It was almost 40 miles long, 10 feet high with a ditch on the northern side and perhaps a palisade on top – a major piece of infrastructure.īut the Romans could not sustain such a northerly frontier with the Picts they were forced to make do with the more southerly Hadrian’s Wall and the turf and wood wall fell to ruin. A road once ran beyond the Antonine Wall to Bertha (Perth) this seems to have fallen to ruin after the wall itself was abandoned in 162 AD, like HS2 barely 20 years after works began. By this ingenious method, a particularly urgent dispatch from Eboracum to Londinium, a 200-mile journey which would ordinarily take a week, could be done in around 10 hours, about the length of a train journey from York to London on a very, very bad day.ĭid they ever overreach? Of course. Most impressively of all, were the mutatio, every four miles or so, where imperial messengers could change horses to reach maximum gallop for an entire journey. The roads had to be smooth, their quality monitored – “I do not wish to injure the draught animals while the roads are bad”, wrote one Octavius to his brother Candidus from the northern frontier at Vindolanda around AD 110 – and they were conscientiously maintained by imperial officials.Įven in Britain’s dreary climate, travelling along the main highways wasn’t especially unpleasant, for the wealthy at least – every 15 miles or so (the length of a typical day’s journey in, say, an ox-drawn wagon) could be found a mansio (from manere, to stay, whence “mansion”) with stables, bedrooms, sometimes bath-houses and of course a tavern to revive the spirits after a long day’s travel, foreshadowing the motorway service stations of the future the privately-run cauponae with their thieves and prostitutes were loucher affairs by far. But they soon accrued a commercial function, too, tightening communications between towns, greatly facilitating trade and urbanisation, with Londinium, with its enormous temple to Diana (where St Paul’s stands today), amphitheatre (Guildhall), high walls and lookout barbican (Barbican), as the biggest marketplace of all, capital of Britannia Superior. Their primary function was to allow soldiers, dignitaries, even emperors to move around Britain speedily, and with ease. Impressively broad, with a raised, usually hard-surfaced carriageway, curving downwards for drainage, vaulting over bridges, and with regular milestones dedicated to the current emperor, Roman roads bespoke central authority and power unopposed. These radically transformed the landscape and integrated Britain into an economic network that stretched to Egypt and beyond. To travel the route of the doomed HS2, you would have travelled from London to Viroconium (partly Wroxeter) and on to the fort of Mamucium (Manchester). ![]() We don’t know what the Romans called them, but what the medievals later called Ermine Street was the great northern highway from Bishopsgate in Londinium to Eboracum (York) via Lindum Colonia (Lincoln), parts of which are now the A10 and A15 Watling Street followed the path of the invasion of AD 43, coursing through London (at Edgware Road) to Verulamium (St Albans) and leading to Wales, some now absorbed into the A2 and A5. These radiated outwards from Londinium firstly to the ports and existing legionary settlements and then to the new towns, not vast unyielding courseways, more long, very straight zigzags. The Romans, in stark contrast, were able to coral vast manpower and engineering expertise to enmesh their freshly-conquered, rain-spattered isle in a splendid lattice of highways between AD 43 and 180, by which point the network was complete. But these were few and far between, and ill-maintained since the Celtic tribal kingdoms were small, independent, and frequently at war. There were some Iron Age roads or rather tracks from the 1st century BC. The Roman Empire relied upon speed, and the roads that they built in Britannia – the fantastic, arrow-straight thoroughfares shooting through the countryside – “annihilated distance”, as one classicist put it, like never before. Many of the routes we rely on today stretch back as far as 2,000 years, making HS2 look like a flash in the pan. London’s links with the North, and other parts of the country, have in fact been evolving – sometimes in dramatic ways – since the birth of Britannia itself. And yet its crucial northern stretch, to Manchester, has, in the click of a fingers, been consigned to oblivion. ![]() HS2 was hailed as an indispensable link between London and the North.
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