The previous post talked about how you can sometimes walk along a stretch of Roman road which hasn’t been taken over by a modern road, in that case the Fosse Way.

 

Earlier that day, I was able to see a stretch of the old route, though not walk along it, further south at a place called Bretford.  This is where the Fosse Way crosses the A428, which is the direct road between Coventry and Rugby, in Warwickshire – the village is about halfway between the two.

 

The main line of the Fosse way is very clear: pencil straight, north-north-east, through the Warwickshire countryside, with few villages or landmarks towards the junction with Watling Street at High Cross, and then to Leicester.  In Bretford, however, the modern road bears left for a few hundred yards, and then right before resuming the straight course.  This is because Bretford marks the junction not just with the other road, but with the River Avon.  The Romans stuck with the direct route and forded the river – Bretford means “plank ford”, suggesting a plank bridge, or post to mark the place to cross.  When the bridge was built, some time in the 13^th century, it must have made sense to put it a few yards west of the ford, thereby inserting the dog leg into the road, which remains to this day.

 

The bridge is listed, and still single-track so controlled by traffic lights.  For no reason I could make out, there is a raised concrete walkway along one side, which is best described as functional.

 

It did however enable me to climb up the railing to try to see the course of the old road, now on private land.  It’s hard to see from that side, frankly, but from the other side, there is a very clear holloway emerging between trees, on the right of the picture.

Having been quite a busy place in the 13^th century, Bretford never recovered from the impact of the Black Death, and has been a small village ever since.  I want to do more work on the Fosse Way – why did it take this course, what happened to it when the Romans left, what happened to other places along the route and what influenced that?  It’s much less clear than for Watling Street or other major Roman roads.   I’ll be grateful for comments or insights.

In most places, the great Roman highways of old are buried under a modern road, or under farmland, or have simply worn away.  Sometimes, however, there’s a stretch that’s still recognisable.  One such is a couple of miles of the Fosse Way in Leicestershire.

The Fosse Way, running from Exeter to Lincoln, was one of the most important roads in Roman Britain, and bears out the point that we all learnt in school about Roman roads – it’s straight.  Between Lincoln and Ilchester, not far from the southern end, it runs for 180 miles, without ever diverting more than 6 miles from the straight and narrow.  The same is true for many of today’s motor roads which follow the Fosse Way.  For example, from Moreton-in-Marsh in Gloucestershire, the A429 heads north-north-east into the West Midlands, then as that road peels off towards Warwick, the Fosse Way continues pencil-straight, now the B4455, with a few very minor kinks, right up to a place called High Cross, where it crosses another great Roman road, which we now know as Watling Street.

There, the motor road takes a diversion.  To go to Leicester, which is the next stop on the Fosse Way, you have to do a mile west along Watling Street (now the A5) and then pick up the B4114.  But thankfully, the Fosse Way survives in the form of a footpath, which sticks to the straight line route to Leicester, heading north-north-east to where today’s road swings round to meet it four miles further on.

At the start of the footpath at High Cross, you can see the tower blocks of Leicester in the distance, 10-12 miles away.  Would the Roman legions have been able to see plumes of smoke from the fires there, I wondered, as they embarked on their march to their next camp?  The basics of the Roman road are still clear: a raised carriageway with ditches either side for drainage.  These days, it runs between hedgerows for a mile or so, before opening up into pastureland.  What crops, if any, would the Romans have seen, and then, as they established themselves, brought in?  And what would soldiers from Italy have made of this stretch of middle England – temperate, green, and fertile, if somewhat unremarkable?  It may have been cooler than Rome, but certainly warmer than patrolling Hadrian’s Wall.

High Cross was one of the most important junctions in Roman Britain – the Catthorpe interchange, or Scotch Corner, of its day.  The staging post there was known as Venonis.  Experts disagree on what this name means – I’ve seen both “place of the tribe” and “place of poison plants”.  But excavations suggest that there were timber houses, a few buildings for trading purposes, and some paved streets.  The pottery and other artefacts found there suggest it was occupied from the late 1^st century onwards, and remained so for about 300 years.

Unlike the Fosse Way, however, there are no signs now of the Roman settlement at High Cross itself.  It’s a bleak, windswept junction.  Watling Street is a busy dual carriageway, taking traffic from the logistics hubs near the motorways to Nuneaton, Hinckley, and on to the northern West Midlands and beyond.  So millions of people a year go across one of the main road junctions of Roman times, but hardly any probably notice they are doing so, or have any reason to.

So why isn’t there a settlement at High Cross any longer, when Scotch Corner – also a Roman junction – remains important?  In brief, one major reason is that, for centuries, Watling Street was not the major highway that it was then and is now: travellers between London and the north-west and north Wales chose to go via Daventry and Coventry instead.  So there was no call for a staging post at High Cross, and trade shifted to other larger centres.  I’ve written about this in my forthcoming book about Watling Street, “Our Ancient Road”.

Finally, praise for Blaby District Council, who have provided car parking and a portaloo, for free, at the northern end of the Fosse Way footpath, with a playground, at a place called Fosse Meadows.  Thank you, and I would be happy to make a donation for that sort of thing in future, as we did at similar places on holiday in the USA recently.

The next blog post will be a short one about another part of Fosse Way where you can make out the old road.

 

We’ve been on holiday in New England, enjoying the fall foliage.  I kept an eye open for things relevant to this blog, and sure enough, one arrived in upstate Vermont.

One of my main interests is in how roads have developed over time, how some main roads have become by-ways, or how roadside buildings can suggest to us what travellers of previous centuries experienced.  In Vermont, we visited a museum known as the Old Stone House in a place called Brownington, where the staff explained that what’s now a small and quiet village had been very busy in the 19th century, as it was on the main coaching road from Montreal to Boston, both fast-growing cities and emerging commercial centres.  The winter stage coach service began in 1824.

                       

The road now is a minor road, and as it heads north from Brownington isn’t metalled: it’s a dirt track, albeit wide and pretty firm – we chose not to drive our hire car along it, but would have risked our own car in most weathers.  The pick-up trucks on the road today threw up clouds of dust – an apt reconstruction of one of the things which coach drivers and outside passengers would have had to deal with in the mid 1800s, as the picture shows.

Several buildings survive from that period, though they tend to show one side of the life of the community.  The Old Stone House itself, which hosts the museum, was built in 1836 as a boarding house for students at the local school.  The Congregational Church dates from much the same period, as does a rather fine gold coloured house, occupied by someone named Samuel Read Hall, who was briefly the principal of the Grammar School and minister at the church.  There are a couple of barns and a blacksmith’s shop, but the hotel – named the Rice & Going Hotel, no idea why – is now privately owned.  So the ensemble of buildings show more about the life of the mind than about that of the body.

Brownington is about halfway between Boston and Montreal, a bit over 200 miles away, so between 3 and 4 hours drive.  In practice, it feels worlds away from either.  And that might be an interesting insight into the experience of at least the first-time traveller, setting out for a distant city they didn’t know, and passing through a quiet rural area, with plenty of time to think about whether the journey was going to take them where they wanted to be.