Sometimes the line of a Roman road will be obvious: the characteristic straight line heading across the countryside near a place with “-cester” at the end.  Sometimes you have to look harder, but can find traces in unlikely spots.

One such is just off the M1 in Northamptonshire.  The area is now a hub of the logistics industry, close to not just the M1 but the M6 too, with the A5, (roughly) the Roman Watling Street linking the motorways to other places, and providing the location for many depots and warehouses.  Around there, north of Kilsby and west of Crick, the A5 departs from its straight course and makes a bow to the west.  Not so the Romans, however, and their direct route is still visible along a byway either side of the A428 as it heads from the M1 towards the less romantically named DIRFT (Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal).

The footpath is still around the full width of the Roman road, north of the A428 and has the characteristic profile with the raised “agger” and ditches to either side (see my earlier post on the Fosse Way at High Cross).  Bushes growing up the middle make it harder to visualise in places, but the pattern is clear enough, and highly evocative.

Either side of this ancient highway are the enormous sheds characteristic of 21^st century commerce – in this case, belonging to Tesco and Mothercare.  Groceries and maternity products, unlike electronics, would have been traded up and down Watling Street in Roman times, though it’s hard to imagine that the soldiers building the road in the first century CE would have thought they were laying the foundations of a highway that would still be in use, mostly as a road but partly as a footpath, two millennia later.