In 1959 a long-neglected field behind the White Hart Inn in Puckeridge, Hertfordshire, was ploughed and sown with wheat. When summer came to the village, variations in the height and colour of the crop revealed an intersection of three Roman roads lying deep beneath the topsoil. One line came from the south and was identified as part of Ermine Street, a Roman highway that now forms part of the A10. Another ran from east to west; it was found to be a segment of Essex Stane Street, where ghosts were said to walk. A third line seemed insignificant, unworthy of attention.
That third line stretched a short distance from the intersection northwards towards a hedge, where it disappeared. It’s the one that interests Christopher Hadley. Blurred by time, its vagueness makes it attractive to him. “Two thousand years after the road opened to the traffic of Roman Britain,” he writes, “sections of it remain, not as the motorway it was in ancient times — there to speed an army to its fort or bring pots from the kilns — but as a bridleway, as the footings of a windmill, a green baulk, a country road, or the line of a parish boundary.” For Hadley, the road’s fascination lies in what it became.
Hadley’s road stretches 14 miles, from Braughing to Great Chesterford in Essex. It doesn’t merit a name. To the Romans it was not important, just a short section of the network they built in Britain. That network — all ten thousand miles of it — was the largest civil engineering project to be carried out in Britain until the advent of the railways in the 19th century. No road system would rival it until the construction of the motorways. Hadley’s little section, although seemingly insignificant, is, to him, sacred. It’s “an eloquent road” that “will speak to us if we are prepared to listen . . . It will tell us stories.”
These roads deserve the same reverence as a great painting, a cathedral or an epic poem. “I cannot think of a comparable artifact,” Hadley writes, “something built in antiquity to a standard not surpassed for nearly two millennia, which is still used today for its original purpose . . . and survives as other things too that we find useful: a footpath, a boundary, the subject of a photographic work of art.”
Hadley’s road is a testament to Roman ingenuity. It was built to last. The road bed is composed of up to 30in of hardpacked agger — rubble collected from nearby. In places its width is greater than two motorway lanes. It was carefully cambered so that water would easily drain away. Since Romans built their roads straight, they did not take the easiest path, going over obstacles rather than around them. The bridges, mostly made of wood, are long gone, but one can imagine the engineering involved. The road linked places of commerce and industry, evidence of which remains. In Caley Wood, in Hertfordshire, for instance, archaeologists have found an average of 14 potsherds per square metre, or 36 million fragments of ceramic. This suggests a nearby pottery industry of immense proportions.
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The Road is not really a work of history and Hadley is not really a historian. He’s more than that. He’s a writer prepared to use his imagination to take him towards places where hard evidence alone won’t lead. He speaks of faith, feelings and intuition, things professional historians often scorn. When searching for his road, he makes full use of his senses — he smells the oxlips sprouting along the verge, tastes the elderberries, feels the rough edges of pottery sherds, listens to the cuckoo that a Roman engineer would once also have heard. All this helps him to see a road where none appears to exist. “It takes the eye of a zealot,” he admits.
It’s not easy to describe this book. As a sourcebook on Roman roads it falls short, because that’s not really what Hadley intends. It is instead a chronicle of his infatuation with Roman road construction, or, as he writes, “a paean, an ekphrasis, a love letter, an attempt to describe the remains of one of these extraordinary feats of human endeavour that are hidden all around us”.
In places Hadley’s road became farmland, revealing itself in weird ways when the corn grew tall. Elsewhere it’s jungle with the ecology of the land altered for ever, some plants, like blackthorn, grow thicker than on open countryside. Other bits of the road disappeared through pillaging, the building material repurposed. Flagstones and rubble that once made a road can now be seen in the walls of St Mary’s church in Braughing. Look closely and you can spot a stone with an inscription that might be Roman. In other places the solidity of the road surface provided convenient foundation for a building or border wall.
The road is defined not just by its foundation, but by the things dropped — accidentally or contemptuously — along the way. Bits of pottery, broken jewellery, worn out shoes are buried everywhere. Coins fell from pockets. Brought together the litter tells a story, or rather thousands of little stories.
There’s something beguilingly mysterious about these ancient roads. When, precisely, were they built? How long did they take to construct? We sense a chicken and an egg: the land had to be conquered for the roads to be built, yet the conquering army needed roads to advance. They presupposed a prodigious supply of time, money and labour. Some have speculated that the Romans merely improved already existing roads, but Hadley pours scorn on that heresy.
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“How did they do it?” he asks. “How did the Romans get them so straight without modern technology? There is something teasingly aliens-built-the-pyramids about it.” He’s not too bothered by things he cannot fully understand, delighting in what he calls “admirable uncertainty”. The proof of the road’s construction lies in the fact that it still exists. Some questions don’t need to be answered.
“I have tried to make something whole again from its few surviving parts, to mend and rebuild with the fragments I have collected.” He succeeds, partly because of the breadth of his knowledge, but more importantly because of the beauty of his prose. This book deserves to be read at least twice, first to appreciate what it reveals and then to luxuriate in its effervescent voice. On nearly every page a random passage takes one’s breath away. “Nodules of flint litter the field edges like newborn lambs encased in their cauls. Hard-going underfoot, walking on the chines of the long dead, rinsed and boned by a land that has rejected them. I am stalking the missing miles . . . Trying to fill up the intermediate loss.”
For Hadley, the past is neither distant nor dead. We walk on paths plotted 2,000 years ago. His road, he feels, “conveys the thinness and immanence of place — the sense that the past might leak through to the present, and the present to the past, like ink through tissue paper”. His road remembers.
The Road: A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past by Christopher Hadley, William Collins, 353pp; £20
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