The Road: A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past

Have you ever heard the march of legions on a lonely country road? The Romans built thousands of miles of roads. For two thousand years they have determined the flow of ideas and folktales, where battles were fought and where pilgrims trod. Almost everyone in Britain lives close to a Roman road, if only we knew where to look

In the beginning was Watling Street, the first road scored on the land when the invading Romans arrived on a cold and alien Kentish shore in 41 CE. Temporary campaign roads followed, rolling out west towards Rochester and the first major battle at the Medway. As the Britons fell back to the Thames, the road pursued them to the river’s edge, carrying troops, supplies and military despatches. In the years of fighting that followed, as the legions pushed onwards across what is now England, into Wales and north into Scotland in search of booty, mineral wealth, land and tribute, they left behind a vast road network, linking marching camps and forts, changing the landscape permanently, etching the story of the Roman advance into the face of the land, channelling our lives today.

Christopher Hadley, acclaimed author of Hollow Places, takes us on an epic journey into the past, retracing and searching for an elusive Roman road that sprang from one of the busiest road hubs in Roman Britain. His passage is not always easy. Time and nature have erased many clues; they rotted bridges and raised whole woods across the route. Carters found an easier ford downstream, and people broke up its milestones to mend new ones. Year after year the heavy clay swallowed whole lengths of it; the once mighty road became a bridleway, an overgrown hollow-way, a parched mark in the soil.

Hadley leads us on a hunt to discover, in Hilaire Belloc’s phrase, ‘all that has arisen along the way’. Gathering traces of archaeology, history and landscape, poems, church walls, hag stones and cropmarks; oxlips, killing places, hauntings, immortals and things buried too deep for archaeology, The Road is a mesmerising journey into two thousand years of history only now giving up its secrets.