Why does a road follow a particular course?  If it’s a new road these days, it will be a mixture of ease of construction and more particularly finding a route where land is available and environmental considerations permit building – there was a huge row in the 1980s, for instance, over proposals for the extension of the M40 from Oxford to Birmingham to cross Otmoor.  If it’s an ancient road, geography will be more important.  How does the road cross rivers or avoid particularly boggy areas?  Does it serve ancient settlements?  And the impact of geography is most obvious with mountain passes, which target an accessible way across a mountain range.

We walked one such in January (2017) in Switzerland: the Gemmi Pass, which links the Swiss capital Bern (and a lot of western Switzerland) with the Rhone valley.  You can walk all the way, up from Kandersteg, at the northern (Bern) end, across the top and then down to Leukerbad in the south, and we did that in our younger days, but this time we were staying in Kandersteg, so tool the cable car up and down, and walked along the trail between the peaks of the Rinderhorn (3448m) and the Daubenhorn (2942m) to the high point of the pass above Leukerbad, and then turned round and walked back.

Much of the route is flat(tish) across a broad valley, and alongside a lake called the Daubensee.  It looks as though geography would have determined the course from ancient times, but research shows that at the southern end, the original route (the Alte Gemmi) ran to the east of the present one, and was several hundred metres higher.  There is evidence that some travellers used this route from the 9th century CE, with a hostel or refuge in place from the 12th or 13th century.  By the 18th century, more people were wanting to visit the spa at Leukerbad, so a path was built into the mountainside to take the route over a lower point in the mountain range, which has been used ever since.

The pass is a frontier in more ways than one.  It marks the boundary between the Swiss cantons of Bern and Wallis (Valais in French) – see the pictures of the boundary stone and flags on a nearby rock.

It’s a linguistic frontier between the French-speaking Valais and the German-speaking Bern.  And geographically, the pass marks the end of the Bernese Oberland, and the mountains in the fantastic view looking south are the Valais Alps: the best-known is the Matterhorn, though the Weisshorn and Dom are actually higher.

One other building linked to the route is the Ruedihus, now a restaurant on the outskirts of Kandersteg, which was built in 1753, and served, among other things, as a staging post for travellers over the Gemmi pass where they could change mules (rather than horses) and no doubt refresh themselves before or after a tricky section of their journey.  We enjoyed an unusual white wine soup, as well as the history – Swiss Parliamentary retreats have taken place there.

Some well-known people have travelled across the Gemmi pass.  Mark Twain wrote about it in “A Tramp Abroad”.  He admired the Alpine flowers on the way up, but near the top found “a storm-swept and smileless desolation.  All about us rose gigantic masses, crags, and ramparts of bare and dreary rock, with not a vestige or semblance of plant of tree or flower anywhere, or glimpse of any creature that had life”.  Twain did however develop an interest in mountain climbing there, and went on an expedition from Zermatt.  (Thanks to Project Gutenberg for making the text easily available, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/119/119-h/119-h.htm#ch35.)

Other walkers across the Gemmi include Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, and Guy de Maupassant (who mentioned it in a story called “The Inn”), all of whom signed the visitor book at the Hotel Schwarenbach, which is about halfway across the pass, along with Lenin and Picasso to break up the literary fraternity.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson over the pass on their way to his (at the time) death at the Reichenbach Falls.

These days, the Gemmi pass is the province of walkers, and in winter, cross-country skiers, para-skiers, and others.  There is an alternative to get to the central Rhone valley from the Bernese Oberland: you put your car on the train in Kandersteg, and emerge the other side.  It’s quicker, of course, but you won’t get the joy of seeing the new mountain range emerge ahead of you, and the sense of travelling a route carved out hundreds of years ago.

 

There are quite a few surviving bits of Roman London, and more are being discovered as the apparently endless desire to build newer shinier office blocks leads to more excavations.  The biggest current example is that the new Bloomberg headquarters is being built over the site of the Roman Temple of Mithras, and it’s expected that public access will resume some time this year.  There’s an interesting video about it on YouTube, The London Mithraeum: A Future for the Past.

We walked round some of the sites recently, following a trail published by the City of London Archaeological Trust (https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/visit-the-city/walks/Documents/roads-to-rome_final-accessible.pdf), and this got me thinking about the roads that linked up the sites and how they fitted in with the major roads heading out of London, such as Watling Street and Ermine Street.

The traveller from south of the Thames had two choices to get across the river under his or her own steam.  There was a ford at Westminster, which took some traffic up towards Park Lane and Marble Arch and points west and north from there.  But if you wanted to pass through the heart of Londinium, you came across the first London Bridge, built out of wood at some point between 50 and 100CE.  This was probably 100 yards or so east of the current bridge, and the traveller’s path would now pass through the courtyard of the church of St Magnus the Martyr, on Lower Thames Street.  There is a plaque which commemorates, with more certainty, that this was the route to the bridge from the medieval period to the early 19^th century.  More atmospherically, there is a large piece of wood, held to a pillar by a metal strap, which dates back to 75CE and comes from the wharf which the Romans built.  It was found the other side of Lower Thames Street, in Fish St Hill, which was the way into the heart of Londinium.  Since the 17^th century, it’s been better known as the location of the Monument, which commemorates the Great Fire of 1666, which started very nearby.

 

Having climbed up Fish Street Hill, our traveller would head up the line of Gracechurch Street.  Where that meets Lombard Street was the entrance to the Roman forum, a public building and open area where people bought and sold goods, took refreshment, and discussed affairs of state.  The route today is actually not one of the City’s more distinguished thoroughfares: you pass post-War office blocks, shops, and eateries.  The modern emporium of Leadenhall Market is roughly on the site of the forum.  As you continue north along Gracechurch St, however, you get glimpses of the iconic buildings of today – the Lloyds building, the “Gherkin” and the “Cheesegrater” – off to the right, and up ahead is what’s now Tower 42, but to my generation was the Nat West Tower, and for decades the tallest building in London.

Where Gracechurch Street meets Wormwood Street used to stand the Bishop’s Gate, which gave its name to the street heading north, which is the start of the great Roman road, Ermine Street.  That’s definitely one for another blog.

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.

It’s striking how little things can take you straight back in time. I guess most of us have a song that transports us back years to a holiday or a romance – the hits of Fleetwood Mac and Blondie take me straight to a minibus trip across Europe to Greece and Turkey in 1981, and The Corries’ “Wild Mountain Thyme” to a car journey in Germany a few years earlier. Smells can have the same effect: a warm scent arising from thick carpets and powerful lights brings back childhood visits to the Crescent Theatre in Birmingham to watch my Dad in Gilbert and Sullivan shows.
The potential in sights is less obvious, but we’ve had a live experiment recently near home in north London, as neighbouring roads were transformed for two days to serve as the backdrop for a scene from a TV series to be called “Guerilla”, set in 1971. The Victorian terraces provided the right starting point, but a lot of effort went into turning the shops back into how they would have looked at the time.
Different signs went up above the doorways – simpler and more homely. The one for the garage stuck to the same words – Mountgrove Garage, MOT, Tyres, Servicing, Bodywork – and at first I thought it had only been changed because London phone numbers are longer these days, until someone else pointed out that the website wouldn’t have been there either! More subtly, today’s design is more modern in ways you know when you see it – a slightly sharper font, with smaller lettering, and a cleaner look.

Bigger changes had been made to create a 1970s grocers store, with the goods displayed on shelves in the shop window. Some of the produce is still around – tinned fruit hasn’t changed much, and Whitworth’s still sell demerara sugar, albeit in snazzier bags – but the packets of Lux and Omo washing powder, biscuits, and tinned vegetables were all a step back in time. Outside, there was advertising for tobacco, and vending machines selling cigarettes and bubble gum, which you don’t see these days.

More important than the details, however, was the overall effect. Walking along the film set took me back to the local shops in Castle Bromwich where I first lived: the grocer’s, the butcher’s, the baker’s – no, not the candlestick maker – and with it a world of different shopping patterns, different approaches to meals, less choice but maybe a more personal service.
This was probably a one-off experience for us, unless the area becomes popular as a film set. And there are permanent opportunities to go back in time at places like the Black Country Museum, Blists Hill Victorian Town in Shropshire, and Beamish. But more fun, I reckon – and one of the themes that will run through this blog – is to look around a bit harder to see what is still with us from the past, the sign painted on the wall, or the unusual street name that tells you who used to trade there. What would the travellers from the 1970s, or the 1570s, have actually seen that we can still see? And what would they have seen instead?

To make the point, there is at least one sign locally which the film-makers didn’t need to cover up and recreate, but could just leave in place: one for a builders’ merchants store, which is now a beauty parlour. I’ll be drawing on more such survivals in future blogs.

I’ve always enjoyed journeys and exploration.

When I was small, I used to draw up detailed plans for the car ride to the seaside for the family holiday, labelled “Itinerary” like the plans which the AA supplied to its members in the 1960s, and sit in the back, noting if we were a few minutes earlier or later than planned at various points along the way. When I was a teenager, we started to go on trips to places around Birmingham, where we lived, exploring the Cotswolds and Shropshire, and I drove round parts of Worcestershire as a history student researching one of its 18th century MPs.
I’ve also always enjoyed writing. During my full-time career, the effort went into reports and papers for government work. Now I have more time, and the freedom to write about things I choose.
Journeys take on an extra interest when they follow in the footsteps of earlier travellers, whether a celebrated figure from history, or one of millions of nameless people whose trips to market, to church, or to war together shaped their world. For in shaping their own world, they also laid the foundations for ours. Sometimes these foundations are still visible – a medieval church still standing proudly, or a fading sign that tells you that the mobile phone store was once a haberdashers emporium. In other places, a bit of investigation can reveal that the largely abandoned track beside a dual carriageway was once the main highway from London to the Midlands.

The picture shows me in Holyhead, beside the first milestone on Thomas Telford’s London to Holyhead road, and I have a book in preparation on that great highway, which will feature in some blog posts.  But above all, this blog will be about the joy of going on a journey, exploring the country, getting a different perspective on the past, and building an understanding of how places developed as they are. I hope it encourages you to go on your own journeys, and to comment on mine.