Sir,—Mr. Belloc’s article on Captain Grant’s Topography of Stane Street brings up a subject on which knowledge has rapidly advanced in recent years. Recent writers, such as Mr. Johnson in Folk Memory and Byways in British Archæology, and Mr. HippersleyHippisley Cox in Green Roads of England, have detailed strong links between old roads or tracks and points (such as barrows, camps, stones, and churches on “pagan” sites), which are undoubtedly pre-historic and pre-Roman. Mr. Belloc himself, in his books on the Pilgrim’s Way and Stane Street, gives many instances of this. Following on these lines, working in the field, and keeping an open mind as to who first planned our tracks or roads, I find in my own district (Herefordshire and counties adjacent) that mounds (tumuli), moats, ponds, camps, groves of trees on elevated points, and mark-stones link up in alignment, and that on such lines are to be found in confirmation fragments of existing roads and traces of old tracks, and that these alignments usually terminate on a lofty hill peak or camp.
As the artificial points which align have been proved in the main (on archæological evidence) to be pre-historic, the only logical conclusion is that there was a systematic pre-historic planning of straight-sighted trackways. We have many fragments of (so-called) Roman roads in this county, and they also line up (in as far as there are straight fragments) with sighting points of pre-historic origin.
Now both Mr. Belloc and Captain Grant have shown how portions of Stane Street are based on exact alignments.
I am obliged, however, to point out that both writers commence their investigations with an assumption and on a basis which is unsound.
This basis (assumed without good evidence) is that there were no systematically planned roads or tracks before the Romans came, and that our so-called Roman roads were entirely new creations, both planned and executed by Roman surveyors.
This is entirely upset by the discovery I have mentioned, for which evidence is fast accumulating, including confirmation by observers in other districts. That the Romans used sighting methods, that their engineering and surface construction was a great advance, is in no doubt, but in my district they certainly selected those portions of old straight-sighted tracks which were of most use to them and laid on them their stone surface.
From details given by Mr. Belloc and Captain Grant I see primâ facie evidence on ordnance maps that the alignment from Pulborough Bridge to Chichester continues beyond Chichester, and is sighted on St. Catherine’s Head; also that in the other direction it continues (as a pre-historic track) at least as far as Sevenoaks, and was therefore not originally planned as a road to London at all.
Finally, if these roads were on sighted alignments, it is an absurdity to treat such low-lying spots as Chichester and
London Bridge as being terminals. The terminals were hill points, and, with such, the need for modern type instruments
to make the alignments disappears.—Yours, &c.,
Alfred Watkins.
Hereford, January 30th, 1923.
Source info: Checked in library.