It’s interesting to link up different “periods” of history.  We compartmentalise for convenience – the Iron Age, the Roman era, the Anglo-Saxons, and so on – and simplify the transition from one to another down to one decisive battle or treaty.  In practice, customs and relationships would have overlapped and changed more gradually.  The Catuvellauni tribe in what’s now the St Albans area had been trading with the Roman empire before the armies arrived in 43 CE, so found it fairly easy to adjust.  The Iceni from East Anglia, by contrast, famously fought to the death under Boudicca.

West Sussex has examples of Iron Age and Roman life fairly close by.  Cissbury Ring is a large Iron Age hillfort high on the South Downs, which commands views through 360 degrees over the countryside and the sea.  It was used as a fort from 400 BCE to about 100 BCE, but the land was used for cultivation in the first century CE when the Romans arrived. 

So how did their interactions first take place?  It’s easy to imagine that late Iron Age farmers could have been working on hill tops such as this, and spot the arrival of Roman troops in the valleys below.  In the words of the poem ‘Roman Road’ by A G Prys-Jones,

             “And dreamers hear when the shadows fall

            The stirring sound of their bugle-call;

            Men from Africa, men from Gaul

            Marching over the Hill!”

The road which the Romans built through Sussex – Stane Street – is still visible a few miles from Cissbury Ring: indeed it is reckoned to be one of the best preserved of the well known Roman roads in Britain.  It ran from London to Chichester, and a recent walk took us along one of the clearest sections a few miles from the southern end.  It’s certainly got some of the familiar characteristics: it’s straight, and has the high centre, or agger, with the road falling away on both sides.  On the other hand, it’s quite narrow in places – as trees have grown up, for instance: not many soldiers could march side by side, never mind allowing two chariots to pass each other. 

That said, in the driest English summer for decades, the landscape becomes one where soldiers from Italy might have felt more at home.  A legion relieved of the job of patrolling Hadrian’s Wall might feel that the march south had been worthwhile.  But they might still have felt a pang of homesickness as they approached Chichester and saw the sea shimmering before them …

NOTE I explore these themes in more detail in the early chapters of “This Ancient Road: London to Holyhead: A Journey through Time” (RedDoor, 2017).

To introduce this blog, I’m thinking ahead to another publication, now that “This Ancient Road” is out there.  One of the inspirations for that work was Daniel Defoe’s “A Tour through the whole Island of Great Britain”.  Published in the 1720s, it’s a vivid picture of “the present state of the country”, part history, part travelogue, part guide.  I’m interested in following in Defoe’s footsteps, starting with the tour of East Anglia.  I’ll be posting more on the idea soon, but to get something going, I’ve been looking into Stratford, East London, and spent some time there recently.  Here is a taster of the sort of thing I hope to be writing, though I haven’t yet set up one key element of what I want to do, which is conversations with local people.  I’d be very glad of any comments, either now or when I post more ideas.

The road to Stratford

Defoe would have loved this!

His book is a celebration of Great Britain, and particularly London.  In the preface, he says that the work is “a description of the most flourishing and opulent country in the world”.  But this is no static or backward-looking account – he sets himself to cover “the improvement, as well in culture, as in commerce, the increase of people, and employment for them”.  While by no means blind to the less well-off and the risk of business failure – not least because he had suffered a few himself – he is always on the look out for growth and positive developments.

So he could not fail to be excited by the approach he took to Stratford, from Bow Bridge

over the River Lea, which then marked the border between London and Essex, as it did until 1965.  To the left of what is now the A11, High Street, are a series of tall glass buildings.  Through the remaining gaps between them, you can see the facilities built for the 2012 Olympics – the Stadium itself, now the home of West Ham United and renamed (unimaginatively?) the London Stadium, and the ArcellorMittal Orbit sculpture.  To the right, currently behind hoardings while the work is done, is a huge new development at Sugar House Lane, which, according to its promoters, is being “transformed into an energy-efficient, creatively designed, truly mixed-use neighbourhood, a place alive with the hustle and bustle of residents, retailers and local business people alike.”  It will include 1200 new homes, a hotel, and plenty of space for businesses.

Heading further into the centre of Stratford, the history and complexity of the town become more apparent.  There are a few fine Victorian buildings, recalling the rapid development in the mid 19^th century, as industries moved away from the centre of London across the River Lea, boosted in 1839 by the railway, which made Stratford a new sort of transport hub, as it remains today.  St John’s Church was built in 1834 (even before the accession of Queen Victoria) to provide for a growing local population who otherwise had to walk to West Ham to worship.  Across the road to the south, the Old Town Hall opened in 1869, a fine example of civic pride, complete with balcony and flagpoles.

On the other side of the road beyond the church is the Stratford that predates the glass and metal structures.  BrightHouse, Ladbrokes, and some less-than-fashionable pubs, and the Stratford Centre, the 1970s mall and indoor market: it was quite busy when I was there, but the contrast with the glitzy Westfield Centre, built as part of the Olympic programme, is all too obvious.  That is where the high-end shops are, and while everyone can walk round there, many local residents will actually be making most of their purchases elsewhere.

Stratford has been part of the London borough of Newham since a 1965 reorganisation of local government.  The borough has the highest black and minority ethnic population in London – 71% of residents in the 2011 census – and also has the highest ethnic diversity.  And it’s growing fast: certainly in terms of numbers of people, it shows the highest increases in London both through migration from overseas and from “natural change” (ie more births than deaths).

Change, of course, is nothing new for Stratford.  Defoe noted that the village (as it was then) had “more than doubled” over the last 20 or 30 years, with “every vacancy filled up with new homes”.  Unlike other places on his tour, there is virtually nothing he would recognise: only St Mary’s church in Bow, on my walk.  Since the 1720s, Stratford has seen agriculture, industrialisation, railway activity, the Blitz, de-industrialisation and successive post-War rebuilding efforts.  The impact of all this, and the effects of the current changes – physical, economic, and social – on longer standing residents, are what I want to understand better as I work up this project.

You can walk along the roads in the small French village of Fleury-devant-Douaumont, as you can in other French villages.  But the roads here are marked out only by white posts and a smaller number of posts identifying the occupiers of some of the houses.

The village itself was so badly damaged in the First World War battle of Verdun in 1916, that it was one of a handful of villages which the authorities decided not to restore.

Fleury before the War had 422 inhabitants, and information is quite good about what they did for a living: several farmers, a grocer who also ran the cafe, three pubs, and the “marechal” – not the boss, or a policeman, but the blacksmith.  But in 1916 it found itself at the epicentre of the struggle for a stretch of northern France.  The inhabitants fled.  The land occupied by the village changed hands 16 times, as the success of assaults by either side shifted the front line just a few tens of metres, sometimes. By the end of the War in 1918, the combination of artillery shelling and ground combat had left little of the village standing.

I’d like to say it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like.  But the sad truth is that we see on our TV screens each night pictures of the destruction in Mosul, Aleppo, and other war-torn places, which are suffering the same fate at the moment.

Let’s hope they can be rebuilt.  For Fleury and a few other places, the decision was taken not to try to rebuild the village.  It’s a few hundred metres from the Verdun Memorial which provides a history of the whole battle and an extensive exhibition.  So plenty of people visit Fleury, walk along the one-time roads, and see where the different tradesmen lived.  The area is now forested, so being honest, the markers didn’t really work for me: I could have done with a ground plan to help imagine how it was in 1914, though one photo of the Rue de l’Eglise (Church St) helped.  But it certainly serves as a vivid memorial to the senseless destruction of a battle where the number of dead, at 300,000 is hard to get your head round.

On Saturday 23 September, David Elis-Williams kindly invited me to join him for the final stretch of his walk along the A5.  He began at Marble Arch on 30 April, walked to Wroxeter in Shropshire, then had a break and walked the rest of the way in mid-September.  Congratulations to him on a big achievement, both the physical effort and the interesting things he wrote up in his blog (http://a5walk.blogspot.co.uk) each night.  It was a privilege to be there as he walked through the arch at Holyhead, and to meet again Alan Williams, John Cave, and Richard Burrell who showed us round two or three years ago, and to get to know David’s former colleague Bob Daimond, who’s a career expert on the roads of north west Wales.

It was also a chance for me to reflect, a day or so after publishing my own book on the London to Holyhead road, “This Ancient Road”.  Previously, I’d gone to Holyhead by car, with at least one overnight stay on the way up, so moving gradually from London to North Wales.  This time I went by train, stepping on at Euston in the heart of London, and stepping off at Holyhead three and a half hours later.  The more abrupt change brings out more sharply the contrasts in our country – or I should say countries, since one of the first things to strike me was that the signs are written first in Welsh.  Holyhead’s above all a port, a place that looks outwards over the water to Ireland, and the town centre is mostly small and local shops.  It feels every one of the 250 miles from London.

So what are my reflections on the whole business of producing the book, now that it’s done?  It’s been consistently very enjoyable, getting out, looking round different areas, trying to find out more by looking at the roadscape, and also reading in the British Library to understand the history of roads themselves, of pilgrimage, of industry, and of the people who journeyed along the road.  There have certainly been some difficult moments, both on the road when I couldn’t track something down and in the writing of particularly tricky bits – I never really understood the Anglo-Saxons at university, and it hasn’t got much easier.

So here goes with the quick quiz answers.

Best moment?  Handing a copy of the finished book to my mum.

Worst moment?  None really.  I was annoyed to be locked into a park-and-ride car park due to a failure of the timetable, but it was opened fairly quickly, and the fine was refunded when I made my case.

Favourite bit of the road?  So many … Kilburn brings back happy memories of my early days in London, Snowdonia is the most classically beautiful though I’ve always liked the Shropshire countryside too, and the Holyhead Road through Soho in Birmingham is a really vibrant stretch of multi-cultural modern Britain.

Least favourite?  None.  As my Dad used to quote from Richard II, “All places that the eye of heaven visits are to a wise man ports and happy havens”.

Are you going to write another book?  I’d like to.  I’ve got a few ideas, based on the “journey writer” concept.  Watch this space.

Thirsty, footsore, but uplifted.

We had these things in common, at least, with the medieval pilgrims to St Albans when some of us walked 12 miles of the way there last month.

St Albans Day is 22 June and on the nearest Saturday each year, there is a festival to remember him, with special church services in the morning and late afternoon.  Groups from my wife’s church, St Mary’s Stoke Newington in North London, have attended in recent years, and although not a worshipper myself, I’ve tagged along for both the walk and the service.

The medieval pilgrims would probably have travelled along what’s now the A5 to get there from the north, or the current A5183 from Radlett or A1081 via London Colney from the south.  More memorable than the road numbers is the fact that the Radlett road and the A5 to the north are the old Roman road we know as Watling Street.  My book on the subject, “This Ancient Road”, comes out on 21 September, and enthusiasts can read a different take on it in John Higgs’s “Watling Street” which came out in mid-July.

We chose not to walk along Watling Street nonetheless – it’s a busy road, though that didn’t put off David, who has blogged about his recent walk at http://a5walk.blogspot.co.uk/2017/.  Our route took us cross-country from Bayford station via Hatfield and along a disused railway line named the Alban Way.  It was a very hot day, and we had to walk fast to get there in time, but regular worshipper or not, there was a real sense of occasion in celebrating the life of St Alban in a packed Abbey Church, and filing out past the shrine to the Saint himself, singing a special hymn to the tune of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah”.  And then sitting down to steak frites and a couple of beers!

Many thanks, by the way, to the church at Little Berkhamsted, which provides much needed facilities for travellers by having their toilet open from early in the morning.  Very helpful.

Deservingly or otherwise, we followed medieval pilgrims in wearing a badge showing the martyrdom of St Alban.   This is a badge from around 1400 in the St Albans museum, and with their permission, I am using it in my book.  By luck, printing it out fitted some ordinary office badge holders neatly, so we put them on.  Our ancestors may have questioned whether we had done enough to deserve a badge (which they would have paid for, not been awarded), but I hope they would be pleased that the tradition remained very much alive six centuries on.

We are used to seeing all sorts of things commemorating the dead on the Western Front in the First World War: the poppies, the centenaries, the memorials erected on the village green, the poetry.  So it came as a bit of a surprise, on a holiday in Slovenia, to find evidence of the effects of war in a very different part of Europe.

Slovenia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1914.  The area around Kranjska Gora, in western Slovenia, was strategically important for the war against Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian authorities ordered the building of a better road over the Vrsic pass, which rises to 1611m (about 5,900 feet), using Russian prisoners of war as labour.  The road was built in 1915, but disaster struck soon after.    A terrible avalanche in March 1916 killed around 100 Russian prisoners, who were by then being used to clear snow off the road, as well as destroying some of the equipment used to build the road.  As a result, avalanche protection was improved, and the road construction strengthened.

You can still see some of the results of this labour: some of the cobble stones on the many hairpin bends on the road from Kranjska Gora to Vrsic, are originals from the rebuilding during World War I.  There is a small wooden chapel, built in the Russian style, to commemorate the men who lost their lives in the avalanche.  But maybe the more lasting memorial is those cobble stones that their successors put down, which are still benefiting travellers today.

“All places that the eye of Heaven visits  Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.”

My Dad used to like quoting this bit of advice from John of Gaunt in Richard II.  Certainly the chance of finding points of interest in unexpected places came through on a recent visit to the village of Much Haddam near Bishops Stortford in Hertfordshire.

We were there for a walk courtesy of Country Walking magazine.  As well as a pleasant six mile stroll through the countryside, this drew attention to the Henry Moore museum along the route, including plenty of sculptures outdoors which you can see easily.

A seasonal benefit was a field of young lambs, and later some very early bluebells coming through.

But the greatest historical interest came in Much Haddam itself.

The Forge Museum (www.haddammuseum.org.uk) includes some Elizabethan wall paintings, on the wall where they were originally painted, where they had been hidden behind layers of wallpaper for centuries, until they were revealed in the early 20^th century.  They feature the Judgment of Solomon from the Old Testament, the Royal Arms of Queen Elizabeth I, and the coat of arms of the Newce family who owned the property at that period.  I’ve certainly not seen anything like this, in a secular and domestic setting, and in what today seems a relatively small property – this isn’t a stately home, but a room that’s about 12 foot by 10 foot, in a two storey house with a few such rooms either side of a corridor.  The Newce family were local notables, and their house was designed to emphasise their status to neighbours and visitors, but there would have been grander properties not far away.  The wall paintings are the unusual thing, certainly to our eyes.

As its name implies, The Forge Museum also includes a blacksmith’s workshop, which occupied the building for centuries, plus other local history.

More generally, walking along the main street in Much Haddam raises a number of questions,  Why were there so many fine apparently Georgian buildings?  What led people to this part of Hertfordshire?  Why are they apparently built as terraces?  I don’t have the answers, and the point of this post is to bring out that you can find points of interest where you don’t expect to, and the chance to use your own eyes and detective instincts to explore at least a bit about the history of a place and what made it tick.

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.