Roads that ramble, and roads that runPaul Hindle explains some of the peculiarities of British roads
Roads are one of the commonest features of the landscape, but probably the most ignored; they are taken for granted as we rush from one place to another. But as we travel around it can be fascinating to see what each section of road can tell us about its history.
Perhaps the most obvious feature of a road is its direction, and in particular how straight or sinuous it is. Straight lines are rare in the landscape, and straight roads are equally rare, usually being either Roman or related to enclosure. As Sellar & Yeatman said in 1066 and All That, ‘the Roman roads ran absolutely straight in all directions and all led to Rome’! In fact Roman roads are better described as being ‘direct’, and usually proceed in a series of straight alignments from one Roman site to another. They were designed this way for simplicity of construction. Many are marked on OS maps; but otherwise, the existence of Roman sites en route is a fair clue to a road’s Roman origins. Some still retain traces of the aggers, or ditches, that originally ran along each side; good examples can be seen along Ermine Street as it crosses Lincolnshire.
Straight enclosure roads, by contrast, laid out between 1760 and 1840, run through the then newly created enclosed landscapes of straight walls or hedges, which are mainly found in midland England (and much less in Wales or Scotland). Whereas Roman roads were often later used as parish boundaries, enclosure roads rarely run along the boundaries but were designed to give access from each village to its new fields and to neighbouring villages. These roads often bend and change width at parish boundaries, reflecting the work of two different surveyors who had each built a straight road, often of different widths, from their village to the boundary. If the roads did not meet up exactly at the boundary, a double-90° bend might result.
Most British roads are sinuous, though GK Chesterton’s poem probably does not reflect the true cause:
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road,
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire . . .
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
More likely is that country roads bend in response to the landscape, for example to avoid sometimes long-gone obstacles such as woods, ponds, bogs, depressions, even buildings. Some bends may also have been reinforced by the traditional traveller’s right to divert from a difficult section of road, even to the extent of trampling crops. Even modern motorways rarely go in a straight line for more than a couple of kilometres.
Enclosure also produced a distinctive width of road; standard widths of 60ft (18m), 50ft (15m) or 40ft (12m) were common, to allow horses and carts to get around any obstructed sections. With modern road surfacing, enclosure roads often look rather odd with a narrow strip of tarmac running, with wide verges, between walls or hedges up to 60ft apart.
There is a vast range of road widths, from packhorse tracks less than a metre wide (often paved, as in the Calder Valley in Yorkshire, or cobbled in parts of Lancashire), through country lanes and main roads to motorways. As a general rule, the wider a road, the more recent it is, though the physical remains of older narrower roads are often destroyed in the widening process. An exception to the rule is Roman roads, which were built to standard widths of up to eight metres. The standard minimum width of a road nowadays is four metres, designed to allow two cars to pass, and OS maps mark roads that fall below this width with a narrower yellow line. Many non-enclosure roads in country areas were originally ‘single-track’, but most were widened on a piecemeal basis during the first half of this century when they were first surfaced with tar. The continuing existence of single-track roads in some rural areas today is simply a sign of little traffic.
A curious feature of some old roads is the creation of multiple tracks running in parallel, either where there was nothing to contain the road, as in a drove road crossing high ground, or where travellers had chosen the easiest route available, such as when climbing a hill. The Icknield Way is thought once to have been a mile wide, and on maps one can see a whole set of parallel tracks below the Chiltern escarpment near Lewknor in Oxfordshire. In some places a modern road runs right down the middle of a set of old drove tracks, as at Winsford in Somerset. Again, in aerial photos one can often see a set of roads climbing a hill, only one of which is tarmacked as the modern road - an example is at Twyford Down in Hampshire (it has not been destroyed by the new motorway). Modern descendents of this old multi-track habit are dual carriageways and motorways.
The surface of roads varies from modern concrete and tarmac, compacted stone (as prescribed by McAdam), to unsurfaced tracks, whether of stone or compacted earth. In the last category are the ‘green roads’ which traverse many parts of upland Britain. The reason why some roads were tarmacked, and others not, is related to need. The numerous roads that lead up into fields, for example, were rarely needed for motor vehicles; while the huge network of drove roads, which was in any case always more or less independent of the rest of the transport system and by-passed the majority of settlements, fell into disuse as modern transport haulage systems were developed. A few drove roads have continued to be used, however, such as the ‘Welsh Road’ and Banbury Road in the Midlands which are tarmacked in places.
Street furniture is a ubiquitous feature of urban roads. In the country, there is much less of it, but what there is can be very interesting. Stone or metal bollards indicating distances to nearby places may be turnpike milestones, showing that the road was once turnpiked, probably in the mid-18th century. A few Roman milestones survive in situ, while quite a number of parish boundary-markers survive at the roadside. These often go unnoticed, and can be cairns, crosses, stones, iron plates, even trees. One example can be seen at the boundary between Ingleton and Bentham in North Yorkshire.
Virtually all urban roads have names, which may give dues to the history of the road and the area it served. Simple words like ‘Old’ and ‘New’ in road names can indicate which road came first, while landowners often have roads named after them, and many long-gone features may also be recalled by road names. In the country, fewer roads are named, but any names can be instructive. Most simply say where the road is going. A Welsh Road in the Midlands, or a Galloway Road in northern England were probably once drove roads, whilst a Coal Road probably led to a coal mine, and a Turbary Road to peat cuttings.
What lies beyond the road boundaries may also give clues to the road’s history. The sheer number of roads in an area will be determined by economic features in the landscape, such as towns and villages, mines or industry; while in earlier times the presence of forts and castles was also a reason for a road to develop. The existence of cultivated fields also requires roads to allow agriculture to operate.
But it is the physical landscape which has the strongest control on the routes roads take. Slopes are the most obvious control. Some roads contour around slopes, whilst others have to go up them, perhaps using curves or zigzags, the steepness of the roads being determined by the traffic that used them, and by the technology available. Thus Roman roads are often quite steep, as they were designed for men on foot and horses. Until this century, wheeled vehicles could not tackle steep slopes, but cattle could; so drove roads sometimes had steep sections, but the main roads did not. Footpaths, horse-tracks and cart-tracks are original, not modern, distinctions between roads, and they reflect not only the different widths but also the different steepness of roads. Rivers also control the routes which roads take, either by forcing them to travel along their banks, or by the choice of fording and then bridging points.
It may seem odd that height is a feature of roads, but there is a height limit to most roads today, reflected in the height of bridges and tunnels, determined by the size of vehicles in use, such as lorries and double-decker buses. Overhanging trees are cut to this same ‘loading gauge’. The reverse, depth, is also a feature; where an old road runs down a hill, centuries of traffic plus the effects of rainfall often lead to an over-deepening, and the creation of a ‘holloway’.
So when you travel around Britain, whether for business or pleasure, keep an eye on the very roads beneath your wheels and the tracks beneath your feet. They have a fascinating history, and many clues can easily be seen.
Dr Paul Hindle is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at Salford University
Further reading:
BP Hindle, Roads, Tracks and their Interpretation (Batsford), 1993;
A Raistrick, Green Roads in the Mid-Pennines (Moorland), 1978;
GN Wright, Turnpike Roads (Shire), 1992.
