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

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Nowadays a long straight road is considered boring and dangerous to drive along - we prefer curves to keep us awake - but the excitement of realising we are sometimes travelling a road initially constructed 2,000 years ago along our exact path helps connect us to the generations who have undertaken the same route, marching, riding, droving, walking (or driving) for two millennia. And good for him and anyone who genuinely enjoys 275 pages of a bloke slipping into verse and panegyric over the remains of a road! There is equal pleasure in following him through the countryside in all seasons, sharing his reflections on how echoes of past millennia continue to be part of our present experience.

The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. Any shared joy I can glean - such as over the use of delightful antiquated words that are doubly delightful for their utter uselessness - feels somewhat unclean.Erudite and fascinating insight into the expertise and experience needed to draw conclusions from sometimes meagre or partial evidence left on (under) the ground of that incredible and useful legacy of Roman occupation, the straight(ish) road. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Then I realised that the last time I thought much about the subject was when I was at school in the 70s and my brother and I used to play with 1/72nd scale 'Romans and Britons'. Gathering traces of archaeology, history and landscape from poems, church walls, hag stones and cropmarks, oxlips, killing places, hauntings and 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. Sir Dover is the only one afflicted by the deeply self-obsessed British public school old boy mentality, in my opinion, who has ever so honestly and openly recognised it for what it is - wanky sybaritic self-indulgence. A bad elevator pitch might have been something like, 'So I have an author who's written a book about a walk along a minor Roman road and a few interesting tales that arise en route.Time and nature have erased many clues; they rotted bridges and raised whole woods across the route. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.

Then I became overwhelmed with the micro detail of the local landscape and although many of stories and folklore Hadley draws in are compelling, as a reader I ran out of steam! Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. I admit that my pitch barely sounds any better but, well, I'm glad Hadley made it, his agent touted it and William Collins accepted it.

We all think we know about Roman roads because they are straight, but this book shows there is far more to them than that. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). 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. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.