wore nothing much else — and there was Boadicea— and Caractacus, of course, who had our sympathy— but they came later. It is practically all wrong, o f course. In the first place, there were no Ancient Britons. I men­ tioned the Celts in the previous chapter as having brought the Iron Age to Britain in about 600 b . c ., and, in particular, the Belgae, who invaded and settled from about 250 onwards. What Ancient Britons there were— if you like to consider the comparatively peaceful, round-headed, Bronze Age people (who made the Round Barrows) as Ancient Britons, rather than the long-headed Stone Age people (of the Long Barrows) whom they had

34

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

ousted— what Ancient Britons there were had all been killed or absorbed by the Celts, or were, at any rate, well out of the way of the Romans. And, secondly, these Celts or Belgae were by no means savages, though they did prefer to remove most of their clothes before going into battle and possibly getting them spoiled, and they did use woad, much as lipstick, or powder, or a coat of sun-burn is worn to-day. But, on the whole, they were comparatively civilized— at least in the south-eastern half of England— south-east of where the Fosse Way was to be, that is. They had good government in the different tribes and were excellent farmers. They had their own coinage and were extremely clever metal-workers. There was probably more wheeled traffic in south-east Britain (which meant better roads, at least) than on the other side of the Channel; because we know that for hundreds of years the tin from Cornwall had travelled in waggons across England to a port near Colchester, and later on, to Dover or the Solent; and some of the ingots which have been found were shaped to fit a pack-animal’s back for the journey on the other side. (Incidentally, when they were turned the other way up, they would fit neatly against the ribs of a boat.) One of the things the Romans were particularly struck by in Britain was the excellence of the chariots. When Cicero was writing to a friend here, he asked him to bring one back for him. So the Britons were not such savages— and they

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were in close touch with the other Celtic tribes in Gaul. It was partly this which led to the Roman invasion, because the Britons had been helping the Gauls against Caesar. He determined to teach them a lesson; and so, in 55 b .c ., he made a demon­ stration invasion. Whether he said “ Veni, vidi, vici” or “ Waynee, weenee, weekee,” he was wrong: he came, and he presumably saw— but he certainly did not conquer. However, he seems to have ‘learned’ them, because for nearly a hundred years no other Roman legion came to Britain. But in this hundred years more Belgae came (driven out of Gaul, no doubt, by the Roman conquests there) and Britain began to share the prosperity that Roman rule brought to Gaul. In Rome there grew up probably exaggerated tales of the wealth of Britain: its corn-growing areas and its immense wealth in metals. The king of the Trinovantes, a British tribe whose capital was at Colchester, was Cunobelinus (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline), and he was particularly friendly with Gaul and with Rome, too. When he died, his sons quarrelled for the throne and an appeal was made to Rome. Perhaps that decided it. In a . d . 43 the Emperor Claudius sent Aulus Plautius with four legions— the Second, Ninth, Fourteenth and the Twentieth— and a number of auxiliary troops, about forty thousand men in all, and came himself for a time to see how things went. They went extremely well. If we can take the Roman roads in Kent as a guide to the

36

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

campaign (and I think we can), the first thing the expeditionary force did after landing, in three divisions (perhaps at Lympne, Dover and Richborough), was to concentrate at Canterbury. Then it forced the crossings of the Medway and the Thames and took Colchester— the most important town in Britain. That was the end of Part One. Part Two began with a drive west, north-west and north, outwards from Colchester— still in three divisions. The Twentieth and Fourteenth Legions took the centre, north-west, with the Second on the left flank, working west, and the Ninth on the right, working north. In little over three years, by a . d . 47, Part Two was over— and the line that had been reached was that of the Fosse Way. The Ninth Legion was at Lincoln, and the other three were some­ where along the line: Leicester, Cirencester, Bath, Axminster, Seaton. Ostorius Scapula, who was then in command, decided to consolidate his gains— while he turned and mopped up a tribe called the Iceni (or the Ickni, as they should be called) in East Anglia, who were still giving trouble. So he built a line of forts along the Fosse Way. That is the end of Part Tw o— and quite enough history for one chapter because Part Three went on for a good many years. It is time I got back to the road. Soon after Perry Street, the road begins to climb gradually up the right-hand side of the valley, with Chard coming into view across to the left. The typical

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37

Somerset landscape is quite unlike any other county. I always think of it as dappled with little round trees in much the same way that a summer sky is sometimes dappled with little round clouds. They are not so little, really; but one gets such great views across the country there, and the trees are every­ where, dotted along hedges, stream and skyline: the very scale of the view makes them seem small. A great many of them are oaks, which meant that on this particular morning, they were not fully out, so that Somerset seemed rather backward compared with Dorset, where there are more beeches. But the road-side banks made up for i t : primroses, bluebells, a few wild geraniums and, occasionally, ferns uncurling through the rich grass, made them as gay as you could want. M y road presently began to climb more steeply, and then bore left in a way I could hardly believe the Roman Fosse had done. Just after a triangular green called White Down (or properly St. Whyte’s Down, where an ancient fair used to be held), we got back to the proper line, and there was the Fosse coming along the boundary of Cricket Park— a broad, raised bank running through a belt of enormous beeches. Pre­ sently, these beeches crossed the road and became a magnificent avenue, and at the end of this, I found myself on Windwhistle Hill. Here, on a clear day, one can see north and south from sea to Bristol Channel; but the slight mistiness which promised me good weather made me pay for it by robbing

38

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

me of some of the view. Along the crest of the hill the Fosse Way bends slightly to the east and then plunges down steeply past a smithy to Chillington and Hinton Park. And now it does something which I have never seen a Roman road do before and which / cannot explain: it drops below the level of the surrounding country until it is a narrow cutting at least 30 feet deep, and so it runs for 2 miles or so, almost to Overstratton (notice the name again). In one place it is joined on the left by what was perhaps a branch road from Exeter— this, also, in a cutting. Now I know that both the soil and the rock under it are soft at this place; but I cannot believe that wear alone has sunk the road as deep as that. The level in the sunk way is no better than that on the surface. The only suggestion I can make is that the road was perhaps deepened by smugglers who used to work in those parts and who may have preferred to keep out of sight. But it is only a suggestion— and probably a poor one. Overstratton is a pleasant little place and I never want to see anything lovelier than the appleblossom against the Somersetshire stone of the cottages. But not far away what I take to be a row of council houses, built of hideous red brick, scream loudly to the sky in a district where everything else is of stone. One of the disadvantages of a tour like this is that as well as seeing so many beautiful places, one sees how badly they are being treated.

THE FOSSE WAY I

39

I hold my breath whenever I approach any lovely little town or village, knowing that, in all probability, somewhere on the outskirts will be a row of council houses, all, apparently, made in the same mould— unmistakably council houses— and, as a rule, built of materials that clash violently with the rest of the district. It is not just because they had to be built cheaply: in many cases it is quite obviously because the council responsible for them was not interested in anything so uncommercial as beauty, and did not take the little bit of extra trouble that might have done so much. There must be good ones occasionally, of course, but one does not notice them, simply because they do fit in. A little further on a large house and garden have been built right on the line of the Fosse Way (one of the very few places where this has happened), and, immediately afterwards, the main road from Ilminster to Ilchester picks up the line. I wonder how many of the cars going past notice the stone effigies of the two ‘children* built into the west end of Petherton Bridge. The story goes that they represent the two children who were drowned in the river there, and no doubt, they serve to warn other children against playing on the parapet. It is a touching thought— but if you look at the ‘children* closely, you see that, except for their height, they look strangely unchildlike, even for their time (and the carving is evidently several hundred years old). Then when you are told that,

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ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

in 1633, Thomas Gerrard, describing the chapel at Stoke-sub-Hamdon a mile or two away, mentions the effigies of the Founder and his wife who repose in stone on a stone pillow— you look again. There is what time has left of the pillow. The children are not children at all— and they were not drowned in the river. It is the pious Founder and his wife— broken off at the knees! From Petherton Bridge to Ilchester, 5 miles on, the Fosse Way is lost in the main road— which, incidentally, points straight to Windwhistle Hill, 13 miles back. The country is low and flat on either side and I noticed how much more lush it was becoming: the grass greener and longer, the oaks gradually giving place to elms, and lines of willow marking the course of brooks. A mile or so to the east a great many Roman British relics have been found on Hamdon Hill and round about, and they are now to be seen in the museum at Taunton, together with some stone and lead Roman coffins, which were discovered quite recently in Ilchester near the Fosse Way. In Ilchester the Fosse bends a few points towards the north and crosses another Roman road which runs from Dorchester towards Charterhouse in the Mendips, where the Romans had big lead mines. After that it goes dead straight for 4 miles, the modern road on top of it. My own way was gladdened by fields and fields of cowslips on either hand. And then at Babcary the modern road swung away for no apparent reason to the left

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41

and came back \ mile later— but that £ mile gave me a very pleasant walk along a grass-grown lane between elms and hazels— a lane that I shared with innumerable rabbits. It was about here that I first noticed hills looming up ahead— a change after the flat, low-lying country I had been crossing. Six miles took me to the foot of Wraxall hill, a steep climb, which puts a curve in the modern road; but at the top I noticed the Fosse coming in on the right as a pack-horse trail through trees and bushes. It is a big hill and the view from the top would have been wonderful on a clearer day. Going down Pye Hill the other side, I followed the Fosse which is now a lane, though, judging from the traces of causeway at the sides, it must once have been very wide indeed. From just at the top, the Romans evidently aimed the line of the Fosse straight at Beacon Hill, 5J miles ahead. As I made my way along the valley, it was curious to note that there were no more cowslips to be seen; instead, the grass was almost hidden by buttercups, and in one field I saw three old women picking dandelions— no doubt for dandelion wine. Through Street on the Fosse I went and up Beard Hill, passing the best farm buildings I have ever seen, built in stone on three sides of a court­ yard and beautifully proportioned. And then came a public house called “ Cannard’s Grave.” The place has been called that for two hundred years at least, and there are still stories of Cannard, though no

42

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

trace of his grave that I could see. He was a highway­ man who was hanged there; or he was a smuggler who gave his confederates away, or got too rich and was killed by them; or he was the innkeeper there and used to murder travellers for what they carried. You see, there is no lack of variety. From my point of view his grave was welcome because it took the main road away from me. Three miles ahead, Beacon Hill towered, nearly 1,000 feet above sea level. Down a small road into Charlton, down another past a brewery, and I was left on a grassy lane between stone walls and trees, climbing straight on for the summit, i j miles ahead. Half-way up, two small metalled roads cross the line and just before these, the Fosse Way is plain to see, ex­ tending far to the side of its present little width as a high causeway in the fields. It is strange to stand on Beacon Hill to-day and realize how important a place it must have been in the past. Right across England at its widest part runs a stretch of high country: the North Downs, the Hampshire Downs, Salisbury Plain, the Black Down Hills, Dartmoor and Cornwall; and along this from end to end, from Dover to Marazion, runs the oldest road in Britain, the Harrow Way. Branching from this at old Sarum, another very, very old road runs along the crest of the Mendip Hills to the Bristol Channel, where Weston Bay and the mouth of the Axe gave an easy crossing to Cardiff or Barry. It is on Beacon Hill that this old

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43

road crosses the Fosse Way. I stood there and tried to imagine how busy a place it must have been in Roman days— travellers going north and south meeting those going east and west, or the waggons with lead from the Imperial Mines rumbling past. Or, earlier still, when the bank and ditch were being dug (and Maesbury Camp a mile to the west), or when the Round Barrows were being made. Even in 1790 it had a certain importance, for there was a stone on top of it high enough to be used as a guide by ships at sea. The base of the stone is still there; but it is a bare 6 feet high— no doubt, the top half made a useful gatepost for someone. Beacon Hill is a quiet enough spot to-day: a plantation of trees on the top, surrounded by acres of bramble and bracken— the most exciting thing a notice to say that if you leave the road when they are using the rifle range below, you may get shot. I left by a grassy lane between hedges. It ran straight for a while and then suddenly went round three sides of a rectangle— for no reason that I could see— until I got to the end of the third side and saw that a spring had broken out on the original line of the Fosse and washed away the ground to a depth of 15 or 20 feet. And so past Stratton Common to Stratton on the Fosse (notice how the names persist). Once the direct line was again blocked by a house and garden, and through Nettlebridge Valley, which is steep, the Fosse seems to have taken a line about half-way between the wide curve of

44

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

the modern road and the bee-line of an older lane. In a farm lane just before the valley, too, I came across some stones which seem to be part of the original Roman paving and was told that others had been taken up quite lately; and in Stretton, when they were laying a pipe across the road recently, they came across the old surface. It was rather a shock, after the lovely country I had been through, to come to Radstock with its collieries. At any other time it would probably have seemed very pleasant for an industrial place. But I hurried through it, glad that the remains of the Fosse cut straight through a quiet and com­ paratively unbuilt part of it, while the main road curved right away. I took a footpath behind a chapel and past some hen runs— a good causeway still showing in places— over a road and under a railway— then up a steep hill on a pack-horse trail, over the top and down, until the direct line was blocked by a cottage which is said to be the only freehold in the village— and so into a lane at Clandown and on to the main road again. I was now only 6 miles away from Bath, and I do not think there is any need to describe them in detail. The only really striking thing was the straight line taken by the Fosse up out of the Cam valley at Dunkerton, a nice little lane which cut across the wide curve of the main road, joining it at the top; and then, on the other side the old Fosse showed very plainly as a raised green causeway, still holding its line.

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45

On the boundary of Bath, the line of the Wansdyke crosses that of the Fosse. This, like the Bokerly Dyke, was found to be either Roman or post-Roman work and was probably dug as a defence against the Saxons. But it is not a very imposing sight and any­ one could be excused for mistaking it for a ditch. I would rather forget the approach to Bath from that point— through masses of unpleasant newly built houses, quite unworthy of what the city should stand for in architecture. As a Roman-British town Bath was unique: its life simply centred round the hot springs and round the temple to the goddess there. With their usual broadmindedness the Romans adopted the Celtic goddess, Sul, whom they found already established, built a temple to her (one of the only two classical temples known in Britain— the other being at Colchester) and called the place Aquae Sulis. It was a walled town of about 23 acres. Little trace of the wall is left, but the baths are still there, wonderfully well preserved— the only place in the country where one can really get some idea of what Roman civil architecture looked like. All that remains of the temple is shown in the Baths museum: a Corinthian capital, bits of the cornice and enough of a pediment for a very good reconstruction to have been made. The most striking thing is the round stone shield with a Gorgon’s head carved on it. There is nothing classical about this: it is obviously the work of a C elt; and he has given the

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ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

Gorgon a beard and a remarkably savage expression. As a special favour I was allowed to see the actual hot springs of Bath gushing out of the ground. Two great bronze doors were unlocked and thrown open— a cloud of steam puffed out— and there was a cavern with a Roman wall across it. Through an arch I could see the innermost mystery of Bath, the hot medicinal waters welling up through the sand. It was most impressive. It really is a mystery too, because no one knows where the water comes from. There has even been a quite serious suggestion lately that it may be new water— specially made out of Hydrogen and Oxygen and whatever else is in it deep down in the earth. At any rate, droughts have no effect on it, the flow never varies, the height never varies and the temperature never varies. But I must leave the rest of Bath to the guide books and get out on the Fosse Way again. And I shall not bother about the actual course taken by the road through the valley, about which there are arguments. I picked it up at the foot of the steep climb to Bannerdown and looked back from the top to say ‘Good-bye* to Bath as it sat there sleek and steaming (or was it perhaps only smoke?) with the hills all round it. Three miles out on the left is what might be taken for a genuine cromlech. But it is really the Three Shires Stones, marking the place where Somerset, Gloucester and Wiltshire meet, and the present stones only date from 1858. Across Duncombe

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47

Bottom, a steep little valley with lovely woods all round, the Fosse must surely have curved a little; but it is hard to trace anything to-day, and so I followed the modern road across the Bristol-Chippenham road and on between Upper and North Wraxall. On the high ground a mile from the main road, the Fosse Way sets its line dead straight, except for one or two momentary wobbles in steep places— dead straight for Jackamants Bottom, i6£ miles ahead. Also, to my delight, it became less and less like a road and more and more like a lane— and hardly that in places. It was metalled for about 3 miles more; but it became more and more beautiful. It ducked down through a little valley by Nettleton Shrub, where traces of a Roman posting-station have been found (about io miles from Bath— the usual distance), and a mile further on it did the same in another little valley even more lovely— with a brook making the best of all noises over a little sluice. Between the two, in a field on the left, bright with buttercups, I had passed a cromlech, the remains of a Long Barrow— to remind me perhaps that this was an archaeological expe­ dition and not just a walk through perfect country in perfect weather. At Salutation Gate, an old milestone on the coach road reminded me that Hyde Park Corner was a long way away, and in half a mile, by the old Toll House at Fosse Gate, the Fosse got tired of being a road and turned into a grass-covered

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ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

lane. When I say lane I may be giving rather the wrong impression: it started fairly narrow (though with a causeway in the field at the side), but before I had gone far it spread out to a full 60 feet— a noble road to walk along, decorated here and there with patches of bluebells. In one place a little stream was bridged by a great flat stone which looked as though it might have had an interesting history if only one could get at it. A mile from Fosse Gate a country road joined us for a time, then turned off for Alderton leaving a metalled surface which also turned away to Norton in a mile or so. The Fosse was still wide and straight and very pleasant to walk along. Three miles west-south-west of Malmesbury, a country road shared my way for 200 or 300 yards — the last time this was to happen for 10 miles or so, and, where it turned off, a most un-Fosse-like track led straight ahead through a field. I carried along it, knowing the direction was right, and, coming out on a road again, saw the green Fosse Way stretching straight ahead once more between widely set stone walls. These end— one of them with an apple tree in full blossom, perfectly set off against the grey stone and with a bright blue sky above— where a bridge crosses the little river Avon. The bridge is only a little more than a hundred years old ; but just to the side of it a water main also crosses and, when this was put up, the footings of an old timbered bridge were found

VIEW OF A DISUSED SECTION ON THE FOSSE WAY AT LONG NEWTON, WILTS

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which probably dated back to Roman times. The Avon here runs through an entrancing little valley perhaps ioo yards wide, with big elms in it, just beginning to show something like their deep summer shadows, and loud with rooks and wood-pigeons. Along the water-edge were kingcups and the spears o f flag-leaves thrusting up. A perfect place to eat lunch and watch the trout below the bridge. Just the other side were found Roman foundations and tessellated pavements, which are marked on the map M U TU ANTON IS. I believe there is something still to be seen there, but I could not find it. Across the Malmesbury-Bristol road the Fosse continues in much the same way, often 60 feet broad, sometimes raised above the fields on either side and dead straight uphill and down. A mile on, a station of some Water Company, the Gloucestershire, I think, might be taken as a model of how to design an industrial building for the country. It is in no way romantic and yet, though relatively new, it does not jar in the slightest. Two miles ahead another branch of the Avon is crossed by a little bridge which is evidently very old and looks as though it was made for pack-horses, but there again I could discover nothing of its history. Over the Malmesbury-Tetbury road, and 3 miles ahead, comes yet another Fosse Gate— and here is to be seen the very first water of the Thames. I live by the Thames, I went to school by it and rowed on it, and I know most of its length to Oxford and

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further— and so I found something of a thrill in looking at the tiny stream, scarcely a foot wide and almost hidden by reeds, and thinking of all that would happen to it later. No doubt a spring gushing from a rock would be a more exciting source for so famous a river, but this quiet beginning in a meadow seemed even better, when one remembered the tranquil reaches further down. Another 2 miles, in parts of it the Fosse banked up 4 feet high and more, brought me to Culkerton Down Wood, which seemed to be almost floating in bluebells, and then, at Jackaments Bottom, the 16J miles of straight line ended and there remained just over 4 miles of Class A modern road into Cirencester, also straight, as the old Fosse Way under it was, no doubt; but set slightly to the east from the previous line. It was a pleasant enough road as main roads go, but from the walker’s point o f view it could not stand comparison with the 10 miles of Fosse I had shared only with the birds and rabbits— and perhaps a gipsy or two. A mile along it I passed the official source of the Thames at Thames Head Bridge, but I prefer to think of it as starting near Fosse Bridge, 4 miles back, flowing through Swill Brook, and becoming the Thames proper at Ashton Keynes. And so I came to Ciren­ cester or CORINIUM, nearly half-way along the 200 miles of the Fosse Way.

CHAPTER

TH E FOSSE W AY II

III

( C ir e n c e s t e r - L in c o l n )

T o look at Cirencester to-day, you would never think that it was once the second largest city in Britain. Yet that is what it was in Roman times. London was the biggest, with 330 acres, Cirencester second with 240. To begin with, it was an important road junction. As well as the Fosse Way, running north-west to Lincoln and south-west to Axminster (with forks to Exeter and Dorchester), there were also roads to Silchester (with forks to Winchester and Old Sarum), St. Albans (through Alchester), Gloucester, and one called the White Way running due north. As well as all this Cirencester, was the centre of the rich wool trade of the Cotswolds. It must have been a good town. It has never been possible to excavate it properly, like Silchester, but we know that there was a Forum and a large Basilica or town hall, 320 feet long and 70 feet wide, and—judging by the bits that have been found— this must have been an unusually magnificent building. To-day Cirencester is just a quiet little Cots wold town, with a splendid medieval church. There are few Roman-British remains to be seen. Forty or fifty mosaic pavements have been found at different times, and some o f these are in the little museum there with other interesting things. One

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o f the most curious is a bit of plaster with a square word scratched on it “ Rotas opera tenet arepo sator” — “Arepo, the sower, guides the wheels carefully.” Until this turned up, square words were thought to date from the Middle Ages, when they were used as charms. The Fosse Way does not start out from Cirencester on the line it came in at. It leaves the town in com­ pany with Akeman Street, the Roman Road to St. Albans, and then, a mile out, turns due north for another mile, where it bears to the east, more or less along its proper course once more. In fact, on the map, it looks as though the Fosse had been made first, before Cirencester, and had then been bent a little on each side of the town to bring it through it. Cotswold country hardly needs describing: it has been praised so often. Its charm to me lies firstly in the beautiful lie of the land, the hills and uplands, and the views along pleasant little valleys, often with streams at the foot; and secondly (and it is a very big second), in the lovely Cotswold stone which, like the golden stone of Dorset, seems to have the sun in it. Take away the stone and the distinctive architecture which has resulted from it— and you would have robbed the Cotswolds o f a great part of their charm. The trees are not particularly large or luxuriant compared with other parts of southern

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England, but they are in exactly the right scale for the country they are set in. Even my main road was as beautiful as I could want, climbing gradually from Cirencester to higher ground, past meadows, woods and valleys, sometimes with the native stone showing in a small quarry, and then, at 6J miles, plunging steeply down to Fossbridge. Here I digressed for some miles to the left to visit the villa at Chedworth. The first thing to be said about Roman villas is that they were not the country houses of rich Romans who came from Italy to spend a few weeks in them— in the way that rich people have villas at Nice or Mentone nowadays. “ Villa” in Latin means “ farm,” and that is exactly what Roman villas were: they were large, self-supporting farms— and they were practically all owned by well-to-do Britons. I f you look at a map of Roman Britain, you will see that there are not many towns on it; but there are hundreds of villas. Nearly all o f these are south-east of the line of the Severn and Trent— and these rivers mark the limits reached by Ostorius Sdapula in a .d . 47, just beyond the line o f the Fosse Way. North-west of this were mines and a few towns (most of them military stations) but practically no villas. In other words, beyond the Fosse Way, Britain was never completely Romanized in all the 365 years of Roman occupation that followed. Below this line the richer Britons no doubt came to consider themselves— and to be considered Romans.

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I had better make it clear here that being a Roman did not mean that you were an Italian and had been bom in Rome. Agricola, for instance (a great general who comes into Parts Four and Five of the Roman conquest when we get there), was a Gaul; the emperors Trajan and Hadrian were Spaniards; Paul of Tarsus was a Jew— and so, no doubt, many Britons were also Romans. The life they lived in their villas would be as Roman as they could make it. The villas in Britain were perhaps not quite as big as some found on the Continent, but they were quite big enough— with as many as twenty or thirty rooms in some cases; and they must have been extremely comfortable to live in— not to say luxurious. They were usually built of timber on a stone foundation, one story high (only once have traces of a staircase been discovered, and they are by no means certain) with glass in the windows. The principal rooms would have a tessellated or mosaic floor and painted plaster on the walls; and they were centrally heated by means of a thing called a hypocaust which worked like this: the floors were built up on pillars and the heat from a furnace was led underneath them and into box-tile flues built into the walls, so that both floors and walls were warm. All but the poorest villas had their own baths— and these were a good deal more elaborate than our own bathroom: they were more like Turkish baths. There were usually three rooms: a cool one with a cold plunge in it, a warm one and

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a hot one— heated by hypocausts. In fact, you can say that the houses built in Britain during the Roman occupation were better than anything that followed for at least thirteen hundred years— better in some ways than anything until eighty years ago— as the people who lived in them must have been cleaner than anyone in this country until eighty years ago. The commonest shape for a Roman villa was, in plan, like a letter E with the middle bar left out. The main block had a corridor running along the front of it, which was stopped at each end by the projecting wings. So that in the centre there was a courtyard, more or less deep, a corridor at the far side of it, and wings on either side. Sometimes a wall closed the fourth side, sometimes rooms, making of it a quadrangle, and sometimes it, too, had a roof. The villa at Chedworth must have been a pretty big one. The courtyard has a corridor right round it, with rooms on three sides; and the two wings extend forward much further even than the corridor across the courtyard. Like almost all villas, it is in a beautiful situation, facing east down a lovely wooded valley with a stream at the foot. Its own water supply came from a spring in the hills behind, and was led to a stone pool with a little shrine by it. Chedworth has been really well excavated. In many places the walls still stand 3 or 4 feet high, and, above the tessellated pavements, they have been extended and roofed in so as to give a very good

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idea o f what it must all have looked like before it was destroyed. The baths, furnaces and hypocausts are all to be seen, and on the north side o f the courtyard several rooms contain large tanks which are thought to have been used for fulling, washing and dying cloth— the wool no doubt bought in Cirencester. So that this villa probably did a large business in addition to supporting itself as a farm. There is an interesting little museum there o f things that have been dug up from time to time— it seems to be difficult to do any gardening there without digging something up. In fact, it is a most fascinating place, as well as being in beautiful country. As I left one of our real English red squirrels scampered across the road and looked at me from behind the trunk of a Scotch Pine. The Fosse Way runs just to the west o f Northleach with its beautiful church (absurdly large for its present requirements— and that is another reminder of what the Cotswolds once were) and it then runs smoothly over high uplands, dipping now and then into jolly little valleys, or looking down them from one end, until it comes to Bourton-on-the-Water. Who could resist turning aside there to see the main street of the village with the little Windrush flowing along it under little arched stone foot-bridges by a wide strip of grass set with poplars? I certainly could not, quite apart from the fact that they have just been excavating at Bourton and have found a Roman well and courtyard. They also dug up two

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mysterious lead vessels, about the size o f washtubs but decorated on the outside. These are cer­ tainly Roman, too, but no one can imagine what they were for. They are now in the museum at Cheltenham. Unfortunately, whoever was respon­ sible for building the bungalow where all these things were found, could not or would not wait for the site to be thoroughly excavated, so we shall have to wait till the bungalow’s life is done before knowing whether it is the site o f another villa or not. But Bourton is full o f interest archaeologically. It includes an Iron Age camp, where pottery o f the Bronze Age also has been dug u p ; and in a gravel pit was found a pit-dwelling, evidently once in­ habited by a weaver, since the holes o f the uprights of his loom were found, as well as the stone he used to sit on while at work. From Bourton, a Roman road, called Riknild Street, forks to the left and runs almost due north through modem Birmingham to Wall on Watling Street. Three miles on, after crossing the river Dikler, the Fosse also turns almost north and runs up a steep hill, tree-lined all the way, into Stow-onthe-Wold. This is a lovely village of stone houses, set high on a hill-top with fine views all round. Going down the hill the other side, I found a portion of the original Roman paving of the Fosse Way in a small railed enclosure. It consists of pieces of stone set edgeways and laid directly on the bare face of the rock. Through Moreton-in-the-March, past

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Stretton-on-Fosse, and on as far as Halford— some­ thing over 30 miles— the main road followed the Fosse W ay; and for much o f the time, broad though it was, it had not destroyed every trace of the old road. I could still see, often enough, a raised bank along the wide green stretches at the side o f the road. Then just after Halford Bridge (where Charles I’s men were ambushed with the treasure they were bringing) the main road turned away to the west and left me with the Fosse as a country road. The Cotswolds were behind m e; but the country seemed no less beautiful. The trees were bigger, especially the elms, and bursting out into foliage all up their trunks in a way I have only noticed in Warwickshire and the counties along the valley of the Thames. Four miles on, near Combrook and Compton Vemey, came the best piece of road since Ciren­ cester: the Fosse on a causeway 5 feet high with broad grassy stretches at the sides, dead straight ahead and behind, and flanked by magnificent elms and oaks—just one’s idea of what a Roman road should be like in such country. And then, beyond the crossing of the Warwick-Banbury road, I saw a welcome sight ahead— a gate. The Fosse had got tired o f being even a country road and was turning into a farm track across fields— but a track on a raised causeway. It passed through a rectangle of embankments, marked ROMAN STATION on my map, and carried on straight ahead. The trees had dropped away for the most part here, but the

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59

contours were varied enough and the grass green enough to make the country well worth looking at. On a hill on my right a most extraordinary wind­ mill showed. It looked like the lower half of a pillared water-tower with a mushroom-shaped metal top clapped hurriedly on it, and just under that the sails of the mill were pivoted— though there did not seem much room for the “ works” between the top of the arches and the bottom of the roof. I heard afterwards that it started life as an observatory, and only took to milling in later years. I can well believe it. Leamington was passed 3 miles on the left, and another 5 miles brought Stretton-on-Dunsmore, which ended a 20-mile stretch of almost dead straight road from Halford. At Brinklow another camp was passed, and then Stretton-under-Fosse (1under Fosse this time) brought another magnificent stretch of road with high wide causeway— and in places the ditches at each side still showing plainly— and for a good 2 miles a fine belt o f trees on our left. Another mile brought High Cross, the Roman station BEN n o n e s , where the Fosse Way crosses Watling Street, the great Roman road from London to Wroxeter or Chester. But whereas the Fosse Way is only a lane here, Watling Street is far busier. In a farm garden at the cross roads is an old stone, said to mark the Roman centre of Britain. High Cross is on high ground for that part of the world; and looking north-east by north I could see Nar-

6o

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

borough 7 miles away and directly beyond that what I think was Leicester, although the air was not quite clear enough for me to be certain. That was my line; but there was no sign of the Fosse continuing along it! However, I cast about and, ioo yards to my right, I found in a field of cows the sort of raised strip of turf that I was getting pretty used to. At the far end of the field it looked as though it ran between two hedgerows set closer together than farming would suggest— and its direction was right. I set off across the field and soon found myself on a grassy lane between the hedges. It was the Fosse Way sure enough. In a mile it turned into a farm lane, and in another two the main road to Leicester came roaring into it. I think we will skip the next q miles and come to Leicester itself. Leicester in Roman days was known as RATAE CORITANORUM — Ratae of the Coritani; and, like Silchester, Dorchester and Cirencester, it was a tribal capital. When the Romans came to Britain they did not upset the system of tribal government they found here: it was allowed to continue much as before, with just a thin veneer of Roman ideas added. And so you must imagine the tribal capitals (there were about a dozen of them in all) as definitely British towns, inhabited by the British aristocracy of that time: the head-men of the tribes, rich merchants and so on, all living lives as Roman as they could make them— at any rate, so

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far as bodily comfort was concerned. There were only seven towns which you could say were mainly Roman: Verulamium (or St. Albans), the only municipium or self-governing town in Britain; four coloniae or colonies: Lincoln, York, Colchester and Gloucester, full of soldiers either retired or serving; Bath, which was purely a spa— and London, which the Romans founded and very quickly made into the biggest city in Britain. Leicester, then, was the capital of the Coritani, as it quite probably had been before the Romans came. I f the medieval walls are any guide to the Roman walls before them, it covered about 105 acres— more or less the same area as Silchester. There must have been some very fine houses there (about thirty mosaic floors have been found); but the only remains of any public building is what is called the Jewry Wall a great mass of Roman masonry 8 feet thick with four arches in or through it. This is thought to have been part of the Baths, since it stands near the river; but nobody can say for certain what it was. There must also have been a forum and town hall of some sort, temples and, no doubt, inns. The only hint of an amphitheatre is in the ex­ cellent Leicester museum— a bit of broken pottery on which are scratched the names of two lovers: Lydia and Lucius, a gladiator. (Let us hope that he won his next few contests at any rate.) Another amusing relic is a box-tile, on which the workman who made it has scratched, “ Primus has made 10

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ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

tiles.” There are quite a lot of these unofficial inscriptions: one at Bath— a curse, written back­ wards against someone— “ who stole Vilbia from me,” and another saying that “ Australis has been going off by himself every day for a fortnight.” The point about them is that they show how Latin was spoken and even written by the poorer classes. No doubt as the Roman roads opened up Britain some common language became essential. I do not suppose for a moment, for instance, that a man of the Dobuni from Cirencester would have been able to talk freely with one of the Brigantes from York­ shire without using Latin. As time went on, Latin became almost as commonly understood in Britain as it was on the Continent. Another very interesting bit of tile records the fact that a detachment of the Eighth Legion was in Leicester for at least a time, very early in the conquest— a .d . 43, or not much after. This was not one of the four legions who made the invasion, in fact, it is known to have been stationed on the Danube at the time. It is known also that two of its officers were decorated by the Emperor Claudius at about that time— and he was in Britain in 43; so that it is not a very wild guess to assume that they brought a draft over from the Danube to help in the early part of the campaign in Britain and were decorated for their services here. But after those first years it is most improbable that Leicester saw much of military life. Drafts marching up the Watling Street would pass it by

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on the west, drafts going north to York would pass it by on Ermine Street to the east. Its life must have been mainly that of a quiet market town in an agricultural district, with dense woods hemming it in not so far away to the east, round almost threequarters of the compass. A few sites of villas in the district are known, and, as well as the Fosse Way, two other Roman roads have been traced out of the town, one a short cut west to Watling Street, and the other east, past several villas, eventually joining Ermine Street north of Huntingdon, where we shall meet it in the next chapter. But Ratae Coritanorum has kept me long enough, and there is a long stretch o f 5 miles through suburbs, which I am not going to describe, though Thurmaston at 3 miles is worth mentioning as being the place where a fine Roman milestone was found. It is now in the Leicester museum. The Roman idea of a milestone was rather different from ours. Sometimes there are no miles marked at all, or no indication of where the miles are from! When an important road was made or re-made, a milestone was usually put up to record the name o f the emperor responsible for it— usually with a good string of titles after his name. The Leicester stone records that it was set up in a .d . 120-121 in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian— then a long string of flattering remarks— and “ To Leicester— two miles” which is hardly accurate o f Thurmaston— still less so in Roman miles which were shorter than ours.

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After crossing the river Wreak at 6 miles, the Fosse Way, a main road now all the way to Lincoln, gradually climbs a ridge between two river valleys, so that there are wide views on three sides. It was most noticeable after Leicester that the trees were a week or two behind those further south and rather smaller, on the whole; but it is a good county, with its acres and acres o f grassland and neat fences. For nearly 20 miles the road continues along prac­ tically the same line, passing VERNOMETUM , the site of a Roman station; and from Six Hills, a mile or two before, a branch road (Roman, of course) went eastwards to Ermine Street. And then at the end of the high ground, by Cotgrave Gorse, it turns abruptly nearly thirty degrees towards the east, as if to avoid Nottingham, 6 miles to the north-west. Looking north from this old sighting point, the road dropping away in front of you, there is a fine view along the valley of the Trent and the low-lying ground to the east, and you see the Fosse Way cutting through it almost straight for Newark. It was specially good when I stood there, because the sky to the north-east, from the horizon upwards, was black with heavy thunder-clouds. Against these the green of the fields and trees stood out wonder­ fully clearly in bright sunlight, giving the heavy sky by contrast almost the purple-blue tint of a bunch o f grapes. Down the hill and 5 miles on, I came to Castle Hill, the site of m a r g i d u n u m . There is not much

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here to be seen as you pass b y ; but there is a lot to be ieamed. For Margidunum is the only fort along the 200 miles of the Fosse Way— the only one that has been traced of that line of forts which Ostorius Scapula built at the end of the second part of the Roman conquest, when he had pushed his advance to the line of the Trent and Severn, just beyond the Fosse Way. Part o f the fort has been very carefully excavated for some years past and an astonishing amount of its history reconstructed from what was found there. Quite a lot of the great stone ramparts that surrounded it were still standing sixty or seventy years ago; but like the paving of many a Roman road they made too useful a quarry for anyone building a house or a wall— and now all the stone left is below ground level. Margidunum was pro­ bably an inhabited site before the Romans came. They usually kept on the Celtic names, and it has been suggested that Margidunum is short for Marigidunum, which might mean “ the Fort o f the King’s Plain.” Traces of an old road lead across the Vale of Belvoir, the centre of the Coritani country, and it is possible that the hill on which Belvoir Castle stands once held the fortress-palace of the king of the Coritani. Margidunum was fortified by the Romans at an early date— probably a .d . 47 or 48, since it is not rectangular in plan as later forts were. It was surrounded by no less than six ditches (which looks as though the district was hardly healthy for Romans at first), and the area enclosed was about

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7J acres— enough for about one thousand men, including some cavalry. The gateways were perhaps of stone, and there was a large bath house; but most of the men at least must have lived either in leather tents or in dug-outs. There was a well, with a lining of oak, so well preserved as to show marks of the saw and adze— after nearly one thousand nine hundred years! After this first period the camp bears traces of having been destroyed by fire— probably in Boadicea’s rebellion (which we shall reach in the next chapter). When this had been quelled, the fort was rebuilt, the inner ditch filled up and a certain number of stone buildings added. However, by the beginning of the 2nd century this part of Britain was so peaceful that a fort was no longer needed. The whole thing was dismantled, and the Fosse Way straightened by being driven straight through the camp. Margidunum became just a posting station. A hundred and fifty years later, there was more trouble: the Piets and Scots swept across England, and, when this had been tidied up, Margidunum was again fortified— this time with a great wall 9 feet thick and perhaps 20 feet high. That was the wall that lasted almost to our own day. Perhaps, when the legions were gone, the— now Roman— Celts may have made a stand against the Saxons from behind it or, more probably, it was just deserted. At any rate, no invaders bothered to pull it down. It needed the Englishman— whose home

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so often seems to be somebody else’s castle— to do that! Six miles on from Margidunum, at East Stoke, is the site of another Roman station— AD PONTEM — where the remains of a Roman bridge across the Trent are said to have been found. But I found nothing to see there, and pushed on along the flat road to Newark. This is a charming little town with a fine old castle by the Trent, where the bad King John died (no doubt grieving for his baggage in the Wash)— and a good little museum. But most of Newark’s history is medieval and later (it has numbers of good legends, which are worth telling)— and I was anxious to get 5 miles on to Potters Hill where a Roman villa was just being excavated. It is interesting to hear how it was dis­ covered. A farmer was putting up sheep hurdles, and in one part of the field, wherever he tried to drive a stake in it would not go for more than a few inches unless he used a crowbar. He got tired of this after a time, so he dug down to see what on earth was stopping him. Less than a foot below the surface he found a tessellated pavement. The news was passed on to the curator of Newark Museum. When I was there, they had found two pavements and some traces of walls, and were trying to work out the plan of the place to see where to dig next. I went and looked at the excavations. It seems absurd to go out to the middle of a field, scrape aside a covering of straw and see a mosaic floor

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only a few inches down. But there it is. All sorts of interesting speculations have arisen. Potters Hill. There’s no reason known for the name. The villa may turn out to be a Roman pottery—just as the one at Chedworth was a fulling establishment. The last thing I heard was that they had just realized the villa is in a dead straight line with a short lane which points in a dead straight line to a spot where it is said a Roman bridge crossed the Trent. And along this lane are two or three quarries where the stone for the villa could have been got, and also several beds of clay which might have supplied the pottery. It is still mostly speculation, of course, but it is most intriguing. I am still waiting to hear whether any traces can be found of the lane linking up the villa in one direction with the bridgesite in the other. But io miles ahead o f me the three towers of Lincoln Cathedral were shining in the sun. What a site for a cathedral that is, high on the hill-top! On Potters Hill the Fosse Way makes a slight bend to the east, and then runs dead straight for 7 miles and more. And at the end of that comes Lincoln, our first Roman colonia.

CHAPTER

ERM INE STR EET

IV

( L in c o l n - R o y s t o n )

I t is a fine approach to Lincoln along the Fosse W ay: some miles o f flat green country and at the end of it the city standing high on a hill, with the long High Street (probably on the line of the old Roman road) pointing straight up towards the cathedral. A mile or so outside, the Fosse Way was joined from the east by Ermine Street, so that one crossing over the marshes round the River Witham would serve both roads. The usual way the Romans carried an important road over marshy ground was to drive oak piles in, lay lengths of timber across these, then a thick layer of flints, flat stones and tiles— perhaps 3 or 4 feet deep and other layers of smaller material well rammed down to make a good foundation for the final paved surface. When piles could not be used, bundles of brushwood were put down in successive layers and the road laid on these. This was the system used by George Stevenson, centuries later, when he built the early railway from Manchester to Liverpool and had to carry his track across the bog at Chat Moss. Before I deal with Roman Lincoln I had better take the Roman conquest a stage or two further. Part One, you will remember, was the invasion in a . d . 43 and the capture of Colchester after forcing

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the Thames and Medway, and Part Two was the drive which carried them to the line of the Severn and Trent, where Ostorius Scapula built a line of forts and probably made the Fosse Way, con­ necting them all up. This allowed him to turn and and settle the Iceni (or the Ickni as they ought to be called), a tribe in Norfolk and Suffolk who were still giving trouble. All this was done in three or four years and in a .d . 46 a beginning was made with Part Three which was to be the conquest of Wales. The Second Legion, on the left flank, moved up the Severn valley probably to Gloucester, which afterwards became one of the five military colonies, like Lincoln; and a legionary fortress may have been established at Wroxeter near Shrewsbury— perhaps the present excavations there will clear this up. At any rate the next thirty years were spent in fighting the Welsh tribes. And all this time most of Britain south of the Fosse Way was becoming very quickly Romanized. But in 61 there was a very nasty set-back. Boadicea, Queen o f the Iceni— or Boudicca, Queen of the Ickni, as she should be called— led a big rebellion of her own and other tribes. They caught the Romans napping. Suetonius Paulinus was up in North Wales directing operations there. By the time he could get back, London, St. Albans and Colchester (which had all become rich Roman towns in a mere eighteen years), had been burned flat and something like seventy thousand Romanized Britons and Romans butchered— in

ERMINE STREET

7i

very unpleasant ways if the Roman accounts can be believed. The Ninth Legion was stationed at Lincoln at the time and in hurrying South to help London and St. Albans, it got cut to pieces. Only a remnant of the cavalry got back to Lincoln alive. One can picture them galloping frantically through Margidunum (the fort I described in the last chapter) with the blood-maddened Celts hard after them. It was probably this which left the traces of fire at Margidunum, because no doubt the rebels burnt it down with everything else Roman they could lay their hands on. In London, to-day, far below the present level, traces of a great fire are still found in the area between the Tower and the Bank. This is the site of the first London and the ashes are no doubt Boadicea’s— I mean Boudicca’s signature. As soon as Suetonius Paulinus could get his armies together, the game was up. The rebels were hopelessly smashed, Boudicca was killed and with her about eighty thousand well-wishers— to make up for their seventy thousand victims. As it was put bitterly: “ He made it a desert and called it peace.” Lincoln continued to be a legionary fortress until a .d . 71 when Part Four o f the conquest started (although Part Three in Wales was by no means over). Then, in 71, the Ninth was moved to York and operations were started against the Brigantes of Yorkshire and Lancashire. A legion we have not met before, the Second Adjutrix— was sent over at

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the same time to help them (the Fourteenth had been withdrawn by Nero two years before) and this went into quarters at Chester, perhaps with the Twentieth, one of the original four. I f Wroxeter really had been a legionary fortress, it was now abandoned. Soon afterwards the other Second Legion— Augusta— was established at Caerleon-onUsk— and so we get the three legionary fortresses which lasted as long as Roman Britain— another three hundred and forty years: York (lately Lincoln), Chester, and Caerleon-on-Usk, in South Wales, where I went later. When the Ninth moved North to York, and Lincoln was no longer a legionary fortress, it still remained largely Roman as a colonia or colony, where legionary soldiers whose time of service had expired were given pieces of land to settle on in their retirement. There were three other colonies in Britain: Colchester, Gloucester and York. The Roman name for Lincoln was LINDUM and it has been suggested that Lincoln may be a contraction o f Lindum colonia, but I believe this is unlikely. There is no trace left of the original fortress, aban­ doned in 71: it was probably a rectangular camp with earthworks round it and mainly wooden buildings in i t ; but quite a lot of the colony is still to be seen. The line of the walls can be followed and one of the original Roman gateways, the New­ port Arch, is still standing in wonderful condition. This was the North Gate. There are two perfect

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arches left to-day, the larger one with motors following where chariots and cisia led, and a smaller one to the side, for walkers. Lincoln was a small town even for those days: its area, 41 acres, was only half that o f Silchester and a sixth o f Cirencester; but it seems to have been important right up to the end o f the Roman occupation, because in a . d . 314 it sent one out of the three bishops from Britain who w ent to the Council of Arles. To-day Lincoln seems to me one of our cities most worth visiting. The cathedral and the castle on the hill— and the fact that it has not sprawled out into disgusting suburbs quite so badly as most towns— these seem to give it that feeling of unity that is one of the first things one looks for in a town. Its streets are full of lovely and sometimes quaint old houses: the oldest inhabited house in England (one of them, I expect), the house in which little St. Hugh was supposed to have been crucified— and the museum is far the most picturesque I have seen. It is housed in a 13th-century Grey Friary. As an afterthought this was made into two storeys by being given a second floor half-way up, supported on lovely stone groining— and the upper room has beautiful barrel rafters. Whatever difficulties it may have set the curator in displaying his exhibits pro­ perly (and he has got over them astonishingly well) it more than makes up for by the atmosphere it gives. The things of particular interest to me in the museum were the inscriptions, because they do help

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us to see what life in Roman Britain was like. There are two milestones, one of them put up by a Gaul, Victorinus, who for a time considered himself emperor, in the 3rd century— at any rate, he must have attended to the roads near Lincoln. But the tombstones are the thing. Several of them are in memory of soldiers from the legion— often the Ninth, of course— and you notice that among them were a Spaniard, a Hungarian, a Macedonian and a man from the South of France, then two civilians who had settled down in Lincoln— a Gaul and a Greek— and, incidentally, an old lady who lived to be ninety, which must have been even more of a feat in those days than now. These stones do emphasize what I have already pointed out— that the Romans were not a race, but a number of races joined together in one empire. It must have been easier to travel in those days and to settle down wherever your livelihood took you, than at any time since— far easier than to-day, in spite of the speed we can travel at. There were practically no frontiers and certainly no idiotic passports, which only seem to keep nations apart and apparently do not keep undesirables out. The language diffi­ culty was much less, because everywhere you went you would find people who could speak Latin; and if you were a Roman citizen, everywhere you went you would find men, if not of your race, of your own brotherhood. In one way at least we seem to have gone backward since the days of the Roman Empire.

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But I must get back to the road, this time Ermine Street which runs from Lincoln, through Huntingdon to London. I only followed it as far as Royston, where the Icknield Way crosses it, because I wanted to get across to Wales and see something o f the Roman roads there. There is a ridge of high ground running North and South down most of the West of Lincolnshire. Lincoln itself stands just north of a gap in it which was originally made by the river Trent (though the Witham flows through it now: the Trent empties itself into the mouth of the Humber, 35 miles further north). It is along this ridge— the Lincoln Edge it is called— that Ermine Street runs for 20 miles and more, as soon as it has crossed the low ground just south of the city, and parted from the Fosse Way. Its old line lay across South Common, Lincoln’s playground, but I could not see any trace of it until I got almost to the top of the hill climbing the Edge. Then its shape showed up plainly enough under the turf, over a wall to my right. The modern road I was on took its line for half a mile and then turned a few degrees west. I carried on along the old line for two or three fields and presently found myself on the sort of Roman road I like— a broad, green lane between hedges, with only a couple of cart-tracks to show that anyone else ever went along it— and dead straight ahead as far as I could see. Once or twice, it turned into a metalled road for half-a-mile or so; but nothing to wear out boot leather. The modern road

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was swerving about roughly parallel a mile or so to my right. Ermine Street runs along too far back from the western brink o f the Edge for you to be able to see out over the flat country below, so that most o f the time you see only half a mile of level fields on your right, with a few patches o f trees at the far side marking the main road and its villages, and hardly more to your left. So there seems a great deal o f sky about. I always think of Lincoln­ shire as a pale green county, probably because that is how a coloured contour map of England shows i t ; and, walking through it, just when the fresh green grass was nicely through, that is very much the colour I found it. A few miles on, Ermine Street ran close by a windmill. Now I am used to seeing windmills with at least the sails broken off, even if the mill itself is still standing. But this one was working. I could not resist the temptation. It did not seem to have much to do with Romans— in fact the only connection I could think of was that it was they who probably introduced the water-wheel for grinding com into Britain— but I was going to see over that windmill if it could be managed. I went inside and, as there was no one to be seen, I climbed up several ladders and through several trap-doors until I found the miller. He was hauling up sacks of com into a room with great wooden bins and chutes in it. At least he was letting the mill do the hauling for him. That was a thing that had never occurred to me: of

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course if you have all that power at hand, you can make it do all sorts of odd jobs as well as grind corn. First of all he asked me if I would like to see it go faster. O f course that was exactly what I had wanted to see, although there was a good steady breeze blowing and the sails were going round at a fair speed as it was. You get a feeling of terrific power as the huge beams carrying the sails (each one weighing a ton) whirl past your face, plunge far below you and then come sweeping up again. The actual sails are made of slats worked on the principle of a Venetian blind, and the more surface exposed to the wind, the faster they go round. It is done by hanging weights on a chain which comes down at the back of the mill by the fantail— (the little fan-wheel which keeps the big sails facing dead into the wind). The miller made it go as fast as it would and then he took all the weights off, put a brake on and stopped it. After that he asked me if I would like to look out of the top. I said “ Yes,” so up we went— up more ladders, right into the steel dome at the top. Here he took out a plate just over where the big axle carrying the sails came in, and I got my head and shoulders through and had a look round— about 65 feet up. I asked him whether there was plenty of wind there as a rule— and in his answer he used a very good phrase I had never heard before. He said, “ Oh yes, it is a very well-blown mill. I do not suppose there is a better blown mill in the country.” Apparently thunderstorms are nasty

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things for windmills when they are actually working, because the wind may drop suddenly and then blow in the opposite direction, without giving the fantail a chance to turn the sails facing it— and then there is trouble. We went below and I saw how the corn to be ground was fed between the two great millstones. There were four pairs of them for grinding different things. I asked if he ever ground flour for bread, but he said: “ Not now.” They had tried grinding a ton of wheat— the best wheat they could buy— when one of the papers was having a wholemeal bread campaign; but nobody would buy it. Practically all their grinding was fodder of different kinds for animals. It seems a pity. I should like to try a loaf of bread made from flour that I knew had been ground in a windmill. However, I said “ Good-bye” to the miller and left his rumbling mill— it makes a good noise, a deep rumble and a contented sort of purr from the stones— and went back to my Roman road. It continued much as before, until, 14 miles from Lincoln, near Cranwell Aerodrome, it reaches Byard’s Leap and takes the name of High Dyke which it bears for nearly 20 miles. Anyone not knowing anything about it must wonder whatever a set of enormous horseshoes are doing held a few inches above the ground on iron posts— especially when 20 yards or more further on another set is found. The story goes that about three hundred and fifty years ago a witch used to live in a cave in the little wood near there. She

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played all the usual witches’ tricks— made people ill, babies squint, horses lame and cows slip their calves— and, in fact, was such a general nuisance that it was decided to get rid o f her. A shepherd who knew her slightly was chosen by lot to do the deed. He was to take the horses to water in the evening, throw a stone in, and mount the first horse to raise its head. Then he had to invite the old woman to come for a ride with him. Providence was evidently on his side, because the first horse to raise its head on hearing the splash was a blind one, Byard, who presumably would not object to the evil looks of the old witch, as the others might have done. Up got the shepherd and invited the witch who replied, “ Wait till I have buckled my shoes and suckled the cubs and I will be with you.” As she got up behind him, the shepherd plunged a knife into her. She clutched at Byard with her long sharp nail and Byard made one immense leap of 60 feet, unseating her, so that she fell in the pond and was drowned. And if anyone does not believe it, there are the horseshoes. I should have liked to know whether the shepherd stuck on or not! After Byard’s Leap comes a really magnificent stretch of Ermine Street. The causeway, with the road on it, is a good 5 feet high, with traces of ditch on either hand; and beyond them again are broad stretches of grass nearly 20 yards wide and then the flanking stone walls. The whole thing must be nearly 50 yards wide. Why it is not turned into a main road

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to by-pass Grantham and several villages (and, incidentally, save several miles) I cannot imagine. But I was very glad it had not been, as I went along it. Four miles on comes Ancaster, famous for its stone. Here there still remain traces o f a Roman station, enough to show its size— about 300 by 230 yards. Here, too, Ermine Street turns a few degrees towards the west— only its second change o f direction since getting clear of Lincoln 14 miles back. Two dead straight lengths of 6 and 8 miles and another of 7 to follow. But I turned aside and went to Grantham to see what the museum had to show. I found a very representative collection of Roman and pre-Roman finds and some especially good Bronze Age stuff. The site of Grantham itself does not seem to have been permanently inhabited in Roman times and most o f the Roman exhibits come either from Ancaster (a fine altar and a stone group o f the Three Mother Goddesses) or, more still, from Saltersford— a Roman ford across the River Witham standing on the old Salters Way. I wonder, by the way, if people often realize how important salt traffic must have been in prehistoric times? Stone Age man could produce for himself, or at least get locally, everything he needed for his simple life except two things: the first, flint— unless he lived in flint country— and the second, salt. And so the very earliest tracks in the country are the flint-tracks and, next to them, the Saltways. It takes little imagination to realize what a precious thing salt

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must have been in those days of no luxury at all: it would be precious not only for its flavour, but even more as a help in preserving meat. Droitwich seems to have been the chief inland salt-producing place in those times; and quite a lot o f tracks to different parts o f the country have been traced, radiating from it. The syllable “ wich” in a placename is said to show some connection with a Salt­ way— and “ wit,” “ wyke” and “ week” — although I ought to say that the usual interpretation derives them from the Latin vicus a village. I leave it to you. But Northwich, Nantwich, Middlewich and Droitwich— all with salt about— do seem rather suggestive. But to get back to Saltersford. Among the RomanBritish things found there an unusual number of different sorts of iron implements have turned up at various times: locks, keys, chisels, sickles, trowels, ladles and so on— enough to make the excavators wonder a bit. And then, 4 miles south, at Colsterworth (close to where Sir Isaac Newton was bom), something unique was discovered. Workmen quarry­ ing the ironstone there, found sunk in a pit in the ground a small iron-furnace about 3 feet 6 inches long and 2 feet broad and high. Now the usual way o f extracting iron from the ore in those days was to make a pyramid-shaped heap of alternate layers o f charcoal and ore, and then cover the whole thing with a thick coating of clay, leaving a hole at the top to act as a chimney and three or four at the

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bottom to blow through with bellows. When the ore got hot enough, a certain amount of iron was freed and became soft enough to be worked, but it never became molten. (Actually it was not until the 15th century that anyone was able to make iron hot enough for casting— actually liquid, that is.) Now the interesting thing about the Colsterworth furnace is that it seems to have been made by someone who was experimenting to find a better way of extracting iron. His furnace was quite unlike anything else used at the time and it was roughly made— obviously by someone who was unused to that sort of work. (You can still see the prints of his fingers and knuckles in the clay— and the nails of his boots.) There were holes of several different sizes in the roof, as if for experiment; and a piece of broken pottery had been placed over each of these, as if to regulate the draught. Inside the hearth was a ball of iron, coated with slag; and parts of the iron were almost steel. The picture one gets is of some solitary worker trying to improve the extracting process and perhaps the quality of the metal— and trying in the right direction. Something interrupted him— perhaps winter or perhaps something more unexpected. He covered his furnace carefully up with earth and went away, hoping to return. But he never came back. That to my mind was the most interesting thing in Grantham. After Grantham— or, rather, just before it, the countryside becomes increasingly well-wooded; but

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from my point of view this was rather offset by the fact that at Colsterworth, Ermine Street runs into the Great North Road. A mile and a half past Stretton (I wonder how many Strettons there are in the country— and probably all on Roman roads) it turns a good deal to the east and points straight for Stamford— with a slight wobble to avoid a bend of the river at Great Casterton, where the earth­ works of a Roman camp are still to be seen. Just outside Stamford the main road bears left, but Ermine Street went dead straight. I could see its ridge plainly, running through a field of cows. Stamford is a charming old town with some lovely old stone buildings. It has been called an architect’s paradise— but as Roman architects seem to have had little to do with it, I shall not keep you there. After this, my Roman road gave very good hunting for some miles. I picked it up coming across a field out of Burghley Park— the main road a mile to the west— and followed it as a lane and a farm-road and a footpath, then a lane again, and once more a cart-track for 6 miles— only beaten once for a hundred yards or two where brambles made it impassable. That brought me to Castor on the River Nene. Castor was an important place in Roman days for its large potteries, where they made, among other things, a famous black ware called Castor, decorated in relief with cream-coloured figures and patterns. Only a few hundred years ago Castor could be desciibed as showing the traces of

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a ruined city. But every year cart-loads of stone, tiles and bricks were taken away— to say nothing of stone coffins, burial groups, coins and a host of other things. To-day there is little to be seen of it— just a few mounds and the earthworks o f a fort DUROBRIVIAE south of the river. Ermine Street brought me to a ford— but when I discovered that the water was 3 feet deep, I decided to make for the nearest bridge, rather than try to wade across. Just after the camp, the Great North Road joins Ermine Street and runs with it for 56 miles, and so I had to say good-bye to quiet lanes for the rest of this trip. But it is good country; and I got a fine view of Peterborough Cathedral by climbing on top of a Round Barrow— still with the ditch round it. Through Stilton (where the cheeses are not and never were made— but only brought to market) I went and on to Alconbury Hill, 5 miles short o f Huntingdon. And here I was shown the excavation of a Roman-British village site— a village not unlike the famous ones on Cranborne Chase, excavated by General Pitt-Rivers (the father of modern excavation), which I mentioned in the first chapter. This one is at Stocking Close, near Monks Wood, celebrated for its rare butterflies. To begin with, “ Stocking” means “ clearing of timber,” and there seem to have been no buildings in this field since Roman times. Secondly, while the soil of surrounding fields is yellow clay with chalk and flints, here it is noticeably blackish and more fertile.

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Thirdly, the son of the owner noticed that bits of pot, which turned up while a drain was being dug, were like a Roman-British urn he had seen. An archaeologist began to excavate and found that, while most o f the surface soil was 9 inches deep, in strips it went down as far as 4 feet. Therefore there had been ditches— presumably to drain surface water away from huts— and in those ditches would be thrown the rubbish of the people living in those huts. Some years of careful digging (not with a pick and shovel, mark you, but with a hand-fork) has brought to light, among other things, the following: rough pavement, with some bits of 2nd- and 3rdcentury pottery on i t ; various hearths but no postholes for the huts yet; a few bits of tile and daub (the clay used for wattle and daub walls); a dozen flint blades and a stone chopper; iron nails; knives; a hollow ground razor; a sickle; a gouge; an ox goad; bronze hair-pins and buttons; a deer’s antler made into a hammer and a horse’s shoulder-blade into a shovel; the skeletons o f a newly born baby, of a sort of greyhound and of a smaller dog; querns for grinding corn, and a cheese strainer; one bronze coin— probably 1st century, and a bit of jet turned in a lathe; and lots of pottery, including part of a hunt-cup in Castor ware, with a pattern of grey­ hounds chasing a deer. Not a great deal perhaps, and yet enough to give a fair idea of the people who lived at Stocking Close. They first went there in the Iron Age (and notice how the use o f flint and stone

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and horn tools persisted). Their food bones show that they kept plenty of domestic animals and also hunted and fished. They were poor; but grew rather more comfortably off in the 2nd and 3rd centuries — the height of the Roman occupation. When the Saxons came, Stocking Close, like so many other sites, was deserted. It is not an exciting story but, like Potters Hill, it shows the way in which history is being slowly pieced together from odd bits. And the discovery of these bits in the first place is generally due to one man keeping his eyes open. The process would be speeded up if more people visited museums occasionally and learned the sort of things to look out for. The rest of the 25 miles to Royston I shall skip, because the Great North Road is a poor road for walkers and I saw little of particular interest. At Great Stukcley an ash tree growing on a Round Barrow right by the road-side, and in Huntingdon a nice little museum— the sort you can do in a quarter of an hour. The most interesting thing to see in Royston is the chalk cave under the cross­ roads, carved with rows of figures. The guide will tell you that it dates from the Druids; some archaeo­ logists say it is Roman. Before I set out on my journey I got a postcard (sender unknown to me) saying, “ At Royston don’t overlook the muchtoo-little-known cave under the cross-roads and for Heaven’s sake don’t try to date its original excava­ tion.” I replied, “ Thanks, I won’t, and I won’t” — and I shan’t !

C H A P T E R

TH E

ICK N IELD

V

W AY— TH E

RID GEW AY

(R oysto n - G lo u cester)

roads I now took, at least for the first half of my journey, are far older than anything Roman. I wanted to get from Ermine Street, which was carrying me South from Lincoln to London, right across England and into South Wales. I could have found one or two purely Roman roads to take me, but nothing, I think, as fine as the way I am going to describe to you. I left Ermine Street at Royston, 40 miles north of London, and followed the Icknield Way to Streatley. There I crossed the Thames and took to the old Ridgeway for 24 miles until it was crossed by the Roman Road from Silchester to Gloucester. The Icknield Way can be traced from Wiltshire through Berkshire, south of Cambridge and up to the mouth of the Wash. Through Berkshire it is roughly parallel with the Ridgeway and a mile or two to the North. But while the Ridgeway runs right along the crest of the Downs, the Icknield Way follows at the foot. This shows that it may be the later track, because early man did not trust himself in the valleys at first but kept to the hill­ tops where there were few trees and the soil was easily worked and where he could see enemies coming.

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Then, as time went on, many o f the high tracks developed lower parallel ways, which are sometimes called “ summer ways,” on the assumption that they would be used mostly in dry weather. Actually, judging by finds made along it, the Icknield Way seems to have become an important road towards the end of the Bronze Age, say from 2,500 to 3,000 years ago— long before the Ickni or Iceni, after whom it is supposed to be called. (But then all the Roman roads have Saxon names. We have no idea what they were called at the time.) Going out of Royston, a bit South of West, it is now a main road as far as Baldock and Letchworth. But it is a good road to walk all the same: past a Long Barrow, a fringe of trees along the right of the road, low hills crowned with trees ahead— and, after a mile or two, open downs on the left, where the stone curlew breeds (and is protected I am glad to say). Five miles out, I turned aside to see the little village of Ashwell, where two schoolboys have started a good little museum and have managed to get hold of a beautiful old house— or, rather, cottage— to house it. Near there, too, is Arbury Banks, an Iron Age camp, though not a particularly impressive one, and not far away, Littlington, the site of a Roman villa. But the whole district is full of Roman and pre-Roman remains. At Baldock, the Icknield Way is crossed by the Essex Stane Street and the junction o f these two roads must have made Baldock a fairly important place. For, although the Icknield Way was not

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made in the first place by the Romans, there is no doubt that they made use of it— and that is my excuse for using it. A mile or so short of Baldock I could see on the downs to the left any number of lynchets or terraces caused by early cultivation. And, just outside the town, I passed the site o f a Roman-British cemetery which has yielded, since 1925, the most astonishing collection of burial groups — no less than 320 of them— as well as many other interesting things. Roman burial customs might almost have been invented to give as much help as possible to presentday archaeologists—just as the Roman habit of losing coins in every conceivable and inconceivable place is remarkably useful. In the days of the Republic — that is to say until twenty or thirty years before Christ— the Romans used either to cremate their dead or bury them unbumed; but by the time of the occupation o f Britain (a .d . 43 onwards) only cremation was practised. The ashes were put into what is politely called an urn, though it was usually just a large earthenware pot, and if it did not actually come out o f the kitchen it easily might have done. Another type of urn was a glass jar, generally square with a narrow neck and one or two handles on it. Occasionally urns of stone or lead are found, but they are far rarer. Buried with the urn there is usually a group of two or three smaller bits of pottery, dishes, beakers, vases or even babies’ feeding-cups and perhaps a bronze ornament or manicure set.

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Now to an archaeologist a piece of pottery is almost as good as a dated letter: he can nearly always form a fairly accurate idea of the date from it. As though pots were not enough, the Romans had another convenient habit: they used to provide the deceased with a coin to pay his passage across the river Styx to the next world. This was frequently placed in his mouth and is found rattling about in the skull or, with a cremation, in the ashes. And this coin also dates the burial fairly closely. At Baldock, for instance, coins have been found which show that the site was inhabited from the reign of Augustus, the first emperor (whose reign began a few years before the life of Christ), until just about the end of the Roman occupation of Britain. But anyone who wants to know more about Roman burials cannot do better than visit the museum at Letchworth, where they will find the Baldock burial groups beautifully set out. In one of them is a curse, like the one I mentioned at Cirencester, written on a sheet of lead and pierced with nails to make it more uncomfortable for whoever was cursed. The lettering of this is rather damaged, but it seems to read “ Tacita, or by whatever name she is known, is hereby cursed.” The grave would not be Tacita’s, of course: the curse would be slipped in there so that the spirit of the deceased could take it to the proper quarters. From Baldock, the Icknield Way led me through the north of Letchworth. It seemed very strange to

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see “ Icknield Way” on a neat cast-iron name­ plate in a neat little road with neat little houses on either side; because up to then I had only known it where it runs lonely and almost unrecognized across Oxfordshire. However, it soon slipped away from the metalled road, through a hedge and out into the country. Before it had gone a mile, it passed Willbury Hill, where an Iron Age camp has been excavated recently. The most exciting thing found in it, strangely enough, was a skeleton. Exciting, because skeletons which can be definitely called Iron Age are almost never found, although those of before and after are fairly common. This one— of a very large man— was quite definitely dated by the crude Iron Age pottery found with it. Crude, I said; and yet only half a mile before, I had passed the spot where another piece of pottery of about the same date had been found (and this struck me as perhaps the finest thing in Letchworth museum): a beautiful Belgic funerary urn— a really lovely thing. This illustrates one of the difficulties archaeo­ logy has to deal w ith: the migrations and mixingup of people with very different levels of culture. Quite possibly the camp at Willbury was actually inhabited by men of the Iron Age when the Belgae from the Continent buried their chief, or whoever it was, in that urn. I f they saw it, they must have marvelled at the workmanship— so much finer than their own. And I wonder how they received the strangers.

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The Icknield Way led me on down a slope, over a railway and under another, to the little river Hiz, where a ford runs between an elm and a black poplar and by a field of daisies and buttercups— a pleasant spot. And so to the little village of Ickleford where, at the inn, George II puzzled his head as to how on earth the apple got inside the apple dumpling. A little lane between hedges took me miles to Punch’s Cross, and, looking back from here, I had a fine view of 15 miles and more to Therfield Heath by Royston. H alf a mile of metalled road, and then my way swung up a grassy track between high hedges, white with may and guelder rose and full of the song of birds— the chaffinch’s sudden fountain of melody and the wistful little tune of the willowwren. A mile’s climbing brought Telegraph Hill, where there was space on the left for a glorious view back the way I had come— Ickleford, Willbury and the downs beyond Baldock— before the hedge shut in again. But only for half a mile. And then the hedge on the right opened and a stile invited me to walk just 100 yards to the edge of what is said to be the original of John Bunyan’s “ Delectable Mountains.” I feel I owe this part of the walk an apology. It was country that I had known only from dashing along the main roads from London in a car. I knew it had a beauty spot or two (and those I generally try to avoid); but London is only 30 miles away and I had always imagined it must be infected with the poison of bad building which

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reaches so far on every side. It is nothing of the sort. On Pegsdon Barn you are standing on the northern brink of the chalk downs; immediately in front of you the turf sweeps down 300 feet; and beyond that spread miles and miles of Bedfordshire, Bucks and Cambridgeshire, utterly unspoilt as yet. Just to the left a dry valley runs up into the chalk for 200 or 300 yards behind you— and the lines of these chalk valleys are things to be looked at as closely as a piece of sculpture. A mile to the left, trees half hide the entrenchments of Ravensburgh Castle, an old camp, in private grounds. Four miles ahead Wrest Park shows up; and over it unre­ cognizable miles and miles of country. To the right I could make out, with my glasses, Caesar’s Camp at Sandy Gap, 10 miles beyond Biggleswade — and that is a good 10 miles from where I stood. It is a grand spot and one can understand the im­ pression it must have made on John Bunyan. My way took me on towards the south-west, through a lovely glade of old thorn trees white with may— down a steep rutted track in the chalk— along a bit o f country road and then once more through a deserted green lane with high hedges on either side for i£ miles to the main Luton-Bedford road, which I struck just by Warden Hill G olf Course. For the next 3 miles the Ordnance Map is a little vague as to the course taken by the Icknield Way, until it marks it again at Halfway House on the main road between Dunstable and Luton. It is said to

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have crossed the beginning of the River Lea at Waalud’s Bank in Leagrave; but I think myself it is much more likely to have stuck to the high ground a mile or two further north and cut across from Maiden Bower, the other side of Dunstable, straight to Ravensburgh. After all, those were the two camps it ran past, so why make for low, marshy ground when there is a direct line along the sort of ridge it generally follows in that part of the country? However, I dutifully went by the map— and was rewarded by having to pass through some of the most disgusting building development I have ever seen. The bungalows across the Luton-Bedford road are bad enough, but what Leagrave has now become is past all description. No doubt the people who live in those disastrous little houses went there in the first place because they imagined they were going to live in the country. Now perhaps some of them realize that they, or the builders they pat­ ronized, have utterly murdered the country for miles round. It is bad enough when that kind of thing happens in a suburb or along an arterial road; but in that lovely country of lovely downs it is absolutely unforgivable. It is beginning to spread now westwards from Dunstable as w ell; and if it is allowed to continue, five years will see the whole district ruined and the real country put another io miles away from London. The Icknield Way crosses Watling Street at Dunstable— or more probably just north of it—

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and at the crossing there was a Roman station called DUROCOBRIVAE. Any number o f Roman-British finds have been made at other places near (many o f them can be seen in the museums at Dunstable or Luton), showing that the district was well inhabited at the time. I went to Maiden Bower, the Iron Age camp a mile to the west of Dunstable, just before sunset. It is a lovely place, and from the camp itself one does not realize that the quarry o f a cement works has eaten into the hill on the north right to the brink (Totternhoe Camp a mile to the west has almost gone). It is a circular enclosure, perhaps 300 yards across, with a single bank round it 7 or 8 feet high. Judging by the number of bones of cattle that have been dug up there, it seems very likely that some of these camps were used, at any rate for a time, simply as pens for cattle— to supply the main forts. When I was there Maiden Bower was under corn, and the dark blue-green was almost lit up here and there by white campions, the first of the year for me. I do not know whether anyone else has noticed it, but to my mind the white of a campion is the most luminous of any flower. I f you look at them in the dusk, they do really seem to be glowing with a very gentle light of their own. Just outside the camp I noticed a pair of plover making a terrific fuss, swooping distractedly again and again at the ground. I got out my glasses expecting to find at least a rat or a stoat making off with one of their youngsters. It turned out to

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be merely a brace of partridges who had come too near the nursery and were looking most indignant at all the hullabaloo they had caused. Next morning I climbed Ivinghoe Beacon before breakfast (as I prefer beauty spots without a crowd of people) and was astonished to find a small boy of eight or nine up there before me— but no more astonished, I think, than he was to see me. We admired the view in silence— much the same as from Pegsdon Bam, but a light early-morning haze blurring the details. To the east, the Whipsnade lion, cut out of the turf, showed up strangely. I wish they would either remove all the turf from the inside or trim it to some shape to suit the design. At present it looks as if they had originally intended to have an all-white lion and had then got tired o f turf-cutting and just left it. From Ivinghoe, the map gave me a choice o f two Icknield Ways, the Upper and the Lower, which run roughly parallel about a mile apart for some 18 miles almost to Watlington. I took the one to the South, the Upper. It led me past Tring and across Akeman Street (the Roman road from St. Albans to Ciren­ cester, which it followed for \ mile), through Halton and Wendover to Ellesborough. Here, just south of the road, is Cymbeline’s Mount, a steep little spur of hill crowned with a tumulus. According to tradition, two of the sons of Cymbeline were killed here, fighting against Aulus Plautius and the Romans in the first few months of the invasion.

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Cymbeline, o f course, was Cunobelinus, king o f the Trinovantes, whose capital was Colchester. Now there is another burial on his mount, in the little clump of beeches on the top— a stone marked “ Rob, an Irish terrier, died March 2, 1898.” A mile and a half on, past Bulpit Hill, with a small camp on it, is Whiteleaf Hill where a great cross on a triangular base is cut into the chalk. This, like Bledlow Cross, 4 miles on, is said to com­ memorate one o f Alfred’s battles with the Danes. All this country is full of legends of Alfred. From Pegsdon too, I had looked down on the scenes of many of his exploits. But as walking country, it seems to me to leave something to be desired. It is wonderfully wooded, but too much built upon and inhabited. For most of the time the Icknield Way was a fair-sized modern road. But after Great Kimble (compare that name with Cymbeline, by the way) and Whiteleaf Hill it improved. It skirted Princes Risborough as a grassy track between hedges, ran south with the High Wycombe road for J mile or so, picked up a country road for i j miles and then reverted to its proper form as a grassy lane. Then there came over 10 miles of perfect walking. At times it was a tree-hung terrace cut into the side of the downs; at times it ran parallel with them, \ a mile out on the flat; sometimes it had hawthome hedges— but nearly always there was an avenue o f trees to shade it. It was a green and white day: green hedges, trees and grass, o

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white may and chestnut, guelder rose and cow parsley. I climbed up through the woods to see Bledlow Cross, warned that it would take me much more than the ten minutes I had estimated from the map. Actually I was up and down in very little over the ,en. Why do people in these days underestimate the powers of walking so much? I f you ask the way in London to anywhere more than ioo yards away, you are given elaborate instructions about trans­ port ; and if you say you are going to walk, you are looked at as if you are mad and told it is a very, very long way. Apparently the spread o f motorbuses is having the same effect in the country. After Chinnor the little single-track railway line from Princes Risborough to Watlington (or rather to J of a mile short of Watlington— which struck me as queer) ran beside us for a mile or two, but it is hardly the sort of railway to object to. In fact, it never had a train along it in the two hours I had it in sight. The main Oxford road from High Wycombe is crossed just by Beacon Hill and quickly forgotten again; and, not far from Watlington, the familiar outline of Wittenham Clumps showed miles ahead— as it has a habit o f doing from the most unexpected places all over Oxfordshire and Berks. From now on, instead of skirting the foot of the Chilterns, the Icknield Way let them turn away south and took a line of its own across the Oxford­ shire downs. And grand country it is, sweeping in

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strong curves and folds down to the broad, green valley of the Thames. The soil is a lovely cafe-creme colour, shading almost to cream where the chalk shows more clearly, and patched with beautiful shapes of blue-green springing corn. Hedges are rare, to mar the fine lines of the ground. Here and there a few clumps of trees seem to have strayed from the heavily wooded Chilterns behind, but not enough in number or size to spoil the contrast with the wonderful richness of the valley scene ahead. At Swyncombe Down with its so-called Danish entrenchments (Alfred again perhaps), the 10 miles of turf come to an end and for most of the way to Goring a little flint road carries the old track. Then, a mile before Ipsden, the metalled lane forked east and left the old road to run as a cart-track across fields. Later, a little hedgeless lane brought me to Cleeve, near Goring. There are arguments as to where the ancient track crossed the Thames. Certainly on the other side of the river, several miles away, the Ridgeway forks into three— one for Streatley and Goring, one for Moulsford (further upstream) and one, lower down, for Pangbourne. I crossed at Goring, as the nearest bridge, and then made my way north to where the Fair Mile swings up on to the Berkshire Downs from Moulsford. It curves past a little larch wood, bright in its early green, and then runs straight and wide (70 to 80 yards in places) for i j miles to the foot of Lowbury Hill with its Barrows

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and Roman camp. Another straight i£ miles brings it to its junction with the rest of the Ridgeway; and then begins what is for me the best 20 miles in England. One’s chief impression at first, on these Berkshire downs, is that of height and space. The sky is very wide, and one is almost up in it, with the larks that fill it with perpetual song. Far ahead, for mile after mile, the old Ridgeway stretches, and every skyline it leads you over shows a slightly higher one beyond. Little woods and clumps of trees swell up just when a touch o f difference is needed, and everywhere, ahead and on your left to the south, the strong curves of the downs carry your eyes always a little upwards. To the north, a string of little villages, tucked round with trees, follows the parallel course of the Icknield Way along the foot of the high ground— Blewbury, Letcombe Bassett, Letcombe Regis, Kingston Lyle, Compton Beauchamp— lovely names and lovely places. And beyond them, for miles and miles— over Dorchester and Abingdon, to Boar’s Hill and Oxford— lies the green, rich valley of the Thames. Even the sky above the Berkshire downs seems different. It has a pearly opalescent look caused perhaps by light reflected back from the miles and miles of short, flower-studded turf. And the soil— where an occasional field of arable allows it to be seen, is a lovely colour, a light, warm brown. Twenty miles of this without fear of interruption is a walk not to be despised. Nine miles o f it brought

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Segsbury camp, a wide, roughly rectangular en­ closure behind a single high bank and ditch, on the very brink of the downs above Letcombe. Another 4, and the great earthworks of Uffington Castle on White Horse Hill top the skyline ahead. Below that, on the slope of the downs to the north, is the White Horse himself. It has been customary to look on this as the crude attempt of semi-savages to show something like a horse in a naturalistic style; but I see it as something quite different— as a real work o f art, made in a day when vision was clearer— and never intended to be purely representational. Its affinity with some of the best modern art is obvious. No one knows its age or even its purpose; but in style it seems to compare with certain pro­ ducts of the Iron Age. Below it stands Dragon’s Hill, on which St. George killed the dragon. And if anyone doubts this, there are the marks where its blood trickled down the slopes and where no grass has grown from that day to this. Not far ahead lies Wayland Smith’s Cave, where, if you leave a horse overnight— and a piece of silver— you will find your horse shod in the morning. It is the burial chamber of a Long Barrow, with the earth removed, showing the huge stones; and it is surrounded by a group of beeches— altogether one of the loveliest sights on the downs. And now I have forgotten to mention the Blowing Stone, a great block of sandstone, which stood once on the Ridgeway but is now in a cottage garden \ mile below. On this Alfred used to blow

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a great blast to warn the countryside of the coming of the Danes. I made it sound all right, but I doubt if my blast would have roused a countryside. Only 4 miles away, to the south-west, is Ashdown Hill, where he turned at bay after his defeat at Reading and won the first of that series of victories which kept Wessex free. Needless to say, the Iron-Age camp there is known as Alfred’s Castle. But I must leave the downs— after a last look at the wonderful view from the culminating hill by Little Hinton— for now, as well as the north, the west is open, over the Cotswolds and Gloucester almost to Wales. A quick descent brings the other Ermine Street, a real Roman road again that runs in long stretches of dead straight from Silchester to Gloucester. It misses Swindon by a mile and a half (though the influence of the town can be seen in the hideous houses at Stratton St. Margaret) and, a mile before, is joined by a Roman road from Win­ chester. Through Cricklade the modern road takes two sides of a triangle; but traces of the old road have been found cutting straight across the meadows. At Cirencester the Fosse Way is crossed, and then comes one of the best examples I have seen of an old Roman road triumphing over the new. For some 8 miles the road is almost dead straight and for much of this distance it is set high on a raised causeway, up to io feet high in places. The views, as one climbs gradually up to almost i,ooo feet, are magnificent— right back over the Cotswolds and

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to the Berkshire downs more than 20 miles behind. And then comes Birdlip Hill and another straight stretch of 5 miles, a stretch which in Roman days was 8 miles long and paved. From the top you get a fine view of Gloucester and the country round it, including the gasometer, which is tastefully painted bright red. In Gloucester it is held that the city was probably a legionary fortress before the founding of Caerleon, but it is strange that little evidence has ever been found to support this. In fact, the only positive clue we have to the whereabouts of the Second Legion before Caerleon is a tile-stamp from Seaton, in Devonshire. And so, if we are to stick to proved facts, we must rank Gloucester (GLEVUM as it was called) as a Roman colony— like Lincoln in its later days. Little is known o f its lay-out except that an ancient rectangular entrench­ ment about 500 by 400 yards has been traced. Part of the old wall can still be seen in the cellars of the Museum. Here, too, is the Birdlip Mirror, a famous example of Celtic metal-work, and several inter­ esting Roman-British remains. North and south from Gloucester, Roman roads ran to Tewkesbury and Worcester and to Sea Mills, the Bristol Channel port for the Mendips. To the west ran the road to Wales, through Monmouthshire. But the Roman conquest o f Wales— and my own more peaceful penetration o f it— will have to wait now till the next chapter.

CHA PTER

( G lo ucester - C a e r l e o n ,

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(C hester) h e n I started to look for a Roman road from Gloucester to Caerleon-on-Usk (near Newport, in Monmouthshire), I soon found myself spoiled by choice. I wasted no time in considering the most direct one along the Severn and the railway to Chepstow, because that would obviously be one long stream of traffic— and also I wanted to go down the Wye Valley past Tintern Abbey. But even so, almost every road I looked at on the map seemed to be marked ROMAN ROAD. The fact is, the Romans worked the Forest of Dean pretty thoroughly for iron, and so the whole district got covered with a network of roads. It is curious, by the way, that they never seem to have bothered with coal; but I suppose as they had an unlimited supply of timber and plenty of slaves to chop it up, coal was hardly worth the digging. Eventually I decided to go due west, through Huntley and Mitcheldean, cross the Wye at Bigsweir Bridge, follow the river down to Chepstow, and strike west again to Newport and Caerleon. I left Gloucester on an obvious Roman road called Over Causeway, raised several feet above the meadows on either side. Where the modern

W

A ROMAN ROAD WITH ORIGINAL PAVING IN MONMOUTHSHIRE

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road swerves to cross the bridge, the hump of the old track can still be seen running along the side— dead straight. Three miles out, the hills of Mon­ mouthshire came into sight and I began to wonder what the mountains of Wales beyond, and the Sam Helen running through them, held in store for me. At 5J miles I had some good hunting, when the modern road went round two sides of a triangle and I followed the old Roman line for 2J miles, sometimes as a lane or a footpath and sometimes as a long mound running through fields of white­ faced Herefordshire cattle. I shall not describe the Forest of Dean in detail because, so far as I could see, practically all the Roman characteristics of the roads are lost. It is mostly very steep hills with thickly wooded sides— and it struck me as just a little muddled in effect. They do the same sort of thing much better in the Wye Valley, which is simply magnificent. So till I get there we will see how the Romans dealt with Wales. If you remember, they made a start there in a .d . 46— three years having been enough to subdue the south-eastern half of England as divided diagon­ ally by the Fosse Way. It took over thirty years to settle Wales. Suetonius Paulinus was busy raiding the Druids’ stronghold in Anglesey when Boadicea’s revolt in 61 took all his attention off Wales for a time. Ten years later, Vespasian’s general, Petillius Cerialis, started in on it again, and had subdued North Wales by 74— in three years. The Silures

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in the South were dealt with from 74 to 78 by Julius Frontinus; and it was probably he who founded the legionary fortress at Caerleon-on-Usk, where the Second Augusta Legion was quartered. These Silures in Monmouthshire and Glamorgan had proved very tough nuts to crack. Ostorius Scapula had defeated them once, in 47, and taken their King, Caractacus, prisoner; and they had been hammered at, on and off, ever since. By 74 the Romans realized that something more than brute force was needed for dealing with these stubborn Welshmen, and so they used their well-tried trick o f peaceful seduction. The military fortress at Caerleon was probably built in 74 or 75, and at about the same time a civil town, Caerwent, was built only 8 miles away. And here the wild tribesmen were given a taste of Roman luxury. After 78 we hear of very little more trouble with the Silures! I came to Caerwent 4 miles after leaving Chep­ stow. I am sorry that I cannot conscientiously describe my walk down the Wye Valley from Bigsweir Bridge to Chepstow, because it was very beautiful— perhaps the nearest thing we have to Rhine scenery; but, unfortunately, the road there does not seem to be Roman, so I must leave its beauties to guide-books and the pictures in railway carriages. Caerwent is a quiet little village, by-passed just to the north by the main road. The Roman walls are still standing— for the most part high enough to be impressive, perhaps 10 feet or more;

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and in a farm in the middle o f the village I was shown where the forum and basilica once were and the remains o f a temple and of a small amphi­ theatre. The amphitheatre, curiously enough, is /«side the walls, and stands on the site o f earlier buildings, so that the population of the town evi­ dently decreased as time went on. Caerwent was never a large town (only 44 acres), but it was the only Roman-British civil town in Wales, v e n t a SILURUM was its name, and it must be classed with the other centres of tribal government. Cirencester (Corinium of the Dobuni), Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum), Leicester (Ratae o f the Coritani) and so on. Its original walls of earth were rebuilt with stone a century or so later. It had three blocks of baths, many small houses and several large court­ yard houses (perhaps one of them was an inn) and at least two temples. The main gates, to East and West, have been destroyed by the road, but the smaller ones at North and South can still be seen. They tell a story. Caerwent’s position, within \ mile of navigable water, which was an advantage in the days of Rome’s strength, was just the opposite when her grip on Britain was slowly weakening: the Irish pirates could make their raids and get away. And so we find that the Romans themselves in later times blocked up the two smaller gates. A tumbled heap of skeletons, which has been roughly dated about a century after the Roman withdrawal, probably hints at the final fate of Venta Silurum.

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But there was no complete sack o f the town: like so many other relics of Roman-British civilization, its life seems to have ebbed slowly away when the Romans had gone. Perhaps the Silures went back to their hill-top fort a mile north of the town, where they had lived before its foundation— and no doubt they soon forgot the luxury of the Roman baths and the days when they had erected a statue to a 3rd century legate of the Second Legion and dedi­ cated it “ by the republic of the Silures, by order of its Senate.” This stone is still to be seen; and in the museum at Newport is a collection of other relics from Caerwent as well worth seeing as the Silchester collection at Reading. This museum understands the importance of selection: it does not overwhelm you with masses of stuff as some are inclined to do. I recommend it strongly. From Newport I went to Caerleon, or ISCA, the third o f the legionary fortresses, with York and Chester. The great thing to see there is the amphi­ theatre, the only one in this country where you can get a really vivid feeling of what such places must have been like in their prime: the hot sun beating down on the rings of six thousand excited faces, the snarls of the wild beasts in their dens, the sounds of deathly struggle in the arena— all this needs very little imagination. The walls still stand complete round the arena, 6 feet high, some of the stones still inscribed with the names of the centurions whose men had built them. The gangways are there, 16

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feet across, and rising banks o f turf all round, where the seats mounted to 30 feet, the dens for the animals, the waiting-rooms for the gladiators. With very little alteration the place could be used to-day for contests— with electric lions perhaps, to avoid blood­ shed ! The site of Caerleon shows three things very clearly: that the Romans liked a warm, sheltered place, that they liked beautiful surroundings and— what an eye they had for strategical considerations! It is a perfect spot, just where the hills close round and shelter the valley of the Usk, accessible from almost every side by land or water, and yet easily defended. The fortress was about 50 acres, with earth walls at first and stone later— but I cannot resist quoting what was written of it in the 12th century. “ Many traces of its former splendour may yet be seen, immense palaces, formerly ornamented with gilded roofs . . . a town of prodigious size, remarkable hot baths, relics of temples and theatres, all enclosed within fine walls, parts of which remain standing. You will find on all sides, both without and within the circuit of the walls, subterranean buildings, aqueducts, underground passages; and, what I think worthy of notice, stoves contrived with wonderful art to transmit the heat insensibly through narrow tubes passing up the side of the walls.” O f course when that was written, in the 12th century, domestic architecture was hardly at its highest; but Caerleon must have been a fine place. And notice the mention of a civil town such as no

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doubt grew up near most of the fortresses and big forts. To-day Caerleon is still a beautiful place, with the silver Usk winding away between the hills. I almost wished I could have stayed there and traced the history of King Arthur and the Round Table. But my road followed the river between the hills past Usk, where the Roman fort of BURRIUM was, through Abergavenny and Crickhowell to Brecon. A lovely country with great hills on either side: the Black Mountains north and peaks whose names I shall not attempt, on the south. The road-banks bright with ferns and bluebells and occasional great patches of pink campion. Sometimes I could leave the winding main road for a short distance along a straighter track marked ROMAN ROAD; but it was not t ill after Brecon that I found myself on an obviously Roman Way. Three miles west o f Brecon stands the Roman fort Y Gaer, and almost the whole way to it there is a Roman road, well-metalled still where it has not been washed away, and running about a quarter of a mile south of the modem one. It is a beautiful walk, especially on the crest o f the hill where it skirts two woods with a lake below and then drops down, shaded by hazels and hawthorns, to the farm on whose land the fort stands. When I went to Wales I was quite unprepared for the charm of the Welsh people. For some reason I had always thought of them as rather reserved, if not positively surly. In actual fact everyone I met, especially in

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South and mid-Wales, treated me with such a display o f charming manners, almost Irish in their kindliness, that I came away feeling that it is we English who are churls. The farmer who took the trouble to show me over Y Gaer was no exception. The 6- or 7-acre fort is beautifully placed in green fields with lovely trees marking the lines of the old walls. These still stand many feet high; and the masonry o f the curved corners is as clean and fine as though it had been built yesterday. The watch-towers at the corners and the guardhouses at the south and west gates can still be plainly traced. The course of the old road runs just north of the camp, and I traced the line of its causeway running down through an orchard towards the river Yscir; but the exact crossing of this and of the Usk (they join their waters just here) is a little uncertain. However, the modem road to Senny Bridge picks up the old line before long, and then in the village it curves to the left while the Romans took a shorter course (and so did I) for a mile. There are still traces in the river there of the bridge they threw across. At Trecastle, a couple o f miles further on, I left civilization for the first time in Wales and struck up a steep path to the left for the fort of Y Pigwn, nearly 4 miles ahead and 1,350 feet up on the moors. A climb of 400 in the first mile knocked off most of it, and then I saw the first stretch of really straight road that had come my way for a long time— over 2 miles of it running along the

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crest of the moor, and pointing dead at its objective. The road was well surfaced with broken sandstone. In one or two places a rush o f water down the ruts had washed away the metal, leaving a clean section showing how it was made: a layer o f large flat pieces of stone underneath, and on top smaller stones like a macadam road. On either side stretched acres of ling and heather— the ling just in flower, and occasional drifts of marsh-cotton. North, across the valley I had left, one hillside was bright gold with gorse in full bloom. I have never seen the gorse so well covered as this year. Here and there on the nearer hills the little whitewashed Welsh cottages shone out from a background of dark green, and far in the distance to the south, where the wilder country lay, two or three peaks of the Black Mountains lay over 2,000 feet high across the sky. As I topped a skyline, I saw the tumbled outlines of the fort on the next, still a mile away. The course moorland grass had almost conquered the road by now, but in the wheel-tracks the turf was short enough for comfortable walking. There is little to be seen of the fort—just mounds of earth and fallen stones, surrounding the flat crest of the moor. Y Pigwn was probably only made and used for field opera­ tions: it was never a permanently inhabited fort like the Brecon Gaer. The Roman armies never camped, even for one night, without digging a ditch and bank— and each soldier carried two stakes on his back for the palisade. Y Pigwn shows two

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forts, a smaller, later one, set diagonally inside another. I went down a steep shoulder the other side of the cam p; and a mile brought me to a farm and a lane which carried me in 5 miles to Llandovery. It had been market day there and I met a lot of Welsh farmers on their way home, wearing bowler hats and mackintoshes, and riding ponies that looked ridiculously small under them. They greeted me in Welsh, but as it was too early for the only Welsh I know (“ Good night” ), I had to answer them in English. From Llandovery I went by way of Caio to Pumpsaint, where an old gold-mine that was probably worked by the Romans is being tried again, now that the price of gold is so high. The road there was beautiful; a narrow ledge in places, cut out o f solid vertical rock with a rich wooded valley below. Part of my luck this year has been to spin Spring out for at least an extra month. Three weeks ago, on the Fosse Way, the bluebells were at their best; in Oxfordshire they are over; but in Wales I found them at their best again. The roadside banks were bright with them and a background o f new ferns, springing tufts of a green that sets them off perfectly. A mile or two westwards along the main road from Pumpsaint and then, at last, I was able to strike off due north along the Sam Helen. Actually there are two Roman roads called Sam Helen in Wales: this one from Carmarthen up to Caerhun, near Conway, and the other, further east and roughly

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parallel, from Neath, past the Brecon Gaer and on northwards— possibly to Wroxeter, though it has not been traced nearly so far. I found it very difficult on the first half of my journey to get anyone to talk about any Roman roads but this shorter Sarn Helen (which I crossed near Brecon). For them there was hardly any other Roman road and certainly no other Sarn Helen. “ Sarn” means “ Way” and Sam Helen is said to be a contraction of “ Sam y Leon.” “ The Way of the Legion” — but that is quite probably wrong. I saw no specially Roman characteristics in this road for at least 50 miles, except that it has stretches of straight, unusual in Wales; but even these are more obvious on the map than on the road. A couple of miles of lane and then, as it turned right, I turned left, down a steep little tree-hung track, by a ford across the little Twrch. I straightened out my direction by two farms and began a steep slant of 600 feet in a mile, with the hill on my left. It was a wonderful view from the to p : the grey rocks showing through the turf, sheep of almost exactly the same colour and, all round, the bubbling cry of curlew emphasizing the loneliness. A long descent brought Llanfair-Clydogan, where I crossed the Teifi and took to a sunk lane between bluebells and ferns and pink campions till I came to Gogoyan bridge. I leaned over it and watched the trout in the brown water for a few minutes and then went on up the valley to Llanio There was a fort here

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called LOVENTIUM . The remains o f the baths are still there, and a Roman well whose level never varies in the driest summer. The course of the original road is a bit uncertain up this valley, but there is a ridge across a meadow near the fort, which goes brown before the rest of the field— and I have no doubt that a spade would soon show the road beneath. The farmhouse is largely built of stones from the camp, one or two of them inscribed. From Llanio the Sam Helen runs due north for 9 miles. And then comes a gap of 32 miles where its course is uncertain. What it probably did (and what I did) was to go north-west almost into Aberystwyth, cross the Ystwyth at Pentrebont and the Rheidol at Llanbadam-fawr and then make north-northeast to cross the Dovey somewhere near Mach­ ynlleth. The country round Aberystwyth is remarkable for the number of hill-top forts: twenty-nine of them within a semicircle o f a 10-mile radius. One o f the chief forts is Pen Dinas on the isolated hill right by the seashore, between the estuaries of the Ystwyth and the Rheidol. Anyone who has ever been to Aberystwyth will know it as the hill with the monu­ ment that looks exactly like a factory chimney, half a mile south of the town. Pen Dinas was partly excavated last summer and more work is going to be done on it this year. It was originally defended by a high bank, faced on the outside with stone, and by additional ramparts and ditches where the

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natural slope o f the ground was insufficient in itself. The entrance, to the south-east, was 15 feet wide; and at each corner holes were found going 2 or 3 feet into the solid rock. In these, great posts had stood, two at each side— no doubt to hold the gates or barricades as well as strengthen the turn o f the wall. The stone facing was carried round the entrance and along the inside of the wall for several feet and was built to fit close against two sides of the posts. No pottery has been found so far, nor anything that can be closely dated. The interest o f Pen Dinas to me is that the Welsh probably went on living in such places all through the Roman occupation. With the solitary exception of Caerwent, and perhaps a villa or two in the extreme south-east, there is no sign that the Welsh tribes ever became Romanized in the way that much of England did. No doubt they got hold of Roman pottery and that sort of thing whenever they could— but, for the rest, their intercourse with Rome was limited to dodging the press-gangs after slaves or auxiliaries: they continued to live their old lives on the hill­ tops as though Rome had never been heard of. From Llanbadarn-fawr I continued north-east for a mile and picked up the main road from Aberystwyth. This goes through a village with the surprising name of Bow Street. “ Street” you notice — in Wales! Remembering the Strettons and Streets that line the Roman roads in England, I wondered whether it showed that I was on the right track.

GLOUCESTER-CHESTER

"7

From Talybont I took a straighter line than the main road— up the hillside by Bedd Taliesin— on the main road again for a couple of miles— and again a short cut over the hill by Pont Llyfnant. The only Roman feature of these lanes was their comparative directness; but they were often very beautiful, cut out of the solid rock. Above Taliesin I saw my first foxgloves and wild roses (the May still out) and had a grand view across the Dovey estuary and a hint of the big mountains to come. It is not known where the Romans crossed the Dovey. They had a fort near Pennal, and the remains of a causeway could be seen until comparatively lately, but this only ran to a quay. Probably their main crossing was 3 miles upstream, at Machynlleth. Just above here the little river Dulas comes in from the north. The main road follows its left bank, but I followed its right along a smaller lane. In 4 miles, just before Aberllefenni, I found something which convinced me I was right. My smaller lane crossed the river, but a raised hump, banked up on the left with great kerb-stones almost hidden with moss, ran straight on through a pinewood— surely Roman work. The villages of Corns and Aberllefenni are built entirely o f slate, and very nice it looks in that setting. Used edgeways, as it is in walls, slate has a much more luminous and less powdery look than it has on roofs. Even the fences there are made o f thick strips of slate wired together. A steep climb up a valley to the north-west

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brought me to moorland again. It was a lovely way up, past yellow gorse and young green bracken — and once, half an acre of bluebells like a sheet of water. Often the road was banked up with great kerbstones, sometimes there was a trace of camber, and once I passed a big stone, now split into three, which looks as if it had been set up as a milestone. Although this part of the road is not shown as Sarn Helen on the map, it seemed to me far more obviously Roman than much that is. After coming into the main road, 3 miles south-east o f Dolgelly, the real way is uncertain again until Cymmer A bbey; but from there the 4 miles to Pont ar Eden (where the map first shows it again) seem to me obvious once you know where to look. From the Abbey it follows the lower hillside track (below Precipice Walk) on the east of the river, past the old copper mines at Glasdir, and so to Pont ar Eden. It was a superb walk. The afternoon sun was just beginning to light up the precipices on the north of Cader Idris behind me and shone like silver on the surface of the river winding about where the valley broadens out into flat green meadows below the abbey. A cuckoo was calling in the woods across the other side— not “ Cuckoo,” but the lovely bubbling call of the hen-bird which so few people seem to know. Sometimes the river was fringed with yellow irises and sometimes a cluster of lilypads stood out pale green on the black of its surface where it reflected the mountains beyond.

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” 9

At Pont ar Eden a row of enormous stepping-stones, which may well be Roman, took me across the Mawddach and soon the road began to climb above the trees on to the shoulder o f Craig y Penmaen. First the oaks dropped away and then the ash and thorn; the bracken followed, and I was left with only grey stones andheather. Ahead and to the left the steep-sided valley opened out on to the wide moors rolling up to the mountains beyond. From Craig y Penmaen the Sam Helen slopes gradually down again to join the main road just before Trawsfynydd, where a reservoir now fills what my map showed as a valley. Through the village, build­ ings, roads and the railway have blotted out all trace of the old road, and I did not pick it up for certain until close by Tomen-y-mur, the fort I w'as making for, 2 miles on. A notice-board nearby invited me to pay threepence to visit the “ Roman Castle” — actually a medieval castle tump standing in the Roman area. But Tomen-y-mur is noteworthy as being the only small fort with an amphitheatre of its own. The small arena is now a swamp, but the oval mound round it still stands 2 or 3 feet high. The road north from the fort is well worth following. It cuts clean through three ridges of solid rock to keep its gradient and then winds cleverly down into the valley a mile away and up the other side. Crossing the Ffestiniog road I was delighted to see two notice-boards saying “ Roman Road.” I could have done with these at several places! But

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Ffestiniog must have a bad mark as the place where they tried to charge me twice as much for the bread and cheese I had with my beer as anywhere else in England or Wales. The 5 miles of Sam Helen north from there are simply magnificent. The road climbs to over 1,700 feet, high among the bare crags, with never a wheel rut on it for miles. Sometimes it is cut through rock, or raised up on a foundation of big stones. For most of the way it can easily be seen by the moss which grows more thickly where its impervious surface stops the water soaking away. (Just the opposite to its effect in a meadow, when the grass withers first on top of it.) I lost it among some slate workings almost at the top, picked it up again beyond, and lost it again on the very steep descent to Dolwyddelan. Then came 2 miles along an entrancing little valley like an Alpine Garden, with low grey rocks and a tumbling stream, cuckoo flower and toy may-trees. A mile and a half along the main road (but by the side of a perfect Welsh mountain river) to Pont-y-pant and I struck up again for the heights (a mere thousand or so this time) and came down into the beautiful valley between Bettwys-y-Coed and the Swallow Falls. This was obviously a beauty-spot, and what I thought at first glance was a seagull on the river turned out to be a large piece of picnic paper to confirm my fears. So I hurried across Miner’s Bridge, up the path to the left for a mile and then

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struck north once more up through the woods and over the heights to Trcfriw. It was lovely walking, but I could not have pointed out any part o f the way as obviously Roman. Five miles along the main road brought Caerhun and the end o f the Sam Helen— though a branch had gone off at Tomen-y-mur for Carnarvon. The fort at Caerhun, KANO VIUM , was built at about the same time a t Caerleon and Y Gaer, roundabout a .d . 75. At first it had earth ramparts and wooden buildings, but early in the 2nd century it was rebuilt in stone, as so many other forts and fortresses were. I asked a local man in the village where the Roman fort was. He said there was not one, so far as he knew. I said I thought from my map I ought to have taken the last road to the right. He said there was no road to the right for several miles and he had never heard of any Roman fort. So I thanked him and walked back a couple of hundred yards: there was the lane, and down it, standing in the middle o f what remains of the 5-acre fort— the village church! The lines of the walls could be made out in the fields and there may have been Roman remains in the church, but unfortunately there was a service on, so I could not see. And I wanted to get on to Chester to round off my tour of Wales. I made no attempt to trace a Roman road there, though I believe bits can be found near St. Asaph. I felt that anything o f the kind would be an anticlimax after parts o f the Sam Helen. Chester, itself, is no mean city to

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finish off at, though its atmosphere is medieval rather than Roman. There are very few Roman remains outside the fine collection in the museum. A good section of the foot of the old Roman wall can be seen, preserved at the expense of one man who paid for the telephone exchange to be built above it rather than through i t ; and, close by, the more recently excavated south-east comer of the fortress, just outside the medieval wall. It struck me as remarkable— and deplorable— that this later piece should be left unmarked and unprotected for children to play over and deface. Surely a city like Chester is proud enough of its Roman history— one of the only three legionary fortresses in Britain— to afford a few feet of railings and a notice-board. Fifty yards away the amphitheatre lies beneath 15 feet of subsoil. A few small excavations have made it possible to calculate the size and shape of this, with its seating for eight thousand spectators. But houses are built on part of it and I am afraid it can never be brought to light like Caerleon. However, it is something to have been able to find out even as much as that— and fit another little piece into the fascinating jig-saw of Roman Britain.

CHAPTER

VII

H AD RIAN ’S W ALL P e o p l e may ask whether I have used special maps for these tours. I have not. There is an Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain, but it is too small in scale to be of much use except for working out a general plan. I have used the ordinary inch to the mile Ordnance maps throughout. There may be other maps as good but there are certainly none better either for the walker or for the motorist who wants to know all there is to be seen in the country. All kinds of antiquities are marked in distinctive lettering, and to anyone who wants to get the best out of their maps I strongly recommend the little sixpenny Ordnance Survey Booklet called Field Archeology. There is a most fascinating new edition of the inch to the mile maps, called the “ Land Utilization” series. On these the land is coloured in patches according to its use: woods, dark green; permanent pasture, light green; arable, brown; moorland, yellow; gardens, purple; towns and unproductive land generally, red. The advantage of these maps is that they look like the countryside itself. You see the familiar chess-board of fields and woods and the patches of towns, suburbs and villages. They ought to be specially valuable to those who have difficulty in finding their way about on the

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ordinary maps and of course to anyone who is interested in the production side of the country. I did not want to finish off the seventh and last of these tours, which had taken me through so much lovely country, in the middle of Newcastle. I pre­ ferred to end by the lovely saltings of the Solway Firth. And so I took Hadrian’s Wall from east to west. It runs for about 73 miles, from Wallsend, just east of Newcastle, across past Carlisle and on to Bowness-on-Solway. There is much more than just the wall to see. To begin with there is the ditch in front of it (to the north) and the Roman road, called the Military Way, running along close behind it. Behind that again, at varying distances from the Wall, is an older earthwork called the Vallum. And the Wall itself is divided up into sections by forts, mile-castles and turrets. Obviously the actual wall cannot still be seen along its whole length: it made far too useful a quarry for that— half the farms and churches for miles round are built of it — and it suffered one severe disaster when, in the ’45 rebellion, some 26 miles of it was pulled down and a road made along the founda­ tions, so that General Wade could get his guns across to Carlisle and into action against Bonnie Prince Charlie. But there are miles and miles where it has survived. I did not spend a great deal o f time in Newcastle. At Wallsend the outlines of the flanking fort, SEGEDUNUM, are marked by white stones in the paving and a section o f the Wall itself

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can be seen, marked with a plaque, in Swan and Hunter’s shipyard. Otherwise, all that remains of the wall is in the Black Gate museum, with a fine collection of inscribed stones and other things collected from along it. I left the town by a dead straight road that runs along the foundations of the Wall. There is just one bit to be seen behind railings on the left at Benwell Hill, 2 miles out, and after that I drew blank for another 5 or so. It is not a very inspiring walk, and so I shall try to beguile the way by picking up the story of the Roman Conquest from where I left it, and explaining where Hadrian’s Wall fits in. I left the Conquest, if you remember in the late 70’s. By a . d . 78 the only tribe in Wales who were still giving trouble were the Ordovices. In that year or the year before a really great man appears on the scene— not only a great general but a great administrator, Julius Agricola. And by good luck his son-in-law was a great historian, Tacitus. Agricola evidently thought that thirty years was quite long enough for the Roman legions to spend in conquering Wales, and so in one season he finished off the Ordovices— practically wiping them out, according to Tacitus. His next job was the Brigantes in Lancashire and Yorkshire, who had been tackled by Petillius Cerialis in a .d . 71— when the legionary fortress was moved from Lincoln to York. We do not know just how much of the credit ought to be given to Petillius— but by the end of Agricola’s first

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year there, a . d . 79, the whole of northern England had been linked up by a network of roads and forts, so effectively that in the next year he was able to carry his campaigns straight on into Scotland without any interruptions from behind. By a .d . 84 or 85 he had conquered as far north as Perth, and by his last victory at Mons Graupius he himself believed that his task was as good as done. And then, at the last moment, to his great disappointment, he was recalled by the Emperor Domitian for more im­ portant work in Germany. If he had been allowed to finish his work here, it is quite conceivable that the subsequent history of Britain and even of Europe might have been different. But the conquest was never completed; and for nearly thirty years the northern frontier was left hanging in the air, defended by a number of forts which were far too far apart. We can imagine our old school-friends, the Piets, getting more and more daring as the fear of Agricola’s legions gradually faded. At length, the Romans realized that the line was too long to be held economically, and sometime between a .d . 117 and 122 (the first 5 years of Hadrian’s reign), most of Scotland was abandoned, and a ditch was dug, 30 feet wide and 7 feet deep, from Newcastle to Burgh Marsh, 6 miles West of Carlisle, in order to divide Roman Britain from the land of the barbarians. This ditch, the Vallum, is still to be seen, running for miles and miles roughly parallel with the Wall. It was simply a boundary:

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any fighting would be done in the open to the north o f it— and that was where the ten forts to hold it were placed. However, in a .d . 121 or 122, Hadrian himself came to Britain, decided that the Vallum was not strong enough and started the building o f the Wall a few yards to the north of it. The first section built— westwards from Newcastle— was 9 feet 6 inches thick at the base; but after a few miles had been done, plans were changed and the thickness reduced to 7 feet 6 inches. The height to the sentry walk was probably about 15 feet and there would be a parapet above that. There were seventeen forts along the length of it, and smaller forts, called mile-castles, spaced every Roman mile, between these. Each mile was subdivided into three, by two turrets or raised watch-towers. So that the garrison of each mile-castle or fort (except the flanks) would be responsible for one turret on each side, a third of a mile away. The work of building was divided out among the three legions then in Britain: the original Second ‘Augusta’ from Caerleon, the Twentieth from Chester and the Sixth from York. The Ninth (another of the original Claudian expeditionary force), which we met at Lincoln and in Boadicea’s rebellion, was badly cut up again in one of Agricola’s campaigns and had just been finally wiped out in a rising at the beginning of Hadrian’s reign. The Sixth took its place. These three legions have each left their mark on the Wall in the form of inscriptions recording the work of

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each “ century” under its centurion. Other sections were built (or perhaps repaired later) by sailors from the fleet and by Britons from Devonshire, the Midlands, Dorset, Yorkshire and Lancashire. And so the Wall was built and the Military Way close behind it, with causeways over the Vallum for each section to move its men and materials across. But even the Wall was only intended as an obstacle to raiding-parties: it could not have been held against a massed attack. Each fort and mile-castle had gates to south and north, through which troops could advance out into the open for battle— the style of fighting the Romans liked best. It was not their habit to waste the high-trained legions on frontier work except in emergencies: they were quartered in the legionary fortresses, ready to be moved up in case of trouble. The frontiers were held by auxiliaries, levies of newly conquered tribes, who were formed into cohorts five hundred or one thousand strong and not into legions. And so along the Wall we find records of Gauls, Frisians, Asturians, Dacians and others, as well as Comovii from Shropshire. And now I think I may be said to have covered the 5 miles from Newcastle to Heddon-on-the-Wall, where the main road to Hexham turns off to the south-west and leaves the Carlisle road running more or less along the foundations of the Wall. Just before the fork there is a good section of Wall to be seen in a field to the left, with a curious cir­

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cular chamber in it. When I went to look at it, a goat was standing on top. It looked at me with a very Roman expression in its Pan-like eyes and then went on nibbling. I felt it had quite probably been there since the building of the Wall. It is at Heddon or thereabouts that the Vallum and the ditch in front of the Wall both begin to look really interesting for the first time. For the rest of the way to Carlisle almost always one or both of them are to be seen, even when there is no trace left of the Wall. Those great purposeful gashes through rock and soil give an extraordinary impression of power. At Rudchester, 1\ miles on, the lines of one of the forts, VlNDOBALA, can be traced in the grass; and at the next cross-roads, inscribed stones from the Wall are built into the front of a house on the left. All through this country, any number of stones from the Wall can be recognized in buildings. After a time you get to recognize the shape, about 8 by 10 by 20 inches—just the size that a man could handle without tackle. On Harlow Hill, the Wallditch on the right and the Vallum on the left sweep up in a grand way, and the view from the top made me realize, not for quite the first time, what fine country I was going through, especially to the south where the ground ran down to the beautifully wooded Tyne valley and swelled up to Mickley Hill beyond. Presently the Wall ditch was filled with a narrow plantation of young larch, and on the right the mounds of the Vallum were piled with the heavy i

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gold of gorse-bloom. Just here I could see quite plainly some of the causeways where the Vallum was filled in while the Wall was being built. After Halton Chesters, where the vague lines of the fort HUNNUM are still to be seen, the Wall was crossed by the Roman road Dere Street, which ran up to Scotland from the York road at Corbridge or CO RSTO PITUM , one of Agricola’s forts on Stanegate (the Roman road from Carlisle to Newcastle). Here the Portgate once stood, taking the road through the Wall. Within a mile the road climbed Whittington Fell and took me on to far higher ground than I had reached so far. Glorious views— this time to the east and north— the Vallum more inspiring than ever and primroses and violets growing in the Wall ditch. I enjoyed it all the more for the thought that another few miles would bring wild country, where trees and green grass would be hard to find. At Brunton, the road turns north, down the hill, making for Chollerford Bridge across the North Tyne. I found the abutment of the Roman bridge (on the true line, of course) by walking £ mile along the bank downstream. It must have been a magnificent job. I think nothing I have seen on these walks has given me a greater impression o f the strength and beauty of Roman work than the sight of these huge beautifully fitted stones. Across the river there is a lovely view of the ruined bath-houses that served the fort of c i l u r n u m at Chesters

ROMAN BATH-HOUSE AT CHESTERS, NORTHUMBERLAND

HADRIAN’S WALL

«3 *

a quarter of a mile on. As I walked back along the bank, to cross by the bridge (and a lovely bridge that is, too) a fine salmon came right out of the water twice for me to admire him. The fort at Chesters has been very carefully excavated and preserved. Most of it can be made out quite plainly— the walls with comer towers and gates, the head­ quarters building and praetorium, some o f the barrack buildings and, down by the river, the baths. And there is a good museum there, full of the things that have been dug up. Altogether a perfect place for anyone who wants to get a bit of RomanBritain in a nutshell. Even the ruts of the chariot wheels can still be seen in the thresholds of the gate­ ways. At the end of Chesters Park the road returns to the line of the Wall. As I climbed for a mile or two, the trees gradually fell away and I got my first hint of the wild country to come. Ahead and to the right stretched miles and miles o f bleak moorland with hardly a building on it, the only living things, so far as I could see, a few sheep here and there, and the curlew, bubbling and wailing in the distance. At Tower Tie and all along this stretch there are several sections where the facing stones of the Wall can be seen by the roadside; and there is one most spectacular place where both the ditches are cut through the solid rock and great pieces, split off by the quarrymen’s wedges, have just been heaved to one side and left there. Obviously, in the case o f

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the Vallum, it was the ditch which mattered and not the mounds of upcast. Another mile or two (26 from Newcastle now) and at last the road bore away to the south west and left me to follow the Wall alone where it ran out across the moor and climbed up for Sewingshields Crags straight ahead. The next 10 miles were the best o f all. The formation o f the ground is curious. Seen from the south, it looks like ordinary rather desolate moorland rising to a ridge running east and west. When you climb to the top of this, you find to your surprise that you are on the edge of precipitous grey crags which fall abruptly down to the moors, sometimes 200 or 300 feet below. This is the Great Whin Sill o f north England and it is along the very brink of it that Hadrian’s Wall runs. And it is just this part o f the wall that is best preserved, the full width and often 5 or 6 feet high. As you leave the road you see ahead of you the sheer edge of Sewingshields with the Wall running along the brink. There was a medieval castle here and it is said that King Arthur and his Knights still sit there, in an underground hall, wrapped in a magic sleep, waiting the coming of one who shall break the spell. From the top of the Crags the view is wonderful— north over the Wastes, as the moors are called, with Broomlee Lough at your feet, or south to the Tyne valley— or east or west for that matter— in fact it is one of the places of England. It must have looked very different to the Roman

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>33

sentries at times, when the grey mist swirled down, blotting out everything, and they gazed into it until their eyes burned, seeing everywhere shapes that might have moved the second before. A grim place then! The Wall follows the edge round, south— then west again and a mile brings Housesteads— BORCOVICIUM— the fort most worth seeing of all. When I was there they were excavating the civil settlement outside the walls and one room was placarded “ Murder Room,” because two skeletons and a dagger had been found there. I was hoping to be able to see the remains of the Mithraic temple, the only certain one in this country; but there is nothing left now. The worship of Mithras was very popular among Romans at one time, especially with soldiers. There was a good deal of blood about it— bulls sacrificed in under­ ground temples and so on. Most exciting! Between Sewingshields and Housesteads, by the way, is a place called Busy Gap. It is supposed to be so named because it was a weak spot in the line and raiders used to keep the Romans busy. At any rate there is an extra line of earthworks there. Just west of Housesteads, walking'along the top of the Wall, I came to the Housesteads mile-castle, the best preserved one along the whole Wall, standing nearly io feet high. It was evidently pulled down by raiders more than once; and you can still see how the Romans rebuilt it and narrowed the original gateway.

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I kept on along the top, flushing scores o f wood pigeons and jackdaws from the cliffs beneath me, over Hotpoint Crags and on past where Crag Lough lies right at the foot of the precipice. This is the grandest bit of all. Magnificent columns of basalt, rising absolutely sheer up, and far below, the blue water of the lough and the brown moorland beyond. Another 2 or 3 miles, up ridge and down gap brought me to Winshield’s Crag, the highest point on the Wall, 1,230 feet, and far ahead I got my first glimpse of the Solway Firth. And then to Burnhead, past a good mile-castle, and the steep descent to Haltwhistle Bum, where a quarry is busy eating the hill away. Another mile brought Great Chesters and what is left of the fort of AES IC A ; another three, and the Wall came to an abrupt stop on the edge o f the Greenhead quarry. This was the end of the wild country. In the green valley below, the ruins o f Thirlwall Castle showed very clearly what has happened to one section of the Wall— I was hardly surprised to find very little trace of it for the next mile or so. But the ditch and Vallum were a sure guide. Just south of Gilsland I crossed the Poltross Burn, the boundary between Northumberland and Cum­ berland; and in another mile the River Irthing. The abutments of the old bridge are still to be seen there, but, if I may say so, I was more thrilled by a newer bridge which I found a little way down­ stream. I saw a rather home-made looking derrick

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35

and a cable stretching over the river, so I went to investigate. There was another derrick on the opposite bank and a sort of bench slung on small pulleys from the cable, with a rope to haul your­ self across by. I could not resist this, so I climbed the home-made ladder, sat in the chair and hauled myself across. When I got down I saw a large notice forbidding anyone to use the— “ transporterette” I think it is the best word. So I got in again and hauled myself back to restore the status quo. The Wall starts again on top of a very steep, high bank the other side, and J mile on is Birdoswald and the fort of cam bo g lanna . The most striking things here are, firstly, the view down the valley of the Irthing— simply beautiful— steep wooded banks and the river winding round in a series of lovely curves between, and, second, the Turf Wall. I shall not try to give the history of this wall. So many theories about it have been made and disproved. At any rate, there is a Turf Wall, built of sods laid in courses— it is older than Hadrian’s Wall— and it can be seen at its best at and near Birdoswald. We will leave the rest to the archaeologists. Just before Birdoswald a road had come in from the north; and this now ran more or less along the line of the Wall for 3 miles, almost into Banks— so there was little Wall to be seen— only the ditch on one side and the Vallum the other, and the Turf Wall, which meets the Wall at Wallbowers, 2 miles on. I turned aside here, down a path through the woods

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to see the quarry where the Roman quarrymen had cut their names in the rock— Securus, Maternus and Justus. Queer how these little human touches move us more than great monuments! A mile on, a turret has been rescued and dug out of the roadside bank with a bit of the wall-surface on each side. And then in Banks (a village this time— not just earth!) I found the highest bit of wall I’d seen— a good io feet high. I was glad to see it, because the country was getting more and more civilized and I knew I could not hope for much more. In the next 2 or 3 miles it became more and more fragmentary, usually nothing but rough blocks of the local red sandstone which had formed the infilling. At King Water and again at Cam Brook I could find no trace of its crossing, though the line was clear enough, and soon I gave up all hope of tracing anything but the ditch and Vallum. After Cam Brook, the country changed again: the Wastes of a few miles back seemed to have been in another world and now the richly wooded hills, which had given so much beauty to the last part, flattened out into rather dull pastures with occasional patches of rough marshy ground. In one such place, White Moss, the place of the Vallum is taken by four lines of mounds as the ditch could not be dug. Just afterwards, a lane picks up the line of the Wall for 3 miles to Walfoot, and the ditch was a real ditch filled with water. A bit of cross-country, the line of the Wall a good deal easier

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*37

to follow than some of the Roman roads I have been after, and then, at Tarraby, a footpath takes it to Stanwix on the outskirts of Carlisle. There was a fort here, but I could find no trace of it. Carlisle itself, LUGUVALLIUM, was a town and not a fort. The Wall turned almost at right angles just north of it, coming in south-west and leaving almost north-west after crossing the Eden. I was not sorry to get out of the town and cover the 5 miles to Burgh-by-Sands. A mile out, at Dykesfield, I said good-bye to the Vallum and started on the long straight road across the marsh. Far over the silver water of the Solway, the hills of Scotland shone in the afternoon sun. Right from the road the bright green saltings stretched to the water, ahead and behind. As I walked along, a pair of shellduck, lovely black and white birds with chestnut breasts, crossed the road just ahead, followed by a brood o f tiny black and white speckled ducklings. Seeing me, the drake flapped heavily along the road, pretending that that was the best he could do in the way of flying and that if I ran I could probably catch him. The duck tried frantically to hurry her babies out of danger. But they were not very good walkers (they could not have been more than a few days old ); and she must have had an anxious minute or two before I passed them, still only a yard or two off the road. And so in 5 miles I reached Bowness where the Wall ended in a fort that is still just traceable. I felt as I stood there, with the

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estuary on almost three sides of me, that it was quite a suitable place to end anything, even the long railway viaduct across the water from Annan ends there in mid-air— at least the last two spans are missing. And now let me finish the rough sketch of Roman Britain that has grown out of these walks. Hadrian’s Wall was by no means the end of trouble on the Border. Less than twenty years later, we find Lollius Urbicus launching a punitive campaign into Scot­ land; and in 143, having crushed all resistance south of it, he built the other Wall— the Antonine Wall— 36 miles long between the Forth and Clyde. But this was a long way from the legionary fortresses and its flanks were none too secure. Twice in the second century the new Wall was broken and had to be repaired and regarrisoned, and finally, in 197, something worse happened. Clodius Albinus, the Governor of Britain, claimed the imperial throne after the death of Commodus and crossed over to Gaul, taking with him every soldier he could lay hands on. He was eventually defeated and killed— but you can imagine what happened here in the meantime! The Maeatae burst across the Antonine and Hadrian’s Walls, destroyed them both— (very systematically, considering their lack o f discipline), and then proceeded to destroy every­ thing else Roman they could find as far south, at least, as York and Chester. This was the situation that Severus, the new emperor, had to deal with.

HADRIAN’S WALL

>39

He gave up all idea o f re-establishing the Antonine W all; but Hadrian’s Wall was thoroughly repaired and improved— and all over the country the same work o f repairing forts and fortresses was put in hand. (You will see now why I have so often pointed out that such and such a fort was rebuilt in stone in the 2nd century.) In the meantime, Severus himself spent three years in fighting the Scottish tribes on their own ground. He does not seem to have won any decisive victory or even to have come thoroughly to grips with them— and his own losses were considerable; but he taught them a lesson. For a hundred years after his death, in 2 11, there were peace and prosperity in Britain. The next threat was not from the land but from the sea— Saxon pirates— and we make the acquaint­ ance of a man who has been romantically mis­ described as the founder of British sea-power. This was Carausius, a Roman admiral of the Channel fleet, who rebelled and seized the governorship of Britain as a first step towards making himself Emperor. He was assassinated by one of his own officers, Allectos, who then proceeded to collect every man he could lay hands on (we shall be getting used to this soon!) to oppose an invasion by the real Emperor, Constantius. He got killed, o f course (it is 297 now), but in the meantime the tribes were over the Wall again and Constantius had to repeat the work of Severus. All this time the pirate menace was increasing, and to deal with it

140

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

a chain of forts, the forts of the Saxon shore, was built, reaching from the Wash to the Solent. Fifty years later another danger threatened: the Scots {who lived in Ireland at that time) began to raid the west coast and settle in Scotland. This unsettled the Piets; the Saxon pirates joined in and there was a terrific smash in 367, when practically the whole of Britain, except the walled towns, was sacked by bands of raiders from all sides. This was the death-blow to the villa-system and almost to Roman Britain. The barbarians were driven out and the Wall and forts rebuilt; but fifteen years later, in 393, another would-be Emperor, Magnus Maximus, a Spaniard, repeated the trick of his predecessors. The Wall was lost and never retaken. Dusk was falling over Roman Britain. Confused accounts seem to indicate a partial reorganization and then a gradual abandonment of the north and west, a shrinkage towards the south and east. The way the Romans had come, they went. Yet another usurper, in 407, sapped the enfeebled garrisons and this time Rome herself was too weak to repair the mischief. In 410 Britain was told to arrange for her own defence. It is possible, but unproved, that Rome regained some control for a few years after the death of Constantine III in 412. What is certain is that when the Saxons invaded in earnest and began to settle on the land, they met with little real resistance. Plague had devastated whole dis­ tricts; and in the south and east at least, the in-

HADRIAN’S WALL

141

habitants had little power of initiative left. In the west there is some reason to think that things were different— if there is any truth, as there probably is, in the stories of King Arthur, and if we accept, as we must, the evidence of the Bokerly Dyke, that great earthwork stretching across Cranbourne Chase. But that takes me back to the beginning of this book. Let me end with the words of an 18th-century antiquary, written after he had made a tour of the Wall. “ I hold myself obliged to preserve, as well as I can, the memory of such things as I saw; which, added to what future times will discover, will revive the Roman glory among us, and may serve to invite nobler minds to endeavour at that merit and public­ spiritedness which shine through all their actions. This tribute at least we owe them, and they deserve it at our hands, to preserve their remains.” We may not subscribe to every word of that; but surely with the last sentence we can all agree.

B IB L IO G R A P H Y M APS The Map of Roman Britain, published by the Ordnance Survey (Scale: 16 miles to i inch. Price 4s. od.), gives a good general idea of Roman Britain and contains a useful introductory booklet. For local details refer to the 1 inch to the mile Ordnance Survey Maps (Popular Edition, Cloth 2s. 6d., Paper is. 6d.), on which all known Roman and other antiquities are marked in distinctive lettering. T o get the best out of these maps read Field Archeology, a sixpenny booklet, also published by the Ordnance Survey. BOOKS Roman Britain, by R. G. Collingwood (Oxford University Press, 6s. od.), is the best and most readable book on the subject. The Archeology of Roman Britain, by the same author (Methuen, 16s. od.), gives more detailed information. Roman Roads in Britain, by T. Codrington (S.P.C.K., 10s. od.), gives detailed descriptions of the roads. In style it is suited to the student rather than to the general reader. Everyday Life in Roman Britain, by Marjorie and C. H. B. Quennell (Batsford, 5s. od.), gives a vivid impression of its subject and contains many pictures. As suitable for children as for adults. T h Story of the Whel, by G. M. Boumphrey (Black, 2s. 6d.), includes a short history of the roads of Britain. This, too, is suitable for readers of all ages. A Guide to th Roman Wall, by R. G. Collingwood (Reid, 6d.), should be read by anyone intending to visit Hadrian's Wall. Fuller bibliographies will be found in several of the books given above.

INDEX Abergavenny, n o Aberllefenni, 117 Aberystwyth, 115 Ackling Dyke, 25 Ad Pontem, see East Stoke Aesica, see Great Chesters Akeman St., 52 Alconbury Hill, 84 Alder ton, 48 Alfred’s Castle, 102 Ancaster, 80 Andover, 14 Anglesey, 105 Aquae Sulis, see Bath Arbury Banks, 88 Ashdown Hill, 102 Ashton Keynes, 50 Ashwell, 88 Axminster, 32, 36

Bledlow Cross, 97-8 Blowing Stone, 101 Bokerly Dyke, 23, 24 Borcovicium, see Housesteads Bourton-on-the-Water, 56-7 Bow Street, 116 Bowness-on-Solway, 124, 137 Brecon, 110 Brinklow, 59 Broomlee Lough, 132 Brunton, 130 Bulpit Hill, 97 Burgh-by-Sands, 137 Burgh Marsh, 126 Burghley Park, 83 Burnhead, 134 Burrium, see Usk Busy Gap, 133 Byard’s Leap, 78

Babcary, 40 Badbury Rings, 11, 27-8 Baldock, 88-go Banks, 135, 136 Bath, 36, 44-6, 62 Beacon Hill, 41-3 Beard Hill, 41 Bedd Taliesin, 117 Belvoir, 65 Bennones, see High Cross Benwell Hill, 125 Bere Down, 29 Bettwys-y-Coed, 120 Bigsweir Bridge, 104, 106 Birdlip Hill, 103 Birdoswald, 135

Cader Idris, 118 Caerhun, 113, 121 Caerleon, 72, 104, 106, 108-10, 121, 127 Caerwent, 106-8, 116 Caio, 113 Calleva Altrebatum, see Silchester Cam Brook, 136 Camboglanna, see Birdoswald Cannard’s Grave, 41, 42 Carlisle, 124, 126, 130, 137 Carmarthen, 113 Castle Hill, 64-7, 71 Castor, 83-4 Chard, 36 K

146

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

Charlton, 42 Charterhouse, 40 Chedworth, 53-6 Cheltenham, 57 Chepstow, 104, 106 Chester, 72, 121-2, 127, 138 Chesters, 130-1 Chillington, 38 Chinnor, 98 Chollerford, 130 Cilumum, see Chesters Cirencester, 36,50-3,102,107 Clandown, 44 Cleeve, 99 Colchester, 34, 36, 45, 61, 7 °, 72 Coloniae, 61 Colsterworth, 81 -2 Colyton, 32 Combrook, 58 Compton Verney, 58 Corbridge, 130 Corinium, see Cirencester Corris, 117 Corstopitum, see Corbridge Cotgrave Gorse, 64 Crag Lough, 134 Craig y Penmaen, 119 Cranbourne Chase, 23-8 Crichel Park, 27 Cricket Park, 37 Crickhowell, n o Cricklade, 102 Culkerton Down, 50 Cymbeline’s Mount, 96 Cymmer Abbey, 118 Dean, Forest of, 104-5 Dere Street, 130

Devil’s Ditch, 23 Dolgelly, 118 Dolwyddelan, 120 Dorchester, 11, 29-30 Dovey River, 117 Dragon Hill, 101 Dulas River, 117 Duncombe Bottom, 46-7 Dunkerton, 44 Dunstable, 94-5 Durobriviae, see Castor Durocobrivae, see Dunstable Dykesfield, 137 East Stoke, 67 Eden River, 137 Eggardun Camp, 30-2 Ellesborough, 96 Fair Mile, 99 Ffestiniog, 119-20 Figsbury Rings, 19 Fossbridge, 53 Fosse Gate, 48, 49 Gilsland,i34 Glasdir, 118 Glevum, see Gloucester Gloucester, 61, 70, 72, 103, 104 Grantham, 80-2 Great Casterton, 83 Great Chesters, 134 Great Kimble, 97 Great Stukeley, 86 Greenhead, 134 Grimm’s Ditch, 23 Gogoyan Bridge, 114

INDEX Goring, 99 Gussage, 26-7 Halford, 58, 59 Halfway House, 93 Halton, 96 Halton Chesters, 130 Haltwhistlc Burn, 134 Hamdon Hill, 40 Harley Gap, 23, 27 Harlow Hill, 129 Harrow Way, 42 Heddon-on-the-Wall, 128-9 Hexham, 128 High Cross, 59 High Dyke, 78 Hinton Park, 38 Hotpoint Crags, 134. Housesteads, 133 Hunnum, see Halton Chesters Huntingdon, 86 Huntley, 104 Ickleford, 92 Ilchestcr, 40 Ipsden, 99 Irthing River, 134, 135 Isea> see Cacrlcon Ivinghoc Beacon, 96 Jackamant’s Bottom, 47, 50 Kanovium, see Caerhun King Water, 136 Kingsclere, 13 Knighton Wood, 22 Leagrave, 94 Leamington, 59

147

Leicester, 36, 60-3 Letch worth, 90-1 Letcombe, 101 Lincoln, 36, 68-75, I 2 7 Lindum, see Lincoln Little Down, 27 Little Hinton, 102 Littlington, 88 Llanbadarn Fawr, 115-16 Llandovery, 113 Llanfair-Clydogan, 114 Llanio, 114—15 London, 70-1 Loventium, see Llanio Lowbury Hill, 99 Luguvallium, see Carlisle Luton, 95 iMachynlleth, 115, 117 Maesbury Camp, 43 Maiden Bower, 94-5 Maiden Castle, 29-30 Malmesbury, 48 Margidunum, see Castle Hill Maumbury Rings, 30 Mawddach River, 119 Mitcheldean, 104 Mons Badonicus, 28 Mons GraupiuSy 126 Morton-in-the-Marsh, 57 Moulsford, 99 Municipium, 61 Mutuantonis, 49 Nettlebridge, 43 Nettleton Shrub, 47 Newark, 64, 67 Newcastle - on - Tyne, 126-7, *3°

124,

148

ALONG THE ROMAN ROADS

Newport, 104, 108 Northleach, 56 Nottingham, 64 Oakley Down, 25-6 Old Sarum, 11, 19-21 Overstratton, 38 Ox Drove, 23 Pangbourne, 99 Pegsdon Barn, 92-3 Pen Dinas, 115-16 Pennal, 117 Pentrebonl, 115 Pentridge, 23, 24 Perry Street, 33, 36 Petherton Bridge, 39-40 Pol tross Burn, 134 Pont-ar-Eden, 118, 119 Pont Llyfnant, 117 Pont-y-Pant, 120 Portgate, 130 Potters Hill, 67-8 Princes Risborough, 97 Puddletown Heath, 29 Pumpsaint, 113 Punch’s Cross, 92 Pye Hill, 41 Quarley Hill, 15, 18 Radstock, 44 Ratae Coritanorum, see Leicester Ravensburgh Castle, 93-4 Reading, 11, 12 Rheidol River, 115 Riknild Street, 57 Royston, 86 Rudchester, 129

St. Albans, 61, 70 St. Asaph, 121 St. Mary Bourne, 14 Salisbury, 18, 21 Salisbury Plain, 25 Saltersford, 80 Salutation Gate, 47 Sarum, Old, 11, 19-21 Seaton, 32, 36, 103 Segedunum, see Wallsend Segsbury Camp, 101 Senny Bridge, 111 Sewingshields, 132 Shapwick, 29 Silchester, 11, 12, 107 Six Hills, 64 Solway Firth, 124, 134, 137 Stamford, 83 Stanegate, 130 Stanwix, 137 Stilton, 84 Stocking Close, 84-6 Stoke-sub-Hamdon, 40 S tow-on-the-Wold, 57 Stratford Tony, 22 Stratton Common, 43 Stratton St. Margaret, 102 Streadey, 99 Street, 33 Street-on-the-Fosse, 41 Stretton, 44, 83 Stretton-on-Dunsmore, 59 Stretton-on-Fosse, 58 Stretton-under-Fosse, 59 Swindon, 102 Swyncombe Down, 99 Talybont, 117 Tarraby, 137

INDEX

149

Venta Silurum, see Caerwent Vernditch Wood, 24 Vernometum, 64 Verulamium, see St. Albans Vindobala, see Rudchester

Wallsend, 124 Wansdyke, 45 Watling Street, 59 Watlington, 96, 98 Wayland’s Smithy, 101 Wendover, 96 Weycroft, 32 Whipsnade, 96 White Down, 37 White Horse, 101 White Moss, 136 White Way, 51 Whiteleaf Hill, 97 Whittington Fell, 130 Willbury Camp, 91 Windwhistle Hill, 37, 40 Winshield’s Crag, 134 Winterbourne Kingston, 29 Witchampton, 27 Woodyates, 25 Wraxall, 41, 47 Wroxeter, 70, 72, 114 Wye Valley, 104, 106

Waalud’s Bank, 94 Walfoot, 136 Wall, 57 Wallbowers, 135

Y Gaer, 110-12, 114, 121 Y Pigwn, 111 —i 3 York, 61, 72, 127, 138 Yscir River, 111

Taunton, 40 Telegraph Hill, 92 Thames Head, 50 Thirlwall Castle, 134 Thurmaston, 63 Tintern, 104 Tolpuddle, 29 Tomen-y-Mur, 119, 121 Totternhoe Camp, 95 Tower Tie, 131 Trecastle, h i T refriw, 121 Tring, 96 Uffington, 101 Usk, 1 io U sk, R iver, 111

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A LOST BERNARD

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T h e author sets out to find a stretch o f the R o m an road from B ath to Poole, eighteen miles long, that was still unm apped. It m ay have sunk w ithout trace; its stones m ay have been rem oved long ago; it m ay never have been com pleted. Spurred on by the speed at w h ich m echanized farm ing is ru bb in g out history, the auth or m anages to m ake his ow n m ap o f the long and an gu lar course o f the road, feeling that he is tackling the jo b just in the nick o f tim e. His range o f clues is surprisingly w ide. M a n y o f those reading his highly original accou nt o f open-air detective work on alm ost a grand scale, and poring over his photographs, w ill p ro bably be finding them selves tem pted to set out on sim ilar am ateur ventures o f their ow n— and w h y not ?

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W hile the nam e o f the K n igh ts o f M alta is o f universal renown, very little is gen erally known o f the life o f the O rd er. C laire E n gel’s research presents this highly coloured portrait gallery to those w ho are interested in its history.

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KREM LIN Demy8v03OS.net

T h e K rem lin has for years been the nerve-centre o f Russian history. H ere is the story o f this gigan tic citadel since its foundation 850 years ago.

THE pier r e

CIVILIZATION g rim a l

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Forced at first upon the conquered peoples b y the legions and the m agistrates o f R om e, but later accepted volu n ­ tarily, R om an civilization eventually spread until it covered alm ost all o f w h at in those days was regarded as the U niverse. T o d a y it is still one o f the most im portant o f historic phenom ena, and from the European v iew ­ point the most im portant and decisive. M a n y books have retraced the various phases o f R om an conquest, analysing the political or m ilitary events that m arked its steps. Pierre G rim al, historian and archaeologist, has not failed to record these facts in this new w ork; but it is to R om an civilization, conceived as a coherent and original phenom enon, that he has chiefly devoted his study. It constitutes a com plex system in w hich the hum an and the non-hum an, the m aterial and the spiritual, are indissolubly bound together; for hum an history is not com plete unless thought, and especially that ‘subconscious* thought w hich is transm itted to and imposes itself upon genera­ tion after generation, is brought in. W h a t this am ounts to in m ilitary art, architecture, poetry, m orality, politics, and legislation— a certain style, the R om an style— is w h at the author strives here to define. O n the w a y w e discover certain constants in the R o m an so u l: a love o f the earth, a passion for justice, an uneasy sense o f the supernatural, a keen delight in living— all that was bequeathed to us by C icero and V irg il, the R om an masters o f jurisprudence, and the great politicians, and through them b y the immense mass o f unknow n Rom ans. LONDON:

G E O R G E A L L E N AND U NWI N LT D

A LOST ROMAN ROAD BERNARD

BERRY

The author sets out to find a stretch of the Roman road from Bath to Poole, eighteen miles long, that was still unmapped. It may have sunk without trace; its stones may have been removed long ago; it may never have been completed. Spurred on by the speed at which mechanized farming is rubbing out history, the author manages to make his own map of the long and angular course of the road, feeling that he is tackling the job just in the nick of time. His range of clues is surprisingly wide. Many of those reading his highly original account of open-air detective work on almost a grand scale, and poring over his photographs, will probably be finding themselves tempted to set out on similar amateur ventures of their own—and why not? ‘It reads as excitingly as any detective story and at the same time makes a serious contribution to Romano-British archaeology.’ The Times Educational Supplement ‘This is high adventure for those with an out-of-the-way taste in quest— a sort of outdoors Ximenes puzzle with half the clues missing.’ Punch Crown 8vo. Illustrated. 20s. net

THE CIVILIZATION OF ROME PIERRE GRIMAL This splendid work is accompanied by 229 magnificent illustrations in photogravure of every aspect of Roman life and culture: plans and maps; a chronological table from 800 b .c . to a .d . 337 with the main events in the various segments of Roman life recorded in parallel; an historical and bio­ graphical dictionary; and a very extensive bibliography. This is the first of an intended series of studies of the world’s great civilizations under the direction of Raymond Bloch. F'cap. 4to.

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