The Road A Story Of Romans And Ways To The Past Christopher Hadley by Christopher Hadley 9780008356699, 0008356696 instant download after payment.

Have you ever heard the march of legions on a lonely country road?

For 2000 years, the roads the Romans built have determined the flow of ideas & folktales, where battles were fought & 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 & alien Kentish shore in 43 CE. Campaign roads rolled out to all points of the compass, forcing their way inland & as the Britons fell back, the roads pursued them relentlessly, carrying troops, supplies & military despatches. In the years of fighting that followed, as the legions pushed onwards across what is now England, into Wales & north into Scotland in search of booty, mineral wealth, land & tribute, they left behind a vast road network, linking marching camps & forts, changing the landscape, 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 a lyrical journey into this past, retracing & 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 & nature have erased many clues; bridges rotted & whole woods grew across the route. Carters found an easier ford downstream, & people broke up its milestones to mend new paths. 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 & landscape from poems, church walls, hag stones & cropmarks, oxlips, killing places, hauntings & immortals, & things buried too deep for archaeology, The Road