Sir,—I hope Mr. Watkins will excuse me if I suggest a few points which occur to me from his letter in your issue of February 10th.
I should like to ask first whether the pre-Roman occupants of Britain, even at the beginning of the Christian era, had either the necessity or the inclination to cover their country with a network of “accurately sighted” trackways. They would not, I venture to suggest, have evolved nearly such an elaborate scheme for getting from place to place. Their life centred round groups of dwellings, or villages, from which a system of trackways radiated to similar dwellings in the neighbourhood—trackways, I imagine, worn by the constant tread of men who, while maintaining the general direction, chose the easiest route to their objective. They would avoid steep gradients and thick woods, and cross rivers at the easiest points. It is impossible to avoid obstacles and yet keep a straight line: and therefore I think the Briton would not have troubled to sight a straight line over hill, forest, and river, when by a detour (and perhaps not much greater expenditure of time) he could have avoided these difficulties. His object in making a straight road would be to save time in travelling, and I cannot think there was enough travelling in pre-Roman times to justify such a step.
In one of the sections of map Mr. Watkins prints in his excellent work on “Early British Trackways,” the Ley-line he has drawn crosses and recrosses the same river three time in a mile—surely no Briton, or anyone else, would do this simply to maintain a straight line.
The Pilgrims’ Road is an excellent example of an important pre-Roman road, and anyone who has walked its length knows that very few stretches of it could be said to be aligned. It is clearly engaged in avoiding obstacles (indeed it sometimes nearly turns its back on its objective), but it preserves the general direction. I agree entirely with Mr. Watkins that the Romans found in Britain a network of trackways (nor can I find that Mr. Belloc denies it), but that they were accurately sighted I cannot agree. The line adopted by any pre-Roman road is the result of the instinct of true direction combined with the natural tendency to avoid obstacles.
Secondly, if “Borough” Hill represents “Barrow” Hill, does it follow that this Barrow was used as a sighting point for a British trackway? There must be many barrows in England that have never stood near any kind of road. Thirdly, Mr. Watkins says: “It is absurd to treat low-lying points like Chichester or London Bridge as terminals of an alignment.” If, as I take it, the object of the Stane Street was to connect London and Chichester, its engineers could hardly have avoided using London and Chichester ultimately as terminals, even if the line did not cross any conspicuous hill that would serve as a sighting point. Supposing the nearest hill-points to Chichester and London are chosen, these points are not the terminals of the alignment; but the choice of them as sighting-points depends entirely on the relative positions of London and Chichester, which are thus, in spite of their low-lying position, the real terminals of the alignment.
Finally, I should like to qualify Mr. Watkins’s statement that “in the main, Roman roads in England are an expediency patchwork on old-sighted tracks.” To my mind the character of Roman road-building was essentially independent. Where they met pre-existing tracks they improved and straightened them out as long as they coincided with the line on which they were working, but apart from this they left them alone. In some instances where they could not improve the direction and site of the old track (e.g., the Dover–Canterbury and London road, and the Chute Causeway on the Winchester–Mildenhall road), they imposed their own road upon it; but I regard this as exceptional rather than usual; just as the Roman Road defies forest and hill, so it is independent of other roads unless their two lines actually coincide.
The relation of Roman to pre-Roman roads is roughly the relation of railways to modern roads. A Roman road was built to get you from one place to another, by the straightest route, and without stopping many times. If you wanted to reach some out-of-the-way village, you used the Roman road as far as you could, and turned off along some convenient pre-Roman track to your objective.
I would say, finally, that we are apt to estimate too highly the organisation of pre-Roman Britain. It is only when
nations are highly civilised and organised that they lay out sighted trunk-roads for long-distance traffic. If the
Britons sighted their tracks, it can only have been to accommodate traffic that had no time to spare. I do not think
they had such a traffic.—Yours, &c.,
C. G. Stevens.
New College, Oxford.
February 21st, 1923.
Source info: Journal title in cutting; MS note by AW “Mar 10th 1923”.