Road-Hilaire Belloc

0:00Introductory section of the road. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit libriVox.org read by Devora Allen. The road by Hilar Bellock. Frontus piece, an old title page showing the antiquity of the road problem. It conveniancy and pleasure to the whole nation. Being a short, rational discourse lately presented to his majesty concerning the highways of England. Their badness, the causes thereof, the reasons of those causes, the impossibility of ever having them well-mended according to the old way of mending. But may most certainly be done and forever so maintained according to this new way, substantially, and with very much ease. And so that in the very depth of winter there shall not be much dirt, no deep cart-ruts or high

1:00ridges, no holes or uneven places, nor so much as a loose stone, the very worst of evils both to man and horse, in any of the horse tracks. Nor shall any person have caused to be once put out of his way in any hundred of miles riding. To mend highways, low here the way is shown. No better way than this shall air be known. A firm and certain way of no great cost, in all ways else their labors wholly lost. The old way now could do it to as mere deceit, as may be proved it was a very cheat. Printed for a public good in the year 1675. Author's introduction. We are arrived at a chief turning point in the history of the English highway. New instruments of locomotion, a greater volume of traffic, a greater weight in loads, and vastly increased rapidity in road travel have between them brought us to an issue. Either some very considerable and immediate change in the character of the

2:01road, or a serious and increasing handicap in our rivalry with other nations through the strain and expense of an out-worn system. The moment therefore calls for some examination of the road, its theory and history. That need has prompted me to write this essay, but I must say at the outset that I approach my task with no expert qualification. My only equipment for the general sketch I intend is historical reading and the experience acquired in the writing of certain monographs upon the topography of the road in the past. I can do no more than suggest lines of thought, which, if they lead to practice, need a detailed science I do not possess. The road is one of the great fundamental institutions of mankind. We forget this because we take it for granted. It seems to be so necessary and natural a part of all human life that we forget that it ever had an origin or development, or that it

3:03is as much the creation of man as the city and the laws. Not only is the road one of the great human institutions because it is fundamental to social existence, but also because its very defect appears in every department of the state. It is the road which determines the sites of many cities and the growth and nourishment of all. It is the road which controls the development of strategics and fixes the sites of battles. It is the road that gives its framework to all economic development. It is the road which is the channel of all trade and what is more important of all ideas. In its most humble function, it is a necessary guide without which progress from place to place would be a ceaseless experiment. It is a sustenance without which organized society would be impossible. Thus and with those other characters I have mentioned, the road moves and controls all history. A road system once established develops at its points of concentration the

4:09nerve centers of the society it serves. And we remark that the material rise in decline of a state are better measured by the condition of its communications, that is of its roads, then by any other criterion. The construction, the trace and the whole character of the road change with new social needs and habits, with the facilities of natural science, their rise and decline. But this perpetual change which affects the road as it does architecture and every other work of man, is specially marked by certain critical phases, one of which, as I said at the opening of this, we have now entered. There are moments in the history of the road in any society where the whole use of it, the construction of it, and its character have to be transformed. One such moment for instance was when the wheeled vehicle first appeared, another when their first appeared large organized armies. It occurred whenever some new method of progression succeeded the old. It occurred at

5:14similar critical turning points in the history of the road, not only when any of these things arose, but also when they declined or disappeared. The appearance of great cities, their sudden expansion or their decay, or the new needs of a new type of commerce, and its disappearance, bring a whole road system to one of these revolutionary points. We have had, as I shall develop in more detail, five great moments of this kind in the history of the English road system. The moment when the British trackway was superseded by the Roman military road, the moment when the latter declined in the dark ages, the moment when the medieval system of local roads grew up on the basis of the old Roman trunk roads and around them, the moment when this in turn declined in the later 16th and 17th centuries, and the recasting of the road system by the turnpikes of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Today, the sixth great

6:16change is upon us. It is incumbent upon us then today to get ourselves clear upon the theory and the history of the road, and I propose in this essay to take them in two sections. First, the road in general, next that special institution, the English road. A preface. The British reinforced concrete engineering company limited recently became acquainted with the fact that Mr. Hilar Bellock was engaged in the production of an essay on the history of British roads. In numerous writings, Mr. Bellock has treated various aspects of road history, and his learning on the subject and his method of communicating it are in high repute among wide circles of readers. He is in fact an outstanding literary authority on the topic. It therefore seemed to the company that if they could acquire the copyright of the work, in which Mr. Bellock was treating the whole subject not indirectly, but directly and systematically. And if they could issue this work to people who are professionally engaged in the construction of roads, a very considerable

7:21service would be done to the cause of road development in the country. The future always becomes a little clearer if we thoroughly understand the past, and a company feel that everybody who is giving much of his mind and life to road problems will be glad to have in his possession a book, which brings out the historical and social, not to say the romantic interest, which lies beneath the surface of the English highway. Mr. Bellock was accordingly approached on the subject, and agreed to sell the publishing rights of his work, to the British reinforced concrete engineering company limited, who now have great pleasure in issuing it to the surveying and civil engineering profession, believing that it will at once assist and beguile the work of those, to whose hands the future of the English roads, and with it much of the economic and social prosperity of the country is largely entrusted. End of introductory section Section 1 of the road. This is a Libravox recording, all Libravox recordings are in the public

8:26domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit libravox.org. The road by Hilar Bellock, Part 1, the road in general, Chapter 1, the origin of roads. How did the road come into existence? The experimental or the scientific method, the haphazard road, the case for design in road construction. Section 1. In order to understand any matter, especially if we have to understand it for a practical end, we must begin by the theory of the thing, we must begin by thinking out why and how it has come into existence, what its function is, and how best it can fulfill that function. Next, we must note its effect once it is formed, and the results of a fulfillment of its function. What then, to begin with, is the origin of the road? Why did this human institution come into existence, and how does it tend to develop? How may it best be designed to fulfill its function? When we have decided that, we can go on to the next point, which is, how does the road once

9:27formed react upon its environment, what physical and much more important political results flow from its existence? The answer to the first question, how did that human institution, the road, come into existence, and why, is simple, and will be given in much the same terms by anyone to whom it is addressed? The road is an instrument to facilitate the movement of man between two points upon the Earth's surface. If the surface of the Earth were uniform and quality and ingredient, that is, if it were of the same stuff everywhere, of the same degree of moisture everywhere, and everywhere level, the road between any two points would clearly be a straight line to be accurate to the arc of a great circle, joining those two points. For when we say that the road exists in order to facilitate travel over the surface of the Earth, from one point to another, the word facilitate includes, of course, rapidity in progression, and the straight line is the shortest line between any two points. But the surface of the Earth is highly diversified and

10:32quality as ingredient, therefore the trajectory or course of a road is not in practice and should not be in theory, a straight line from point to point. That straight line has to be modified if we are to give to the road in ultimate form such that it shall best serve its end, and when we come to look into the problem we shall see that it is one of very great complexity indeed, that is, where the study of the theory, even in its most elementary form, becomes of such value to the execution in practice, we discover by studying the theory of the road, how many, and how varied of the elements of the formula we have to establish, we become prepared in that study for the discovery in each new particular problem of any number of novel modifications not present in problems previously attacked. So true is this that the whole history of progress in road making is a history of discovering methods for dealing with obstacles either novel in character or only appreciated after lengthy use. Let us begin at the beginning with very elements of the affair.

11:37The first element in the theory of the road may be put thus, to find a formula of minimum expense in energy for communication between two given geographical points under given conditions of travel and carriage. The diversity of geographical circumstance molds the formula into its final shape through balanced modifications of the direct line. The most obvious modifications to a direct trajectory arise from the two primary circumstances of surface ingredient. It is easier to go over one kind of soil than another, easier to go over one kind of surface in summer and another in winter, easier to go over one kind of surface in wet and another in dry weather, easier to go over one kind of surface with a heavy load and another with a light load, over one with some tar animals, over another on wheels and so on. Again it is for all kinds of travel easier to go upon the flat than uphill and this element of gradient is much more complicated than at first

12:41would appear. Thus travel of one kind, travel on foot for instance, can take a sharp gradient for the sake of a short trajectory more easily than can traffic with burdens and traffic with burdens carried by animals can take a sharper gradient with advantage than can wheeled traffic and wheeled traffic differs according to the character of the vehicle in this respect. Again a road of diverse use must strike a compromise in its formula between the various needs observed. If the great bulk of its use is to provide for rapid military advance by marches you must sacrifice to shortness. Some of the easier gradients which would be demanded for traffic mainly civilian yet of three main users even the least important is incapable of more than a given gradient your formula can never exceed that gradient and so forth. So we have even in this simplest and most primary of all analyses of the road considerable elements of complexity appearing as the study progresses an indefinite

13:41series of further complexities arises and when soon reaches that crux in the theory of the road which has led to so much discussion and which some still call unsolved whether the formula of the road is best left to the unconscious or half conscious action of experiment which in time should lead to an exact minimum of expense in energy or whether it is best to arrive at it by a fully conscious exact and as we say today scientific examination of all the conditions and a deliberate and immediate conclusion upon them should the road grow or should it be planned the discussion does not idle the clash of opinion upon it is at the root of the contrast between national systems and a right answer will make all the difference between success and failure in our approach to a new road system such as is now upon us. Section 2 I maintain that of the two theories the second is just that a gradual experimental growth in its roads a method co-incident we have local caprice

14:44burdens with imperfect communication the society adopting it that conscious design is essential to efficiency and this I propose to illustrate by a single example take two points a and b such that a line joining them must lead across a marsh a river and a range of hills let some primitive wanderer make his way from a to b knowing when he is at a the direction of b by let us say a distant peak overtopping the range between that primitive wanderer would first of all scourge about the marsh and finding its narrowest place at sea would set to work and make his causeway there having crossed it he would come to the river he must either swim or for it supposing him to prefer through the necessity of a pack or what not to for it he costs about for a ford he finds one at d and perhaps he also if he takes time to look about him finds another deeper one at e and another at f but as his causeway is near d he takes that ford then he has to make for the hills

15:46we will suppose that the peak directing him from beyond b is still visible he takes his new direction from it and looks towards the base of the hills at g there in the direct line to the peak the contours are so steep that the trouble of getting up would more than counterbalance the shortness he costs about for a better chance and at last finds a gradient just worth his while at h he climbs up that but though the gradient is easy on the a side at h on the far side it is very difficult so he turns along the ridge to k where he finds an easier down gradient a spur leads him on by its gentle slope and from the bottom of the spur he makes straight for b which is now right in front of him and plain sailing now look at that track as established by our primitive wanderer and see how lengthy and inconvenient it is how ill fulfilling this object of the traveler compared with what would have been established by even a moderately intelligent and cursory survey of the ground as a

16:51hole and the making of a plan to begin with it would have paid our traveler to take a little more trouble in crossing the rather wider gap in the marsh at l and the rather deeper forwarded f because he would have gained very much in time and space with comparatively slight extra effort had he surveyed the whole ground and thought things out he was only led on to the forwarded d because it was suggested by the crossing of a marsh at c the first opportunity made the second but to continue the plan f is nearly opposite the easier up gradient of the hills but having surveyed that bad steep on the far side he slightly modifies his road crossing the ridge at m behind a summit which hid this way from the first traveler then he goes down the practicable though steep slope at n and so reaches b the first road produced have hazard by successive chances gives the lengthy and roundabout trajectory a to c d h k to b the second with very little extra labor

17:56gives him before shorter and better trajectory a to l f m n to b we see from this elementary example how the thinking out of the theory of the road is of advantage in practice it may be urged that the discovery of advantages as time goes on gradually improves the road and in this way half conscious development will always give you the best road in the long run without studying its theory but history is against that view europe is full of roads thus established have hazard confirming themselves by use and by expenditure and for centuries neglecting opportunities which would have been present to the eye of a most cursory and moderately intelligent survey this conflict of principle between growth and design in the creation of the road is at the root of half our modern crises in road making the real issue is between those who would gradually add to or develop from custom and those who would radically impose new plans and on a right decision

18:58the economic future of this country may well depend when we come to consider even the first of succeeding modifications we see still more clearly the complexity of any road formulae and the corresponding advantage of plan over habit the marsh the river and the hill are but the beginning of the affair there is a modification due to the fact that the marsh may not be permanent nor the depth of the river that the road may be of special use at moments when the river is shallow or flooded when the marsh is dry or exceptionally impassable there is the modification of surface clay for instance is fairly good going in dry weather but the worst in wet there is the modification due to vegetation the bouncing of the effort involved in going round a dense scrub against that of cutting through it and of maintaining the cutting when it is established there is the modification introduced by the instruments and science available for construction and for cutting in one stage

19:59of development it will pay to take a road by a bridge across a deep river where in earlier stages of development it would have been necessary to seek a forward in one stage of development it would pay to make a cutting through a scar too steep to climb where in a lower civilization it would have paid to go round it the whole formula increases in complexity the more we examine it it is a formula for the discovery of a minimum of effort but in the establishment of that minimum you have to consider not only a very great number of factors but the respective value of each to the whole and your success in establishing the road depends upon the accuracy of your judgment both as to the presence and as to the comparative value of all those factors end of chapter one section two of the road this is a libravox recording all libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravox.org the road by hilaire bell

21:04luck chapter two the crossing of marsh and water physical factors modifying the formula of the road marsh as the chief obstacle to travel the political results of marshes the crossing of water courses the origin of the bridge the effect of bridges upon roads the creation of a nodal point the function of the nodal point in history section one so much for the first principle of all that the road like all other human institutions is best made with brains and for that second immensely valuable but too often forgotten political principle that if you begin by making your thing wrong it is likely to take root and to remain wrong a catalog of the more important physical factors modifying the formula of a road i will come to the political and economic in a moment is as follows marsh to be traversed water courses to be traversed differences of surface other than marsh and water courses gradients to be dealt with the obstacle of vegetation to be dealt with to these five

22:07one may add a factor common to all and to the making of every road even in its most primitive stages six the proximity of material meaning by proximity the countries of all the factors which make for the cheapness of material for the advantage of using it in a particular place let us take these physical points in their order section two marsh it is not always appreciated that the chief obstacle to travel from a beginning of time has been and still remains marsh which may be defined as soil too sodden for travel as distinguished from the lands which are boggy and wet weather but possible marsh is less striking to the eye especially to the modern eye than a stretch of water much less striking than the apparent obstacle of the sea or of a bold hill range it is nevertheless the chief problem presented to the making of a road because of all natural obstacles it is the only one wholly untreversible by unated man man unated can climb hills swim water work his way

23:11through dense undergrowth but marsh is impassable to him it is the great original obstacle to progress if this has not been recognized in the past and is still little recognized it is not only because marsh is less striking to the eye than water or hills but still more because the original roads established by man informing his cities markets and all the rest of it being compelled to avoid marsh we do not often come across the problem even today partly also because very extensive marsh is a rare phenomenon especially in western europe but if we look at the map and at history we shall see what that obstacle means it was marsh which cut off Lancashire from the south of England and left Lancashire the stronghold of old institutions especially after the reformation it was the marsh of below a temzestry now upon the right now upon the left bank of the river which forbade a crossing below London it was marsh which protected the growth of Venice at the earliest and most dangerous moment of its existence it was marsh which cut off a western polish civilization from the

24:16eastern russian civilization and was the main geographical cause of that sharp division in culture which has affected the whole of later european history we may say that the russian orthodox church and the last revolution would neither have been say for the pincke marshes to take lesser examples we can see today the way in which even our modern ways avoid marsh the large district of gharagano in southern Italy has remained largely isolated through marsh upon its flanks you may see all over europe and even in this well-drained country primitive roads deflected through marsh as they are not by any other obstacle and this deflection stamps our road system to this day in spite of our enormously increased opportunities of road construction we shall see on a later page the way in which marsh deflected in the dark ages Roman roads at the river crossings in this island if a special example be required of a road having grown up and remained on an uneconomic trajectory on account of marsh molding its earlier history one of the best in england is that of the arondale

25:20road south of polbra seaworge from polbra a landing and crossing place on the upper river arond of great antiquity the next considerable inhabited spot was the port and fortified spur of arondale the distance as the crow flies is a short days march or less some 10 miles now the road could have been taken in a fairly direct line and everywhere upon the level had it not been for marsh the marsh bordering the arond prevented such a construction in early times the road had to keep to a high dry bank then to climb right up to the top of the downs and fall again upon arondale so it remained having taken root through all the advances in science so it still stands today the railway takes the obvious line but the road established centuries ago remains on its former trajectory climbs up many hundreds of feet and then drops down again to arondale involving in the short distance of 10 miles gradients of one in eight and heavy hill climbing over more than half the distance a neighboring example of the extreme importance of the first experiment in the history

26:24of a road is seen at Bramber in the next valley eastward there a similar situation the approach landward from the port of shoreham avoids the hills because at some unknown but very early period a causeway was built at Bramber to negotiate the marsh and that was because the isolated hill at Bramber afforded such a good opportunity of fortification and blocking the pass that a road was bound to reach it and even under primitive conditions men were at the labour of making an embankment section three water courses the crossing of water courses does not seem to have been originally in the main a search for a fort it seems to have been rather a search for good taking off places upon either side however deep the water in between the fort was used of course wherever it could be and in it also the hardness of a passage under water was of even more importance than the depth of water below say four feet but the point to note is that often and probably in the majority of cases man in the early times took a shortcut across water either by swimming or

27:28by taking advantage of floating material and was much more concerned with the hard bank upon either side than with the depth of a stream if you take such a very old road as that of a primitive British trackway whose two branches from Stonehenge and Winchester unite in what is called the Pilgrims Way and make for the Straits of Dover you find this trackway crossing them all the way and the Medway as also the Daranth at places where the obvious consideration has been a dry approach upon either side and not the local shallowness of the stream we must remember in this connection that the word forward is used at plenty of places where the stream is too deep for crossing on foot it means simply a going a false etymology here has misled many historians of more importance to the first makers of the road than the depth of a watercourse was its swiftness we have in this country few examples of swift streams of any magnitude and none of streams so swift as to be impossible

28:28or possible with great difficulty but where such examples occur abroad it is easy to see what a boundary and obstacle a rapid current afforded it works in all manner of ways to the disadvantage of travel it makes both swimming and varying more difficult or impossible it makes bridging either more difficult or in early times impossible it usually canotes great differences of level sudden floods etc and it also usually canotes changes and variety of currents as well as the destruction of the banks at an early stage in the development of a road came the use of a bridge and with the bridge the original chief consideration a dry approach from either side was emphasized it is true that fords were bridged as roads developed but the bridging of a ford is not the normal origin of the bridge the normal origin of the bridge if we judge by any one of the original great roads of Europe is the replacing of a ferry men took the obstacle of a river on account of its length

29:30as something hardly to be turned say perhaps in its higher reaches they made straight for it seeking only firm ground from which to embark and disembark and established a boat crossing to this rather than to the ford the bridge succeeded they bridged it with increasing success as their material science increased in power and you may see all over Europe the great bridges thrown not where the river was shallowest nor where it was easiest to traverse for any other reason but chiefly where the main road led in other words the bridge is a function of the road rather than the road of the bridge to outstanding examples of this in Europe or London bridge perhaps prehistoric certainly not much less than two thousand years old and the bridge at Cologne to which one might add the bridge at who are and the bridges of the island of Paris which we know to be more than two thousand years old but it must be remembered that the bridging of a river even in primitive times was the next easiest thing to a ferry and in some circumstances easier even than a ferry a bridge need not

30:35be built of piles it may be built of boats and in principle even over a broad stream once you could build a boat bridge at all you could build it of almost indefinite length what would military against the efforts to make a pile bridge were depth and propidity of stream but even these unless the propidity were very great indeed did not prevent the throwing of a bridge of boats the bridge is an element in the road place a very large part which needs some detailed examination it develops a whole series of results the object of a bridge is to give continuity and security to travel across an obstacle of depth usually an obstacle of running water sometimes a dry ravine it is but rarely that a bridge is essential to the mere trajectory of a road in much the greater number of cases its function can be supplied the far less perfectly by a ferry or a forge or a graded way down into and up from a depression what the bridge does is to permit of continued traffic especially continued wheel traffic across such obstacles without delay and without

31:39transmitment and at the same time to add up to a maximum of weight to security for it is obviously an instrument more secure than the ferry or the Ford especially for heavy weights but the bridge has always represented a special economic effort greater yard for yard than that of the average of the road of which it was a part and that is why you almost always find it the mark of civilization a primitive culture can exist for centuries without bridges the proportion of bridge building effort to road building effort varies very much with the physical science of various times it is less today and was less in Roman times than in primitive times and in the middle ages because we like the Roman engineers expand a far greater economic effort upon the average of a road so that the comparative cost of a bridge is less in primitive times the bridge was something of a feat its construction as measured in effort was equivalent to many miles of road its builder a public benefactor and its building an event of note this is so true that in some languages which

32:43have come down but little change from primitive times the word for bridges found to be a foreign word as though the institution were not sufficiently common before the advent of some civilized conqueror to have acquired a special name and in all primitive societies the bridge is rare this comparatively high cost of the bridge has had certain effects on the history and in the appearance of our roads which are worth noting in the first place the bridge tends to be a gut when the throwing of a bridge was equivalent in expense to several miles of the existing road it was a great saving to make it narrow only one vehicle to pass at a time with side refuges at the piles when the passage of two vehicles in opposing directions was unavoidable again bridges tended especially in times of low economic development to introduce a sudden high gradient the elliptical arch was if not unknown at any rate very rare before the Renaissance and where the plain semicircular arch alone was used a flat bridge involved if the crossing were of any width a great number of piles and therefore an added expense

33:49the difficulty was met in the majority of cases by lessening the number of piles especially towards the center where there was a greater depth consequently increasing the span there and consequently in a semicircular arch increasing its height correspondingly the result was that the bridge introduced a sudden hillock into the road and that feature you find all over western Europe up to quite modern times with many survivals remaining especially in Spain in some of the very early bridges in the poorer districts or on the less used roads the exaggeration is fantastic I know of one over the Gallego near Cuesca where the pitch is so steep that it bulks a car there were particular structures that of London is an example in point where the disadvantage of a gradient was avoided at great expense because a mass of traffic and merchandise made it worthwhile London bridge was carried on a great number of archers precisely in order to avoid this element of gradient a side effect of this was the blocking of the stream

34:50and great difficulty for boats in shooting the archers on a tide but this drawback to river traffic was thought worthwhile as the price of a level road another reason which often led to the expensive flat stone bridge was its replacing an old wooden pile bridge the wooden pile bridge had no chords for creating a gradient on the whole it was cheaper to keep it exactly level and as low as possible consistent with the rise of the water where such structure had preceded a stone bridge the habit of a level road was continued even at the expense of many piles and archers a third effect of the bridge upon the road also due to its comparative expense was the convergence of roads towards bridges established or even only planned you will perpetually find up and down Europe the approaches to a town from two or more directions merged into a common road just at the entry to a bridge in order to save the expense of two crossings though at an extra expense of space and time thus Abavir Khan a very striking example with three converging roads on each side of the bridge

35:54London the chief example in Europe Theragotha with the two main roads from south and west converging on its bridge all gather roads after this fashion but the effects of the bridge upon the mere trajectory of a road upon its surface and contour were far less than were its political and military effects though land armies were always tied to roads more or less it was possible to leave a road for short distances under stress or for the sake of strategy cavalry continually did so for great stretches and infantry could do so occasionally but a bridge acted like a magnet the defense of a bridge was the defense of a point which an army and force was always compelled to use and the term bridge head that is the holding of the space on the further side of a bridge thus commanding the passage is an example of its permanent military function a bridge for the same reason a natural place of toll merchandise had to use it and the same requirement of continual repair which often entailed a permanent post at a bridge gave the opportunity for

36:59using that post for the raising of taxation all through the end of a Roman Empire and the dark and middle ages this function of the bridge is most prominent section four but most important of all the effects of the bridge is its creation of a nodal point that is a knot or crossing of ways the bridge affects this in two fashions firstly by that tendency to a convergence of roads upon the bridge which I have just noted and secondly and much more important by the transverse of a bridge and the river a river is also a high road if it is in any way navigable therefore wherever a land road crosses a river and establishes a bridge you get across ways of communications at such a point where many avenues of approach meet and when opportunities have traveled to different places radiate you have what is called in political geography a nodal point eckneeled street in the Oxfordshire Chilterns and now the nodal point is of such importance that it merits particular attention the nodal point especially if it is established by a bridge has two

38:04great functions in history it determines the strategy of campaigns and altars even the tactics of actions it determines the growth of towns it has been said that London was made by its bridge whether there was a settlement there probably was upon the gravely hill which approached the river from the north before any bridge was thrown across the tidal Thames we do not know but it is certain that the throwing of this bridge gave London its opportunity for development and what is true of London is true of Paris of Roi of Maastricht of Cologne and of 20 other great urban centres in our civilization strategically a commander holding a nodal point retains the opportunity of moving along any one of many lines of movement and at the same time denies the opportunity of junction to his enemies to put it in its simplest form a commander holding a nodal point and concentrated there can prevent the concentration of two fractions of his enemy along any two roads radiating from that nodal point he can himself march up each of these consecutively and defeat the

39:09two fractions of his enemy in detail that is the simplest possible case and it can be developed into any amount of detail and intricacy the bridge is the point where the commerce up and downstream crosses the road commerce transversely to the river commerce and the nodal point of a bridge establishes a market but that nodal point has other characters even more important to civilian life it creates a point of trans shipment where goods must be transferred from the water vehicle to the land vehicle in their transferant you have the political opportunity of examination and toll and if necessary interception and you also have of course the whole of a middleman business of dealing with and passing through the goods you have the depot and the warehousing and all the adjuncts of a built up commercial centre and a market but the bridge as a nodal point has yet another occasional function which has marked all history that function it exercises when it is the lowest bridge upon a great navigable river such a bridge the bridge of Rome for instance the bridge of

40:15London the bridge of Gloucester the bridge of Newcastle etc has been the making of inland ports it must be remembered that before the advent of the railway or at any rate before the organization of rapid and easy road travel it was to the interest of seaborn trade to penetrate into the heart of a country as far as possible you avoided the cost of trans shipment and you had a much cheaper means of conveyance than anything that went by land but the first permanent bridge across a waterway blocked the further progress upstream of seaborn traffic therefore there was a tendency to keep this first bridge well upstream further whenever it was made it tended to create a glut of traffic at this point of section the cargoes from a sea came here and could go no further and this last function of a bridge is perhaps of all its historical functions the most important even where a river is very rapid as the tibre the first bridge has some effect where it is tidal it is of course as in the cases we have just quoted of the greatest effect and usually on the great

41:20tidal waterways the first bridge will be found not indeed at the limit of a tide or there the water would be too shallow but in the last reaches there are cases rochester is one where the road has proved more important than the stream where bridge was imposed very low down in the tideway but it has there fulfilled the same function of creating a market and a town there are cases Antwerp Bardot and Philadelphia are examples where a secure harbor and good warfage made the inland market and town in the absence of such an obstacle as the first bridge but in the greater number of navigable rivers even in so narrow a stream as that of severe the bridge makes the port and the town as one can see by adding to the examples already given nont montré glasco etc there is a little note on the crossing of water courses which is curious and interesting in the history of roads since the crossing is always an effort or an economic terms and expense to be avoided as

42:21much as possible the road naturally avoids a double crossing but on the other hand an island is a stronghold and even a peninsula where two rivers meet is a potential stronghold therefore you have in the history of all early European roads a sort of dilemma the first travelers debating as it were whether the occasion was sufficiently important to warrant the double crossing of the stream at Reading Leon Mela notably at Paris and in dozens of other places the presence of the stronghold made it worthwhile for the road to visit the place in spite of the double crossing whether to an island or to the meeting of two streams but in much the majority of cases the road was deflected from its simplest line to a point below the meeting of two streams so as to avoid the double effort and the occasion explains many a deflection which otherwise would seem to have no reason end of section two section three of the road this is a Librevox recording all Librevox

43:26recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librevox.org the road by Helaire Bellock chapter three passability the choice of soils following the gravel or the chalk conditions in the south and east the obstacle of gradient the early vogue of steep gradients the other side of the hill the modern importance of gradient passes or gaps in hill country section one to the next physical factor modifying the formula of the road we have given the name differences of surface other than marsh and water courses the differences of surface other than marsh or water courses affect the trajectory of a road in several ways first and originally in its possibility to human travel on foot or with beasts of burden or later with wheeled vehicles and hear the two factors were hardness and evenness but there was a great contrast in the obstacles of the north and the south of our civilization in the north and especially in England damp

44:28was the enemy for a trajectory to be used in all seasons and in all weather sand and chalk at once suggested themselves clay can be used only in the dry season the various soils determined the first trackway and impose themselves visibly upon the map of our oldest roads for instance the road down the upper way to pharnum is in its oldest form a deliberate picking out of long gravely stretches in the bed of the valley on a geological map you can trace this road picking its way from gravel patch to gravel patch almost as a man crosses a stream by stepping stones it leaps as it were from one gravely stretched to another and in each keeps to the gravel as long as it can for the same reason a primitive road will follow the south or sunny side of a wood or of a ridge of land so that the surface may dry as soon as possible after rain when the use of artificial material for the surface of the track became common this question of quality of soil was somewhat modified but its essential was retained for what made bad going in the north and particularly in Britain

45:31being heavy soil that same kind of land which interfered with foot or pack horse travels swallowed up material it was a less graving convenience than in the times before artificial material was used but it was still an inconvenience expressed in the shape of expense and nearly all the original trackways continue to take account of this factor long after the use of artificial material had been introduced the earliest of all of course follow the dry ridges and in particular the chalk one may say we have slight exaggeration that the chalk was the essential factor in the building up of British communications before the Roman civilization came if you take a geological map of England you may see the great chalk ridges radiating in a sort of wall from a centre in Soltsbury plain and providing dry going to the channel the straits of Dover and across the Thames Valley it's streetly right onto Norfolk another example of a road taking advantage of dryness of surface is the straight line leading to Lincoln northwards everywhere following that peculiar isolated

46:36ridge with low lying ground upon the left and marsh upon the right another very striking one is the hogs back where from one low lying point to another gildford to pharnum the primitive track deliberately rises and follows the summit of a high hill between rather than the wetter ground upon the slopes though here there is an alternative upon the southern or sunny slope where the trackway leads through to St. Catherine's Chapel this is a modern example of the way in which a primitive track imposes itself upon posterity to this day your motorist climbs up that roof of a house out of gildford and goes down the steep on to pharnum because countless generations ago his ancestor could only be certain upon that height of dry ground in the south which does not concern this essay the great obstacle in the way of soil is not marsh but sand that is something of which we have here no experience but the tracks of nearly all western Islam are dependent upon it drift sand is not so impossible as marsh by any means but it is terrible going north and south

47:40of atlas the knowledge of how this kind of soil may be avoided is half the business of establishing a primitive road an interesting case of surface but one which is rarely met within this country common in dry countries where the rare rainfall is sudden and intense and where temporary water courses carve out the friable soil is the inconvenience due to what are called in some parts of the east nulas that is the dry beds of such water courses or the sudden depressions made by what were formerly water courses now dried up through a change of climate the banks of these are often so steep in their depths so considerable that the making of a plain straight trajectory across such a country would even under modern conditions not be worth the labor expanded it would mean continual bridging or continual embankment one of the effects of this type of surface is the inordinate winding of all the roads and even alternatively the absence of roads perpendicular to the fall of the land and the establishment of communications along the line of fall rather than

48:43across it one can see this very conspicuously in Morocco where there are whole districts a couple of days march across the trails of which are determined by this accident a special example of the same kind of thing is to be found in any hill range where a number of narrow spurs project towards the plain the road hardly ever runs parallel to the range across these spurs it nearly always runs down the valleys or along the plain at their foot and that although there be as they're usually are in each valley centers of population which need to be linked up with the neighboring parallel valleys section two gradients the obstacle of gradient the minimum of vertical effort is the most evident of all the factors which modify the trajectory of a road yet it is upon the whole the most complex to determine the minimum of effort you have to find a formula consisting of many factors some of which I have already enumerated in the opening words of this essay in the

49:43first place you have to consider the average nature of the travel to be served the road used by men on foot without burdens by men on foot with burdens by pack animals by wheeled vehicles etc must conform itself on the whole to the least gradient useful to those who travel by it but that on the whole least gradient is a factor by no means easy to determine it depends not only upon the nature of the instruments of travel but upon habit upon vigor and to some extent upon surface it depends also on the proportionate use of the road you cannot sacrifice 99 travelers to the special weakness of one there is also the question of durability a primitive road taking a very steep gradient will be more durable than one taking a lesser gradient round the slopes of a hill and subject to falls from above and to degradation down the slope below it will need less upkeep for it is always shorter and this last consideration explains what would otherwise be inexplicable the extraordinarily steep gradients which primitive roads and even the roads of a high

50:48civilization will take one of the best examples of this in England is the behavior of the phosphate in the neighborhood of Radstock in Somerset here the original road was presumably a prehistoric track but we know that it was carefully remodeled by the high Roman civilization it must have been used for the great mass of travel during 400 years from the first occupation of the west of England by the Romans about 8050 to the breakdown about 450 and right on into the dark ages that is for not less than 1000 years during the first half of this time and especially during the first third it had to carry the travel of a very full well developed and complex society to one of the most important centers of its wealth the town of Bath yet the road goes up the most astonishing gradients somehow or other these gradients were normally used but it is a puzzle to say how the modern road has frankly abandoned the effort and takes a long sweep around both sides of a valley at a gradient of about one in 12 even so it is quite steep enough for our

51:52modern methods of travel the question of gradient is complicated again by another variable which makes the solution of a problem much more intricate than the discovery of minimum effort upon a particular gradient you have to consider not only the uphill or downhill upon a given slope but the type of further uphill and downhill to which your road once established on that slope is leading you it is not enough to determine your best formula under such and such conditions of travel for overcoming one side of the obstacle you have also to ask yourself whether having got your best uphill road you may not have led the traveler to an impossible position on the further side extreme cases of this one often sees in the Zura range where the hills are shaped like waves in a storm a steep escarpment upon the eastern side very difficult to go up or down and an easy slope upon the western here you have to balance the advantage of your gradient upon the one side with the advantage of the gradient that you will find upon the other and of course to direct your

52:55line principally with a view to travel on the more difficult steeper side that is why you often find yourself following in the Zura a road which goes up the easy western side by an apparently oversteep trajectory you wonder why the road does not take some obviously easier line which lies below you the reason you only discover upon reaching the summit and seeing the precipitous escarpment overhanging the eastern valley your road is made for some exceptional advantage down this cliff some cleft which an easier advance from the west would not have hit a balance has to be struck between the advantage of gradients on both sides of the hill save in the rare cases where a range such as the bourge is symmetrical and gives you equal gradients upon either slope that balance is always a matter of careful calculation where it has been brought to a fine art is of course in surveying for a modern railroad for there the slightest differences of gradient make such a vast difference in the expense of working that the discovery of a true minimum over an obstacle of hill

53:59country is of the first importance section three there is hardly any factor in connection with the theory of the road which needs more material modification as civilization changes than this factor of gradient the sharpest contrast in the whole of history is that which I have just mentioned that of the railroads men suddenly found themselves possessed of a new instrument which enormously multiplied their power on the flat and yet was quite incapable of anything like the old gradients going level or on very slight gradients it could give them travel far more rapid and inexpensive than any that have been known before but one in fifty bothered it badly one in thirty was wholly unnatural and the existing gradients of one in ten eight six were out of a question further released inclination increased all difficulties and the addition of inclination produced these difficulties in a geometrical progression the result was the revolution whose effects we see about us everywhere

54:59the tunnel the cutting the embankment today a couple of generations after that revolution there comes the new problem of the internal combustion engine where a gradient again appears in a new light the motor takes gradients far steeper than the rail its difficulties are not increased in the same ratio but it cannot always deal with the horse road lintin and linmouth and their Devon Chavalli form perhaps the best example of this in Great Britain you have here terrible gradients which were just possible for the horse vehicle and are hardly possible for the motor vehicle and you have the new road round by water smite attempting partially but not entirely to solve the problem a special case in this general category of gradients and one much more complex than appears at first sight is the case of a pass or gap men have always naturally made for any notch in a line of hills to save themselves the effort of higher climbing it began with foot travel and has continued right on throughout the history of the road in high mountains provided with low passes the use of

56:02a saddle in the range was obvious and often necessary but there were disadvantages even in that apparently unacceptionable rule one was the question just dealt with of the double slope the consideration of the other side the most obvious pass from the one side did not necessarily lead to the best descent upon the other another was the conformation of many ranges which is such that the approach to the ridge is much steeper at the summit of a call or pass than it is by tracks to one side this is a paradox which people living in easy hilllands have difficulty in appreciating the Alps especially show roads which puzzle us who are of a gentler landscape when we follow them yet the principle is simple and dependent upon the geological formation of most new mountain ranges which present a hard core forming their central ridge the softer ground wears way on either side of a valley the ridge remains the effect is that a direct approach to the notch in the range would give impossible gradients in the last few hundred yards and therefore the road must

57:04gradually curve round by a side of the valley a third exceptional case is that of trajectories where the minimum of effort is only to be found by going right over the very summit of the highest hill in your neighborhood lastly there is the curious case of a pass where it is to the advantage of a road to avoid the lowest passage of the range and to take a line to one side above it as examples of these last two paradoxical points I may quote the pass of Cient in the Pyrenees and the exceedingly important road from the valley of the Mozel to the valley of Belphur in the Voshe in the case of a pass at Cient there was an obvious notch in the range which was used from the very earliest times till just the other day it was through this that the armies of Amours poured in the 8th century for their attempted conquest of Europe when they invaded France and nearly reached the lois so late as within living memory it was the regular track from a valley of a Gallego to that of Gavos now the modern road after careful survey has been constructed to cross

58:07the mountain summit somewhat to the west and a good 300 feet higher than the old pass why was this it was because the notch of Cient had a very steep approach in the last few hundred yards upon either side and the minimum of effort at any rate for wheeled vehicles of the modern type was found in taking a lesser gradient to one side although it involved a much higher climb the case of the road from the Mozel valley to Belphur in the Voshe is even more remarkable for one would have said at first asking that no such case could exist one would have said that a minimum of effort could never be reached by going over the very highest summit in your neighborhood but it is so when you deal with what I will call a star mountain as will be seen at once from the following elements here the contours are such that had the road deflected to the west or the east in order to avoid the highest summit it would have been compelled either to a very long detour involving in any case nearly as high a climb or to a series of steep and profound ups and downs over the spurs of a mountain

59:11the line taken from the Mozel to Belphur on the other side goes within a few feet of a highest point on the hill and is yet the line of least effort from one point to the other it is an excellent example of the way in which the formula of minimum effort when it is thought out may be quite different from what mere habit would have produced end of section three section four of the road this is a Liebervox recording all Liebervox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Liebervox.org the road by Halea Balak chapter four the obstacle of vegetation the special expenditure due to forest roads which skirt woodlands roads which have been deflected by forest proximity of material as a final main cause modifying the trajectory of a road cost of transporting material and its

1:00:18effects in ancient and modern times one the obstacle of vegetation which is our next cause modifying the trajectory of a road is twofold there is the obstacle presented by forests or permanent vegetation which includes in some climates very high grasses and the obstacle presented by intermittent growths we are not in this country and in modern times will acquainted with the obstacle of vegetation to a road and with the modification of trajectory which it imposes we have no large forests left we have in common with all northern europe no exuberance of growth the dense population and very high road mileage of modern england have put this factor in the development of communication out of sight and it is so unrecognized that the mention of it here may seem superfluous but it is still a grave element in the calculation of a road even in the european world and a graver one in the new

1:01:21countries and it has had its part in framing our own system in its earlier stages in damp tropical countries it is all important and even in temperate climates where large forests exist it has its place a forest two special expenditures attached to this obstacle first the effort of clearing away second the effort of maintenance and particularly through the effect of wood upon surface the effort of clearing always and expense made the forest in very early times an insuperable obstacle to any great or considerable road the forest had tracks but the main road was compelled to skirt the denser woodland or at the least to take a torturous trajectory for the advantage of natural clearings with the development of civilization that difficulty disappeared and it disappeared early although I can call to mind no broad primitive track through any dense woodland

1:02:23the roman roads hewed their way through forests where it was necessary and found in the value of the timber-failed an economic compensation for the effort made but even with them and even with modern roads it remains true that the forest governs and modifies road construction there is case after case where a roman road and even a modern road will skirt a forest rather than be at the effort of overcoming the obstacle for instance the case of the forest of normal in northern France here the main roman road from the center of northern gall to the crossings of the Rhine cuts along the edge of the great wood like a knife with no growth on its western side further cause and effect reacting on one another the lack of roads preventing clearing and the lack of clearing keeping down habitation and so ways there is no great forest possessing a system of roads anywhere in Europe all considerable stretches of woodland where agriculture or

1:03:25other economic effort has not cleared them have a minimum of roadway in our northern climate the larger stuff once failed upkeep is not a grave economic matter the use of artificial material which comes in at the very first stages of road making renders the problem here even less important but in other climates and particularly in the tropics it becomes the dominating factor there are whole districts as for instance on the amazon basin or again in central and west africa where the problem of communication consists not in the cutting of the original track expensive as that is but in its maintenance and in the greater part of those districts even modern civilization with its immense material advantages and with its strong economic inducement to the transport of tropical material has been unable or unwilling to make and maintain forest roads at any rate for ordinary wheeled traffic with the railways it is otherwise the economic

1:04:32effort required for the construction of the track is such that the added expense of clearing the forest is a much smaller fraction of the whole and the type of bed which has to be established for the track partially solves but only partially the question of upkeep even the railway can be overcome by the vigor of tropical vegetation but it has a better economic basis in the densely wooded country than has the road one of the most curious facts in the history of roads due to the obstacle of wood is the deflection of the roman road through this cause after the decline of civilization one can find many instances of this even in England light as is the a foresting of this country and small as are the districts affected thus the great north road making for stampford is a broad unmistakable way raised high above the neighboring country and looking like some great double ramp part from the crossing of the well end for miles to the north and west it approaches a small patch

1:05:34of wood on a hill and disappears it remains lost for a mile after its destruction by the wood and is not found again in anything like its earlier sharpness of outline till stampford is reached that is because the upkeep through the wood became too difficult in the dark ages and men turned the obstacle by developing a new road rounded another very clear example is to be found on the stained street north of earthum where the great nor wood through which the roman road was driven you surped it in later times overgrued and deflected the modern road round by dunked in hill we have here probably not so much a case of keeping down the new growth as of the wetness of the track when artificial materials cease to be used and of the difficult going thus made between the trees the occasional fall of trees across the road left unremove and the danger in such times from any close cover must not be neglected but whatever the cause

1:06:35woodland perpetually deflects a roman road after the breakdown of the old civilization it deflects it almost as often as does the marsh of a river valley b the obstacle to the making of a road due to intermittent vegetation is one which plays no part in our system and is unknown to our climatic conditions nor is it of any great effect save in a few special highly characterized regions of the world the track once established can calmly keep down even the right of spring vegetation in open land such exceptions as there are due to the exceptional development of grasses affect no part of the world where communications need high development the factor exists but needs no more than a mention 2. The last main cause modifying the trajectory of a road is the relative proximity of material for its construction using the word proximity in the wider sense to include all economic effort

1:07:40what today we call the cheapness of the material even in the very simplest and most primitive form of roadwork material enters there is always the necessity of hardening some bit of soft ground or of smoothing some bit of unevenness and from the beginning of travel you have had the transportation of material to the established road for the improvement of its surface for the bridging of its water obstacles or flooring of fords for the making of its causeways over marshes in what may be called the middle period of road construction that is in periods of high civilization but civilization not provided with modern instruments the immediate neighborhood of material introduced a considerable modifying factor into the trajectory of a road this was often masked from the fact that the same soil which provided good going and therefore developed early tracks usually also provided in the nature of things good material for hardening

1:08:40the surface for the building of causeways and even for the throwing of bridges it was also masked by the fact that the bridge if it were to be built of wood could get its material from a considerable distance as the river was its avenue of supply but though transport of material has gone through a revolution in the last hundred years and material for road making is now brought half across the world e.g. colonial wood pavement yet the way neighborhood of material tells can still be seen everywhere upon the road map of Europe thus the absence of main roads and the fence for centuries was not only due to the necessity of continual artificial work embankments and bridges this would not have deterred the Roman road makers nor the great effort of the early middle ages from attempting a full network of roads it was rather due to the absence of hard material and you had the same phenomenon in the land of southwestern France where to this day only one great

1:09:40road serves an immense district whose loose and sandy soil fails to provide a cheap and sufficient material the traveler in Holland notices the same thing here are roads ultimately depending upon brick paving and narrow where had there been abundant material available they would have been brought for they had to carry a great deal of traffic the alternative water traffic by their side was largely developed by the difficulty of making the road the Romans fought this difficulty with singular tenacity they made all their great public constructions to last as it were forever and they made the roads with such a strong political and military object that they would not be deterred save as in the fendlands by the gravest difficulties in the obtaining of material thus in such of their roads as start anywhere near a sea beach of shingle you will find them using that material upcountry for miles and they will make deep foundations for roads that have to cross

1:10:41clay using sometimes hard stone brought over a couple of hundreds of miles of sea and some 30 of land travel it is a difficulty which has not disappeared today it has been very greatly lessened by modern means of transport but it still appears we see it throughout modern Europe for instance in the varying surfaces of the different soils the ideal surface of broken granite is not nearly universal even in England as one would think modern transport would have made it over such a small area with such masses of granite close at hand and accessible by sea the relative cost of transport still makes diversity of surface the rule one can make a sort of economic barometer based on the use of granite it extends farther and farther from the sources of supply as public wealth expands and recedes towards them as public wealth diminishes we have a first-class example of this in the case of flint versus granite flint has its advantages over

1:11:44all other material in hardening a roadway it is at once hard and easily broken it is superficial and therefore cheap it is abundant in supply in the districts where it is used on the other hand it has the gravest possible disadvantage for modern motor traffic which is its effect upon the tires indispensable to that traffic one could draw a graph i think to cover the last ten years showing the fluctuations of this material and granite upon the main roads of southern England and the curve would follow the opportunities of supply and of public expenditure as affected by the Great War end of section 4 read by Anita Hibbert October 17th 2022 section 5 of the road this is a Libravox recording all Libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravox.org the road by Hilar Bellock chapter 5

1:12:51political influences the factor of cost resulting in the strangling of communication congestion which leads to decay a great modern problem the compulsory acquisition of land old roads serving new objects section 1 so far we have been considering the material conditions of the road the physical circumstances which determine its trajectory but these alone do not completely account for its trace in practice or theory there is another category affecting this the political or moral category the various effects of society in modifying what but for them would be the formula of least effort these political causes of modification are of less effect than the physical but they merit a brief mention the political factors modifying the trajectory of a road that is the factors due to man's social action and not to material causes alone are three in number firstly the factor of cost which is the economic tendency to avoid as far as possible the

1:13:54destruction of old economic values in the making of a road secondly legal restraints against the roads following its line of least resistance and thirdly the presence of a variety of objects to be served which variety again interferes with a simple rule of finding the trajectory of minimum effort the first of these political factors the factor of cost you find even in the primitive road which avoids the cultivable land if it can or crosses it at the narrowest point available and you find it at the other end of a scale in our complicated modern world where the road tends to avoid the destruction of economic values in highly concentrated town life and thus keeps narrow when it is established and also fails to develop new communications the effect of this political restraint is constant throughout history great in all periods but increasing accumulatively with the increase of wealth and the economic development of society their follows from this a most interesting historical phenomenon which I shall deal with at greater length in my second section

1:14:56the English Road because it would appear to be upon the point of recurring in this island that phenomenon is the strangling of communications in the old age of a wealthy state from the very effect of its wealth it is a paradox of profound effect which you get over and over again in the history of great mercantile cities their wealth which should be their best advantage in developing and changing communication crystallizes them their ways are laid out for a particular phase of traffic the land on either side of the streets becomes enormously valuable the traffic changes in character new ways are demanded by the new conditions but they are not built because the compensation required for disturbance terrifies the reformer their follows a phase during which you have heavy congestion of traffic and then unless reform comes in time a succeeding phase of decay it is very rare in the history of great urban centers to find the problem tackled at the right moment and solved defined governors of sufficient daring to take the economic plunge the government of Napoleon

1:16:01III did so to some extent in the case of modern Paris though it left a great number of congested streets unrelieved and there are not a few modern Italian towns where similar action has had its effect for instance barry but the general rule in history is that the city having reached its highest point of wealth becomes congested refuses to accept its only remedy and passes on from congestion to decay how strong the influence is you may observe in one particular historical example where its influence is more clearly discovered than in any other that is the example of the city of London after the great fire of 1666 here was the finest opportunity for rebuilding that ever a government had it might have done what was done at Turin and laid out a new city altogether two men of genius Sir William Temple and Sir Christopher Ren produced magnificent plans with broadways round placet for the crossings and a carefully thought out scheme of transfer vested interest and economic peril proved too strong for them the city was rebuilt on its

1:17:06old lines with narrow lanes and alleys courts tortuous trace the mark of all which it carries today there is a good side to this of course no one can regret the conservation of tradition everyone who knew the old Paris mourned for the antiquity which was swept away under Napoleon III and even in our slight changes in modern London we are shocked at the desecration they involve I confess that I myself have never got over the loss of Temple Bar though I only knew it as a child if this were the main motive at work one would criticize less strongly the hesitation to make our town streets meet the modern great change but it is not the main motive the main motive is a blunder in the science of economics it is the idea that the destruction of a number of imaginary economic values imaginary because they form no part of the total real wealth of the state to it the urban site values is in some way an expenditure of real wealth so far is this from being the case that there is perhaps no example in all history

1:18:09of a congested street system being reformed without the wealth of the city increasing after the change of the minor political questions which confront us today in England this stands in the first rank if we do not reform our main roads we shall hand to cap ourselves against our competitors but if we do not broaden and change our town streets we may rapidly strangle and atrophy our most vital centers of commerce section two the effect of a second point legal restraint in modifying the line of least resistance will be found under two forms the first is negative the lack of public powers of coercion for the requirement of land by which a road should pass the second is positive legal restraint against the road through ownership or privilege this political factor in the modification of roads the negative and positive effect of legal restraint works in an opposite fashion to those that we have just examined the older the wealth

1:19:10here the more complex a civilization the less this modifying factor is present thus in England for many centuries we had no compulsory power in the hands of public authority for the making of a new road such powers are as we shall see when we come to the story of the English road a comparatively modern development on this account the road was until modern legislation brought in a new system compelled to follow existing established ways it could not even be broadened let alone a new trajectory enforced and the only compulsory powers in the hands of the authorities were those permitting the levying of labor and later of money for repair the same as true of a second form of legal restraint though in lesser degree privilege such as the deflection of an old line of road by act of parliament in order of for instance to add to the privacy of a park there were not a few examples of this some generations ago and the positive legal restraint imposed by existing right of ownership obviously decay paré passu with the development of public

1:20:13powers for driving new roads or broadening existing ones the third political factor modifying the trajectory of roads is that of a variety of objects imposed upon communications by buried social uses as society grows more complex and at the same time wealthier as new centers of population arise new forms of travel and new needs to be satisfied by travel the simple formula line of least effort from one point to another suffers increasing modification you have to consider not only the line of least effort between two terminals but the due weight to be given to intervening points which do not lie precisely upon that line as a rule of course these new centers exercise their pressure or attraction automatically and you get a deflection arising not from plan but from gradual necessity the same thing happens with new needs as commerce replacing arms but it is curious to note how slowly the modification takes place we have a good example of this along

1:21:15the southeastern coast of England our ancestors felt no attraction for living in the neighborhood of the sea to use the shore as a recreation and the sea air as a remedy is quite a modern idea the result is that all the old roads connected with the sea as a terminal ran perpendicularly to the coast uniting a port to the inland country there is not a main road in England over 100 years old and leading from the sea which does not start from a port for good communication connecting up a line of ports laterally there was little need the result is that to this day when the south coast has become one long line of great watering places many of which are fully developed modern towns on a very large scale there is still no complete lateral communication many of the port bridges as I point out elsewhere in this essay are but recently established many sections of the line are served by imperfect ill-kept pieces of road in one or two places it fails altogether

1:22:15as round cell sea while in others it is built up as a dromney marsh of patchwork old lanes running crisscross to each other have hazard to make the modern line end of section five section six of the road this is the Libravox recording or Libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org read by beeswaxcant the road by heler belloc chapter six the reaction of the road one so far we have considered the origin and development of the road that is the effect of its environment upon the road we must turn in conclusion to the converse aspect which may be called the reaction of the road that is the effect of the road upon its environment a road once formed

1:23:16immediately begins to affect in some degree the physical circumstances surrounding it and in a very much greater degree the human relations which it subserves the physical effects of the road are few and may be briefly mentioned they are all connected with the action of water save for very rare instances where a particular cutting has precipitated a landslide and one or two other exceptions of the sort the effect of the made road upon physical circumstances is in fact dependent upon the conflict with precipitation of which it is engaged it is a general rule in all man's economic activity that the human effort is at odds with the general tendency of nature nature perpetually tends to assert herself and to undo what man has done and heard despite the road is no exception to this rule and the particular way in which it works you can see by examining typical cases one of these we shall come across more particularly later

1:24:19on when we discuss the Roman roads of Britain that are maybe worthwhile to give its general character here the road finding a small stream crosses it by a culvert the road finding a ravine with two sharper gradient on either side traverses it by an embankment and then even if there is no stream at the bottom of the ravine it leaves a culvert or other drain for the water accumulated after rainfall to soak through now when human efforts slackens and the upkeep of a road is no longer sufficient the culvert gets blocked and the road begins to act as a dam the lake so formed will in time destroy the obstacle but before this the road will change the countryside by the creation of such a lake succeeded by permanent marsh today the phenomenon passes unnoticed because we are still living in a high civilization but it has affected history

1:25:19strongly in the past whenever civilization breaks down you begin to get a series of marshes with all their accompaniments of fever and the rest growing up below the roads the greatest examples of the growth of marsh during the dark ages were founded Italy but there are countless examples of the same thing all over the north and west of the Roman Empire and this spreading of marsh too also to other causes such as the embandment of drains and the fence in the breakdown of locks and sluices on riverways is largely caused by the special action of the road the same thing on a lesser scale is to be seen where a bridge falls out of repair the ruins will often half block the current and make an overflow at either side where if the land is flat a wide belt of marsh spreads and the approaches are ruined so that what was a point of special opportunity for becomes a point of special obstacle to communication to on the political side

1:26:27that is in relation to its human service the reactions of the road are exceedingly important and they are not always as clearly noticed as they might be there is a whole group of historical social phenomena which could be connected under the one heading of the attraction of the road meaning by the word attraction the way in which the road compels communication to follow it once it is established this attraction produces a quantity of effects countering or crossing general economic tendencies and it acts in countless ways one interesting aspect of this is the draining of population down onto the road when a map is drawn up showing the density of population we see upon it separate areas of density sometimes far apart and between them areas marked by less density or even void but if one should make an accurate population map of any one moment plotting down

1:27:27every individual upon it you would not get this effect of isolated dense districts you would not get the effect of an archipelago that of a network for upon the communications between these districts would be marked a dense chain of units and progress from the one to the other and one would at once grasp how permanent lesser nuclei arise between the two terminal towns this aspect of the road suggests a far more important one the road in the sense of a means of communication in proportion to its excellent differentiates human society a into areas of density and void b into the urban political habit and the agricultural political habit this is a very important reaction of the road which must be allowed for an ever historical and contemporary problem granted an urban centre with its special opportunities for intercommunication between human

1:28:28beings for experiment and for what may be called the cross-fertilization of knowledge the growth of such a centre is of course dependent upon many things its economic basis either as a market or as the capital of a productive area or more commonly as both the physical surroundings which may as in the case of Genoa or Venice for instance strictly limit that growth etc but among the causes affecting it and the chief among them is the road the degree of excellence in communication the growth of a town is a direct function of this the most conspicuous example of course in the whole history being the immense growth of a London following on the supplementing of the old roads by the railway in direct connection with this you have a mass of subsidiary effects all of the highest importance to the state the road having caused the growth of the city after a certain point a high differentiation arises between urban and rural life the differentiation may become so great

1:29:35that you arrive at a clash of fundamental interests in which one of the two is defeated you certainly have had that in modern England during the last two generations the towns become so much the more important part of English life that the agricultural life was entirely sacrificed to them and the road was the ultimate cause and again you get the curious development of what may be called reserve towns towns like Brighton and Blackpool which are the playgrounds of the greatest cities at a distance the large urban centre breeds as it were and lesser one after its own pattern you have got in modern times that further curious reaction due to growing excellence of communications that is due to the growth of the road the pulse of the great modern city crowds of human beings pour out to Victoria or Liverpool Street into London and pour back from

1:30:37London in the evening the station of Solazar in Paris is in Europe the most striking visual evidence of this strange modern development great floods of human beings cascading into the city of the opening day and airing back at its close at the bottom like so many other human arrangements this pulse is a negation of its own principles a subconscious effect which a fully thought out plan could have avoided there is no true economic basis for it or at any rate not for the most of it there will always be advantages of course in the central point and always some tendency in men to seek that central point in order to enjoy those advantages 10 men may desire to seek daily the central point which has only habitation room for one and that will lead to the pulse of which I speak but the necessity for seeking it daily is already very largely an artificial necessity

1:31:42and it's becoming more and more artificial every day the same work can be done perfectly well as a distance as is now done in centres and in a roundabout way that truth is impressing itself through an economic effect the rents become so high in the crowded centre that whole groups of activities which do not really need a central position tend to disperse themselves to the outer boundaries the printing trade in those branches which are not hurried the printing of books for instance is a good example of this when men debate the probable future of our great cities they often omit one very likely development which is the creation of a number of suburban centres which if the material side of our civilisation declines will become independent towns and the probable decay the central nucleus out of which they all grow it is a speculation worth examining

1:32:44three the reaction of the road upon society its political reaction as many other departments for instance in the communication of ideas the trace of a road will give you the advance of some religious development otherwise inexplicable I have pointed out through more than one historical illusion in other work how the spread of the Christian religion may be directly followed along the traces of the chief Roman roads and especially of the great truck road of the empire running from Egypt to the wall in Northumberland you have only to make a list of names standing on that truck road to show that it corresponds to a list of dates and names in the story of the conversion of Europe Alexandria Jerusalem Damascus Antioch Tassus Ephesus Athens Brindisi Naples Rome Leon O'Conn Canterbury London St. Orbans again a road which for some reason

1:33:47has become established along an artificial line a line not directly dictated by the formula Minimum effort will canalize traffic so that even when an alternative and better way has been provided institutions in towns and all that goes for human activity will have taken route along the old way and all history will be deflected by the deflection of the road we have a very interesting example of this here in England in the case of the great road to the north west and the earliest times Chester was the one terminal and London the other Chester was the port for Ireland and because it was much easier going along the coast than over the mountains Chester was also the base point of departure for the penetration of the north Wales Chester was also the great garrison whence troops could be detached for the Lancashire plain and for the western end of the wall

1:34:49Nevertheless Chester though it maintained for centuries its inevitable importance had a rival in the Roman town of Euriconium under the raccoon one of the very few Roman towns which have disappeared though it has its modern counterpart in Shrewsbury the campaigns against the Welsh were based for hundreds of years as much on this middle section of Shrewsbury as on the northern one of Chester finally when modern engineering made possible a direct trajectory through the mountains this middle Shrewsbury section fixed the hollyhead road which would otherwise have gone round by Chester the main railway system to the north west as we know has been compelled to follow the coast and but for the deflection of the ancient road round by Shrewsbury that road would have done exactly for the modern railway dust now why was there the strange bend westward and southward towards Shrewsbury in the road making ultimately for Chester it was because when the Roman Empire was

1:35:56at the height of its material power when things were working best and public works were most energetically created and maintained the Romans had not fully conquered the north therefore their chief trouble with the Welsh mountain years during the earlier time was with those of the central mountains rather than off the north they had it is true established their garrison and Chester but in making their first great truck road they had been compelled to choose a war southern terminal hence what is still called the Watling Street curls round by Pankridge a Roman name descended from the Roman place name of the itinerary and then makes westward later when the conquest was more complete the branch was thrown up from Shrewsbury northward to Chester long after a short cut was driven from Pankridge to Chester direct we had grounds for the lease that this last road was of later and inferior work because though the traces of it survive the main work has almost

1:37:03wholly disappeared it stands to reason that the original trackway before the Romans came would have run pretty directly from London to Chester without going round by the Shrewsbury district and indeed the course to which all the first part of the Watling Street points is evidence of that when the Roman military engineers began their thorough rebuilding of the roads in the most permanent fashion of the world they were at first confined to the southern plain which alone they felt secure and hence was that deflection round westward towards Shrewsbury created which has affected the whole of English history. Human ex-observe the road producing the economic effect of maintaining towns and especially ports. A road being driven from an existing port to some inland terminus and the port later becoming less and less useful either through the building of ships too deep for it or silting up or whatnot the mere existence of the road tends to make men cling

1:38:04to the port in spite of its disadvantages. There will as a role from the effect of custom and vested interest from the attraction to the points already established on the road expand in the maintenance of the port more energy than would have been required to build an alternative road to some new and better port. The effect of this is very marked in northern France. Belonia was not only the great Roman port of the channel because it stood in the narrows it was also of such importance because it was in antiquity a very broad, secure landlocked history stretching over what is now all dry land up above the town three miles towards Pont de Brieque. Centuries ago the harbour suited up and if it had been let alone it would be hardly serviceable at all. But every effort has been made to maintain that point. Belonia harbour has been steadily

1:39:05maintained artificially for centuries because the road led to it and needed it. And the alternative use of the far superior estuary of the same with the corresponding growth of harbour only came quite late in history. The road has the same canalising effect when it overcomes an obstacle such as a broad river or a mountain chain or a belt of dense woodland. For instance the fertile Lohland fringe of south Wales and the corresponding fertile land to the east of the Seventh were connected when primitive methods alone could be used by the Bridget Gloucester high up the river. The Loha reaches for too much for the earlier engineers, especially in the face of such a tide as runs on them. As a result the whole of that line of communications remained for two thousand years highly deflected and only quite recently has there been some attempt at the more natural line by the piercing of the Seventh tunnel. This effect of the road on canalising human effort

1:40:12is especially marked in the case of armies. The saying an army is tied to the road is a truth which historians should always keep in mind. There have been great cavalry raids in history, not often the permanent effect which marched on a broad front almost free of roads and depended only upon a sufficiency of forage. They have come from the grazing grounds of Asia as a rule and swept over the plains of eastern Europe. But the organised and disciplined forces which have moulded history have always of necessity followed the road. An army is not an island, does an organism connected by a stalk with its base and depended on the stalk for its feeding and equipment, it's passing back of its prisoners and it's wounded in all its life. All these depend upon the road. There are even cases in history, more numerous than one might imagine, where the first creation of the road has been due to military action alone.

1:41:17I believe that the United States shows examples of this, especially along the border between the northern and southern states east of the Mississippi. Certainly Europe shows them in striking fashion. It was a military necessity which made the great roads linking up the stations on the Rhine with the towns of Gaul and the rest of the empire. It was a military necessity which made the regular roads over the Alpine passes. You can hardly say that there was a commercial necessity for the Great Trunk Road which struck the Rhine at Keul and which there later created the first bridge across the river. The country beyond was barbarous and though a large number of Roman merchants penetrated it and a corresponding amount of trade was done, the main necessity for Keul was a military necessity. Military necessity which drove the Great Road from the heart of northern France to this isolated point and so opened up the wild wooded region in between.

1:42:204. The negative effect of the road, the effect of its breakdown, especially the bridges and in the causeways of the marshy land, is equally indisputable in human relations. We have the typical case of Sussex remaining heathen for 100 years after the conversion of its neighbours because the main road from the north, with its causeway everywhere crossing the clay and piercing the scrub of the world fell into decay and because the bridge at Alphardine broke down it is most significant that the great battle of Ockley was fought north of this break in communications. The Danes marching from London against the English army could get down as far south as this and the English army coming up from Hampshire could intercept them as far south as this. But all the Danish attack on Sussex, such as it was, and it was very slight, came from the sea.

1:43:21Another very conspicuous example of the breakdown of the road and the political effect thereof is the chaos you get in the Balkan peninsula after the decay of the Great Roman trunk roads. If the Great Church is today separate from the Latin church to the west, it is due not only to the obstacle of the Pinsk marshes in the north, but to the gradual decline of the south of the main artery between Durazzo and Constantinople. For centuries old and new Rome communicated by the great trunk road down to Brondisium and then across the narrow sea to Dryakion and Byzantium. When that traffic began to be interrupted, the contrast between the east and the west was founded and increased. A last minor effect of the road upon human society is the use of the road as a boundary. That is a use of course which Harder Yeva develops in high civilization. On the contrary, a road of its nature should run transverse to boundaries. It is built to unite

1:44:23towns, the territories of which have boundaries naturally perpendicular to the road. The road from Canterbury to London for instance, the first great main road in the silent, is transverse to the Darent Frontier and all the great roads from the French speaking to the German-speaking country on this side of the Rhine are transverse to the language boundary. It is in the very function of a road to be thus transverse to political limits. But with the decay of civilization, the remains of a great well-built road lend themselves at once to the idea of a boundary. Men need something to which they can perpetually refer which will be a permanent mark which will be indisputable. A river is thus often so chosen, sometimes but much more rarely a range of hills, especially where the crest is particularly steep than marked. But the road, when the use of documents to climbs and when record is with difficulty maintained, the road, especially if it has been built to endure, comes into fulfil this artificial

1:45:28function. Here in England we have more examples of this than in any other part of Europe. Very often you can recover a Roman road first by noting on the map the parish boundary is running on straight lines, which are the prolongation one of the other, and the survival of a Roman road used in the dark ages to define a parochial limit. The road is thus also used as a boundary not only for parishes, but for states, not only for states but for realms. The Roman road to the north west of London was part of the great boundary established between west six and the Danish territories of the north and east. Bunkard quote hundreds of cases with a little research, but best of all perhaps is that of the boundary of west instead, which dates from the heart to the dark ages. The northern limit of the manor was fixed by the great Roman military road which to this day survives and is the boundary of Hyde Park on the north. End of chapter 6

1:46:36Section 7 of the Road This is a Liebervox Recording. On Liebervox Recording, Zarin the Public Dome. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Liebervox.org. Read by LaBuna the Road by Hilar Belek, Part 2, the English Road. Chapter 7 The Road in History Through the Dym Ages, the Characteristics of the English Road. Absence of Plan, a locally instead of a national system, leading to the present crisis. 1. The General Theory of the Road Having Been Scust, we may next turn to the particular case of the English Road. My second and concluding section, the English Road has as we shall see highly marked characteristics of its own, which are of immediate concern to us at this revolutionary moment in the economic history of the state. The fortunes of the English Road followed, of course the

1:47:38story of all the other main English institutions in their outline, just as you had the pre-Roman Burbaric period, then the Roman period, then the dark ages in the general history of the state. So you had the British Trackway, the Roman Road, and the continued use during the continued decline of the latter, as material civilization fell away after the 5th century. The spring of the Middle Ages gave you the ransands of the road. The Black Death, which is the watershed of the Middle Ages, breaks the history of the road just as it breaks the history of the language. Franch dies out. All England is speaking English in the generation after the Black Death, and there's great change throughout society. That change is marked on the roads by considerable decline in travel, coupled with the use of better means of transport, a paradox to which our times are not accustomed. But you get a good deal of that in the Middle Ages. You have, for instance,

1:48:39a decline of wealth in the monasteries, and yet more detailed building in the monasteries, a bad decline in manuscript writing, both with regard to accuracy and legibility, and yet an increase in the amount written, so far as we can judge from our very imperfect evidence. After the Black Death, the middle of the 14th century, the volume of traffic upon the roads of England tends to get less, and perhaps the surface also deteriorates, though that is more doubtful. The Reformation, and especially the dissolution of the monasteries, is the next great day. The violent revolution imposed AD 1536-40 on every department of the national life affects the roads as it affects all else. In general, the Reformation, especially through the dissolution of the monasteries, had the following economic effects upon England. 1. Customary Economic Action Tended to Be Replaced

1:49:41After the change by competitive economic action, 2. Corporate action tended to be replaced by individual action. 3. The Principle Land Aouni Class The Squires became much wealthier than they had been in proportion to the rest of the community. The accommodation of these three main economic facts, at the general result of substituting more and more statutory duties, a local fairs for customary duties, and yet affected the roads, thus where the local community had in customary fashion kept up the local road as part of the Old Social Habit, the No-Lea-Auner refused. He was versed to the Out-Lei, the Crown had less control over him, and he was running the whole thing on an idea of profit and loss. Every Out-Lei was caught by him as much as possible. There was at the same time a revolution in agriculture, a falling off of population, the throwing together of small holdings, the growth of grazing,

1:50:42and the decline of tillage. You constantly get through the common action of all these influences combined. In the middle of the Reformation period, the first interference of the general government by direct statute in the making and conservation of the English road system, this famous piece of legislation, two and three Philip and Mary, Cap A, is familiar to all who deal with the law in history of the highway, a governed the Constitution and maintenance of the English road right down to the great modern change, in the same which falls under the general term Turnpike. These are the main stages in the story of the road in this island up to the present moment when apparently another stage has opened. We have for these seven chapters very different information on the first nothing but conjuncture, on the second considerable body of evidence, on the third again conjuncture, and on the fourth conjuncture, though conjuncture filled in from the indirect evidence of historically vent. For the second medieval period we have

1:51:48even less evidence than for the first, our knowledge begins to grow after the increase of real traffic, and with the early 18th century becomes for the first time full and detailed. Two, we will now follow this development, the English road has a character of its own, which clearly differentiates it from the other road systems of Western Europe. So sharp is the distinction that since modern travel recovered the use of the road through petrol traffic, the new type of road he discovers is after the language the most striking novelty affecting the foreigner on his arrival. A broad, the French model recovered from the Roman tradition, remodeled in the late 17th century, and vastly developed in the 19th, has impressed itself everywhere. The road is there built up on a framework of very broad, straight main ways, preceding everywhere upon one plan. These are connected by subsidiary net of country ways,

1:52:51less direct and less broad, but all carefully planned and graded, and these in turn by local lanes of all surfaces and guardians and gauges, dependent upon one parish rates, and betraying by their irregularity their independence of the national system. Here the scheme is contradicted at every point, a long stretch that strain is very rare. When it is found it is due to some accident of local choice. The surface differs not as between the main road and local road, but indiscriminately. A small parish way will often have a better surface than the main road it joins. The gauges have hazard. The main road between the capital and some great port will go through the most surprising changes in breadth. Here appearing a narrow high street of suburb, and there a few miles on, spreading to 50 feet upon an open heath, then again turning abruptly, round the sharp right angle corners, and between the irregular

1:53:51frontages of a village. The English roads are far more numerous. The mileage of good road surface to the hundred square miles far greater than broad. Yet not one of them is planned throughout. They all twist. The lesser ones winding perpetually and usually without any reason of their own, compelled to such anomalies by the custom of older paths, by enclosures, by encroachments. For the most part these roads, from the most important to the least, are blind. That is, bounded by obstacles which mask the approach of corners and conceal the country on either side. A very pronounced national characteristic, due mainly to the use of hedges upon the more fertile land. The grading is never continuous. The main roads in which this feature has been most throughoutly looked to yet have astonishing exceptions of one in nine, one in eight. The bridges are of varying strength, half of them bearing warnings that they are dangerous to

1:54:53heavy vehicles. When we seek the origin of this strange mixture of serviceable and unserviceable in the English road system, we discover it in the political history of the country. The English had roads yield their more pleasing landscape. They have more length to the square mile than those broad. They are half hazarding gauge and guardian, only half plant. They have such excellent surface, and that independently of their importance, such a strange assortment of bridges, such abrupt and blind corners, all because the road, like every other institution, is a function of society, and because English society proceeded on special political lines of its own, after their reformation. Like the road systems of every other country, that of England arose from the great Roman military ways. It went through exactly the same phases of decline as those of the neighboring continent. It had the same new development in the Middle Ages. It ran through open fields mainly. A man put down on an English road of Henry A or

1:55:58Lisbeth's day would have marked no great distinction between its character and those of a Flanders or Branton or Pervince Hallerode or the roads of the Rhine. But with the 17th century, the profound change which had worked for 100 years throughout all English life appeared in the road. The Monarchy fell, a national road system became impossible. The local landlords took command of society. The local road was the only basis for development. Commens were enclosed, cooperative village farming gradually disappeared. The hedges everywhere increased in number, cutting up the old open fields. An extension of communication could only come through the linking up of tortuous village ways. Then came the industrial revolution, the exploitation of better surface through the turned pike, the epoch of Telfer and then McCannum. Lastly, the huge increase of great towns in the middle and the later 19th century, the coming of the

1:56:59internal combustion engine and the present crisis. For we have come to a crisis today in the history of English road, it must be changed or supplemented under peril of such congestion as will strangle travel and interchange. That is the interest of the subject today. I proposed therefore in what follows to consider, first how this particular character in the English road developed. What were the agencies which gradually made it so different from the road of the neighboring continent, next to sketch very briefly and only in its bare outline, the history of the English road and to conclude with an examination of the reforms which we should undertake and the crisis in travel and the use of the road which has led to that duty. End up, section 7. Section 8 of the Road This is a Leibhrivox Recording. All Leibhrivox recordings are in the

1:58:02public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Leibhrivox.org. Read by Sagar Patke. The Road by Hilar Balok, Chapter 8, the Blindness of English Roads. The two causes governing the development of English roads, waterways and domestic peace, the relation of the English road to military strategy. 1. Of many of the features of the English road, we can determine the origins at once, for they are of common knowledge. The blindness of the English road is due to the enclosures and the consequent increase in hedges since the 17th century, coupled as I have said, with the dying out of champion or cooperative open field farming. It is in part due also to that which has also been alluded to and has affected the English road in all its aspects. Surface, variation of Gauss and gradient, tortueousness etc. The government

1:59:07of the squires following on the defeat of the monarchy nearly 300 years ago. I shall touch on this again when I come to the history of the English road. But apart from these obvious and well-known causes, two causes much less familiar and yet of the first importance, two causes peculiar to this island in all Europe have governed its development, waterways and domestic peace. The English road system has been so powerfully affected by these two agencies, the one physical, the other political, has to have become wholly differentiated by them from the systems of the Western continent. The natural feature then is the omnipresence of waterways throughout the island and the political feature is domestic peace, that is the absence since the modern development of roads began. During the last 250 years of strategic necessities on a large scale. Two, I will take these two things in their order. The way in which the whole

2:00:15history of England has been modified by the presence of water is topographical point of capital importance to the understanding of the national life. There is no other large island in the world which has rivers in anything like the same proportions as we have, either a number or in disposition. Most of the large islands have no navigable rivers at all. Sicily has none, Iceland has none, nor Crete, nor Cyprus, nor Sardinian, nor Corsica. Not only have we a host of navigable rivers but they are so disposed that they penetrate the very heart of the country. The trend for instance is the most arresting thing upon the man. It looks almost as though it had been specifically designed to make the inn most heart of England penetrable to commerce and travel in the east. The themes in the same way goes right into the heart of southern central

2:01:16England and even the seven, the rapidity of which has militated against its modern use had a considerable use in the past and was an artery in the middle ages even for upward traffic to the neighborhood of Wendlock Edge. The great rivers alone, however, do not account for the most of this character. It is the mass of small but navigable streams both tributary to the main systems and isolated along the coast which have so profound the effected our history. If you take one of those outline maps of England with the waterways only mug, such as our sold for use in schools and plot out the highest point upon a stream to which a fairly loaded boat can penetrate, you will be astonished to find how small a central area is left out. One might say that the whole of England outside the hill country of the penines, the lakes and the border is so penetrated by water carriage that if there were no roads at all,

2:02:19its life could under primitive conditions be carried on by waterways alone. Now this universal presence of waterways which meant every opportunity for internal traffic and also for approach from outside the island has had two effects upon the road. First it has made for diversion, that is for the modification of the English road from a direct to an indirect and sinuous line. Secondly it has interrupted. What would otherwise be main lines of travel in the necessity under which men found themselves of turning aside for the lowest bridge upon each stream. As to the first of these points, it will at once be observed that unless you have some strong compelling motive for driving a simple straight line you will, in a country of many rivers avoid such a scheme and seek for the cheapest crossing of each water. You must seek a fold or narrow or a place with specially hard banks and not merely take half a zard that

2:03:24part of the stream which lies on your direct line and seeing that such numerous waterways involve also long numerous flats along the streams. Valley floors subject to flood or formed of boggy soil, the tendency to diversion in a road system under such conditions is intensified by the marshes which abound in a country so water. If you look at the Roman road system you will see how for the considerations which I will deal with later it usually, if not always neglect special opportunities and takes the water as it comes, preferring an expensive straight line to a cheaper winding line but everything done since the Roman road system has been affected by the perpetual consideration of the easiest river crossings inland while the same influence has deflected the road round, the greater estuaries and ports. The lowest bridge over a river is a point of transformation. It stops traffic from the sea going any higher but carry on your journey

2:04:31from the sea as far as possible is obviously an economic advantage especially in early days of expensive and slow road traffic. Therefore a nation dealing with the sea and largely living through sea train costs its first bridge as far upstream as possible and that is exactly what you find upon all the rivers of England for centuries. Even to this day the tendency to build bridges lower down than the old first bridge is checked in spite of the very strong motive we have in the development of the railway system. Take a map sketch to and look around the coast and see how true this is. The lowest old bridge of the time was at Newcastle of the Trent I believe at Gainesboro of the Thames of course right up in land at London of the star at Canterbury of the Sisex house at the east of the Arun at Arundal of the eggs at Exeter.

2:05:39The deep arms of climb out sound were unbridged until the railway came. So far we river and the fall unbridged to this day the seven is not bridged at all till the Cloudsester nor was the D till Chester. Now this had the effect everywhere of checking a direct road system and deflecting the ways everywhere to suit the convenience of the ports and there again we find for reasons which will be given in a moment the Roman roads directly crossing estuaries but every subsequent road system going round them. Take two examples the Roman road to the north which runs all along the ridge of Lincolnshire strikes the Hummer where the stream is from 2000 to 3000 yards wide crosses by a ferry and continues on the far side. The Roman road system of Kent did the same thing over the Wonsum when that stream was as rice homes had pruned abroad estuary 3000 yards

2:06:42across with Richborough as an island on in its midst. The Roman road from Dover and the one from Cantorbury met at a point opposite Richborough when safari took people across to Richborough. Again the Roman road at the lean mines of the Mendips end at the wide mouth of the seven and is carrying on again on the far Welsh side but every road system since has gone right round the Cloudsester and the inconvenient effects of this has road travel develops and water carriage declines are very noticeable today. In all that southern coast of Devon between Lyme Regis and the X if you want to get round to the Maritime southwestern bulge of the county you must make an elbow through Exeter. Similarly the Sussex coast now so crowded has only been linked up quite recently by bridges the one at Shoreham was built within living memory

2:07:47the swing bridge at Little Hampton is an affair of the last few years as also the swing bridge at New Haven of this generation. For 1500 years no one could proceed along the coast continuously from seigh ports mount by Little Hampton Shoreham seaford later New Haven hastings without turning inland to cross at Arundal at Bramber at Lewis at Roberts Bridge. One of the subsidiary effects of this interruption was the comparative ease with which the coast could be attacked from the sea for the difficulty of rapid concentration upon any one point in the lack of lateral communication handicapped the defending force by land. All through medieval history the Sussex coast was raided from the sea so much for the effect of waterways the main physical cause of diversion in the English road. Three the political cause of diversion has been as I say

2:08:52the negative effect of an absence of grand strategy in modern times. There has been no grand strategy in this country since the Romans because there has been no fighting of a highly organized within the island during the whole of its post-Roman history. There was a great deal of barbaric fighting in the dark ages and a great deal of feudal fighting in the middle ages. Even in the beginning of modern organized warfin you had on a very small scale it is true the civil wars. But since then that is during the whole of the period in which modern road systems have developed 1660 onwards. There has been no necessity for strategic considerations to affect the English road system at all and therefore no political force strong enough to compel direct roads was present in opposition to the strong economic motive for diversion. The result is an anomaly that might well become serious if we had to depend upon our road system

2:09:54under the threat of invasion. Look for instance at the two great handicaps the Humber and the Thames. A force standing up to meet a threatened landing which might be directed against Kent or against East Anglia would be divided into two sections deprived of road communication saved round through London. During the war a temporary bridge was thrown across the Thames in the neighborhood of Tilbury if I remember a right but of course with a gate for traffic. In normal times you could not have such a thing. The water traffic is too great and too confused but what you could have would be a tunnel and though the necessity for it may never rise it is also true that should it arise we shall bitterly regret not having driven that tunnel. The same remark applies with even greater force to the Humber and attempted landing on the northeast coast of England threatening alternatively the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire coasts

2:10:55would find the defending force cut into and where the strategic of this position to become acute we should regret the lack of a road tunnel under the Humber just as we should regret the lack of a road tunnel under the Thames. The third principle case that of the Seven is partially met by a railway tunnel the Seven Tunnel far below Gloucester a road tunnel would hardly suggest itself here there is not as efficient potential for it on either side of the stream but here again it might well happen that under the particular circumstances of war we should regret the absence of it. The negative factor the absence of a strategic driving motor has also left the windings of the internal road system at the mercy of the easiest crossings of the rivers and we see how different the things would have been under a strategic scheme. Consider the Roman contrast the Roman roads of Britain were principally military the whole scheme of Roman government was military and the

2:12:01life of all that civilization was founded on the army with the marching of men rapidly and increasing place to place as the main motive of the builders the roads follow those great straight lines which while duly seeking a formula of minimum effort never sacrifice to it the rectus of plan. As we have seen even at the great estuaries Roman engineers preferred a supplementary ferry to continue the road rather than deflecting it round by the first bridge. In this connection however that of estuaries there is one case which is puzzling the case of the Thames an explanation can I think be found though at first it looks anomalous the Romans dealt with the estuary of the seven and of the humble by ferries they dealt by long bridges with lesser obstacles in the same fashion they carried the north road over the trend by a direct line without

2:13:03deflection for a special crossing they carried it across the time at deep water approached steeply they carried it across the Thames at stains which a soul regard to the direction of their road and without considering special opportunities of crossing they did the same at Dorchester and instances could be multiplied all over the kingdom but apparently they did not attempt to attack the Thames estuary. When one considers the nature of the early fighting during the first conquest of the island by the Romans this is astonishing all the campaigns began in Kent and the more series of them were carried on into east anglia the great rising unto Nero was an east anglia and rising and the Roman armies beaten there had to be rapidly reinforced from Kent. For 400 years troops poured in under any special emergency from Dover came up through Kent

2:14:06and any immediate necessity of reaching a point east of London necessitated by a detour by London Bridge though time might be vital the deflection was suffered. Why did the Romans not solve the difficulty and establish at least a ferry across the lower Thames of course they may have done so you can never argue from the absence of traces today that a Roman road did not exist for it is astonishing how thoroughly time eliminate such things. There are whole great towns like Aquilia and Hippo of which not even the foundations remain today even in England when Roman survival is most marked two towns, Silchester and Euriconium have gone save for a few ruins and there are great stretches of Roman road in every country of of Western Europe which have mysteriously and wholly disappeared without leaving a trace of the tremendous work undertaken to build them.

2:15:08For instance the miles after Epsom race course still it does look as though no direct Roman line connected Cantorbury for instance with Colchester and I say again how are we to account for it. I think the explanation lies in the disposition of the March lands on the lower Thames if you take the map of the Thames below the Isle of Dogs and mark upon it all that must have been primeville march including much that is still march you will see that wherever hard land is found upon one bank it is faced by extensions swamp upon the other. There was no good position for a permanent crossing even by ferry and in the whole military history of England we only know the doubtful case in which a junction was affected from south to north which is in the pursuit of the defeated British army by the Romans in AD 43 under all us ploughed here. If as is probable though not

2:16:11that battle took place at Rochester then the pursuit was carried on by a direct crossing of the lower Thames but with that exception I can call to my no military action in the whole of our history where the lower Thames did not prove a permanent obstacle. It is an amusing speculation to think what would have happened to the road system of England if strategic necessity had appeared during the modern period. The thing is purely hypothetical but I might make a few suggestions. In the first place we should certainly have had a road linking up the southern coast. Next we should certainly have had some form of continuous traffic over the lower 7 and the lower Thames and the Humber. Next without doubt there would have been pierced abroad continuous and fairly direct road from the plain of Yorkshire to the plain of Lancashire across the Pennines. Next we should have had of course a broadening of all the ways leading to the main ports.

2:17:14That would have been essential and particularly to the ports from the Straits of Doerl. But as I have said the whole thing is a dream because not that strategic motive but now a purely economic motive is compelling us to revise our system. 4. Apart from these two main causes of waterways and of the absence of strategic necessity causing the diversion of the English road and apart from all other causes of local government which have led to such extraordinary diversity, lack of regular gradient, lack of regular gauze etc as distinguished from the road system under the monarchy and centralized governments of the continent and especially of France. We have certain other elements which have stamped the English road with its particular character. They may be briefly recapitulated without developing any one of them. We shall meet most of them again in the historical sketch of

2:18:17the English road. There is the dampness of the climate. There is extraordinary diversity of soil within a comparatively small area so that road making material continually differs within a few miles for England is of all European countries that in which there is crowded upon a small space the greatest sharpest and most frequently diversity of soil and landscape. There is the increasing density of population in modern times which has had a profound effect upon our road system. There is a political factor of parliament. For since the defeat of the monarchy in the 17th century no direct order could be immediately obeyed until their quite recently grew up the new powers of administration. Between 1660 and the premiership of the late Lord Salis Bury we may say that any important public right including the making of a new way and expropriation of land for it fell

2:19:21under no immediate authority but had to be referred to the lengthy and expensive process of a committee called parliamentary through which the oligarchy of Great Britain worked. All these things have affected the development of the English road but most of all let it always be remembered these two main causes which have been in my opinion far too little recognised the waterways peculiar to this island and the absence of modern strategic necessity also peculiar to this island. End of section 8 section 9 of the road this is a Libravox recording all Libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org the road by Hillair Bellock

2:20:22chapter 9 five stages the potential in political geography examples the primitive trackways the Roman road system the earlier medieval period the later medieval period the turnpike era let us next turn to a very rough sketch of the developments of the history of the English road the stages through which its development has passed measured not from cause to effect but in time before turning to this I would first define the use of a certain word already used which will recur and may be unfamiliar to some of my readers it is a word taken as a metaphor from physical science and one of the utmost value in political geography it is the word potential we talk of the

2:21:31potential between two commercial centers or between a capital and a port or between a mineral producing region and an agricultural region or between a region when barbarians desire to invade fertile civilized land and the center of the fertile civilized land which desires to defend itself etc etc and our use of this word potential is drawn from the doctrine of physical science that energy in open shape energy at work is given its opportunity by the tendency of two points to establish a communication the tendency of two separate situations to establish unity the tendency of a hitherto potential that is only possible not yet actual force to realize itself

2:22:37for instance you will have a highly charged electrical area tending to discharge itself by the line of best conduction you will have a head of water creating a potential a reservoir a hundred feet above the valley has to be connected with the floor of the valley by a tube to turn the potential energy into actual energy and to drive a turbine now in the development of the road system we metaphorically use this word potential in just the same fashion for instance there was originally no bridge across a river because the people in the town on one side of it had no particular reason to cross to the barren land upon the other the town gradually developed into a holiday resort the only place for

2:23:41a good golf links was on the far side of the river and visitors who lived in the town during their holidays wanted to go during part of the day to the golf links a potential was established thus there has always been a most powerful potential between london and dover between the great commercial center of the island and the port nearest to the continent that is a potential which has worked throughout the whole of english history we can watch other potentials at work in different periods a rising and dying out again for instance during the Norman and early angiven period there was a very strong potential between the middle north coast of france and the coast of sessics with a corresponding development

2:24:43of traffic the principal people in england were also great landowners and officials on the coast immediately opposite that potential died down until the revival of modern steam traffic again there is a potential today between any coal field and any center of consumption of wealth distant from that coal field so there is between any coal field and any great port again you will have a strategic potential a particular point of no economic value may be of the utmost strategic value the holding of it may make all the difference to the defenders of the frontiers and in that case a potential exist which is the driving motive for a road

2:25:46between the capital and the point in question with this note in mind we can proceed to some sketch of the history of the english road the development of the english road up to the present turning point in its history following as we have seen the political story of the island falls into five divisions hey first came the primitive trackways the chief of which must have been artificially strengthened and some of which may have been in sections at least true roads up to the Roman invasions b. Next came the Roman road system which was presumably developed in the second century of our era this is the framework of all that followed all our roads from that date 1800 years ago to modern times

2:26:55have sprung from and have grown in connection with this original set plan or framework that is true no doubt of all Western countries but it is especially true of England the english road system is the product in every age of the great Roman scheme the relics of which are more marked in England than they are anywhere else in the world this point is the master point of the whole story it is a point upon which popular history has completely lost its way popular history represents the Roman occupation of this island as an accident a sort of interlude between the native British period and a later and separate English period which arose upon the invasion of the country by German

2:28:00tribes from beyond the North Sea that is not the history of England at all the history of England is the history of a Roman province England began by being like everything else in the north and west barbaric it was civilized from the Mediterranean and made a part of the Roman Empire that is of one common civilization one great state stretching from the grand pians to the Euphrates and from the Sahara to the north sea this civilizing imprint of the Roman Empire Britain has never lost our civilization fell into decay as did that of the whole of the rest of Europe the decay was not due to the pirate raids from north germany and holland anymore than it was due to the raids of the

2:29:04Scottish Highlanders which were just as frequent and violent or the raids of Irish pirates from the west which were at one moment so severe as to put up a separate realm on the west coast of this island the history of England is continuous and its foundation from which we get all our institutions more than half our language all our ideas and religion and the rest of it is in the 400 years of high civilization between the landing of the Roman armies and the breakdown of the imperial system in the west the Roman road is the true and only road of the road system of Britain all our local roads can be found developing slowly from the Roman roads of the district which

2:30:06had preceded them and it is nearly always possible to trace the causes which led to each particular local system in each you will find the Roman road is the backbone of the affair and the later local roads existing only as developments of and changes from this basic Roman plan see the third division is one for which we have little direct but plenty of indirect evidence and the remains of which are with us upon every side it is the growth in the early middle ages presumably from about the Angevin period of the medieval road system which was the deflection and extension of the old Roman road system at the end of the empire during the dark ages that

2:31:12is from the fifth to the eleventh century though the Roman road system had remained the only available one it had decayed and numerous modifications of it had already appeared but with the early middle ages those modifications seem to have grown prodigiously and the indirect network of local roads would then seem to have arisen. D the fourth chapter is even more obscure it is a partial decline only affecting certain districts and affecting some much more than others a decline which corresponds more or less to the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century it went with the flooding of the Finlands with the breakdown of central authority the increase of local

2:32:14interest and so on he the fifth chapter is the great revolution in road planning and construction which may be called the turnpike era beginning early in the eighteenth century and flourishing at its clothes the turnpike system continued to develop with continual changes through three or four generations it survived the competition of the railroads it was vastly improved by the new local legislation of from forty to twenty years ago it left us with the road system we now enjoy which must under the pressure of quite recent changes be modified if our communications are to be saved or at any rate to keep pace with the present conditions of travel end of section nine

2:33:19recording by bow wood section ten of the road this is a liberalvox recording all liberalvox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librovox.org the road by heler bellock chapter ten the trackways the three divisions of the British pre-Roman road system the system of which salt replaying was the hub the system connected with London cross country communications the three factors which have determined travel in Britain section one the origin of the track ways is of course unknown and can only be guessed at by inference but their character and especially the geographical causes which determined their trace we can establish on the largest lines with some accuracy we must not lose ourselves in that kind of speculation which has been so dear to the academies and which is usually very futile as to the order in which the development took place we

2:34:24have no evidence whatever for instance as to the date of the founding of London or of its size before the Roman occupation nor have we similar evidence with regard to any of the centres of England for the uniting of which roads would arise but we have relics of the trackways before us we have the geographical conditions almost unchanged and we have the indication of Roman roads clearly based upon particular existing trackways and therefore suggesting what the scheme was before the Roman engineers set to work roughly speaking the British pre-Roman road system fell into three divisions there was first of all a division possibly the earliest to develop of all which had for its hub solstery plain and from that centre a wall rather than a wheel of diverging approaches to the coast there was secondly the system turning upon the crossing of the Thames at London as a hub it is this second system which was so largely developed in the historical period and which still governs our main roads and railways today thirdly there was the series of cross communications

2:35:30of which the most important by far was the track leaving the X and making for the hunger the British trackways formed along these three systems discovered and used the best passages of the rivers some of which the Romans changed to which they added a certain number but which in the main they retained they also indicate though less certainly the town centres which have remained through the centuries the same and they were also determined by the main centres of agricultural population and to a much less extent by the presence of mines the system of which solstery plain appears to have been the hub we presume to be the earliest because it was dependent almost entirely upon surface good going over dry land it is to be presumed that the earliest system would be that prevalent when men were less able to give artificial aid to the road to harden it to construct causeways or approaches when they were less able to drain marshes when they had not yet cleared forests now of all the soils which make up the surface of Britain choke is the best

2:36:34surface for this purpose it has two characters which give it this character in the first place it is self drained and always possible even in our wetter seasons and in the second place it does not carry tangled undergrowth and even its woods which are not as rule continuous are commonly of the easiest of all woods to pass through in travel from the absence of scrub beneath the branches it so happens that the chalk is in this country distributed in great continuous lines and compact areas which lend themselves admirably to the development of an early attract system you can follow chalk with little interruption from the open central space solstery plain south eastward to the channel to the Dorset coast dorset from the country of Adurotrigis a British tribe whose name survives in that of the modern county and the first in order of the tracks led there the chalk could equally be followed to the neighborhood of southampton water a third line led along the

2:37:34confused hampture chalk to the definite ridge of the Sussex Downs and so to the harbors of Sussex coast and of Kent the fourth with some interruption led along the north dans to canterbury when tracks would radiate the ports of Kent a fifth followed the barcature dans and the chilterns and so led on to the wash and earlier parts of the Norfolk coast which have now apparently disappeared in erosion the sixth line led with more difficulty and has been more obliterated by later Roman work directly westward to the minds of the men dips and to the borders of the savournestuary it could not take advantage of the chalk beyond Wiltshire but it had fairly dry going along the ridge of the men dips the seventh it must be presumed though the traces are largely lost used the height of the cotswolds but here the soil being galitic and not chalk was much less favorable and the extension northward ceased earlier this system then we regard as the earliest of all section two the second system as I have said seems to have been connected with London but

2:38:40here the later track of a Roman engineers and the continuous development of nearly 20 centuries has left us little to go on safe conjecture there are points in that conjecture however which are fairly certain but there seems to have been from the earliest time communication between north and south on the lowest crossing of the Thames now the lowest permanent crossing of the Thames even before a bridge was in the neighborhood of London the crossing of a river is determined by the hardness of the land upon either bank as we have seen more than by any other factor the lower Thames everywhere had extensive marshes either upon one side or the other and usually upon both at graze tillbree erath etc the hard ground approached right up to one bank but was always countered by extensive marshes on the other or by marsh behind gravel forming a sort of island of hard land which could not be used for continuous travel the first good crossing place was at lambath and it is generally assumed that the earliest of all the tracks took

2:39:43the stream here for the alignment of the main approach from Kent through Canterbury, Rochester and Schuters Hill does not point at the centre of London but at lambath this it is presumed was the track followed by what is now Park Lane and so ultimately north westward by the edge where road and its continuations to chester with a branch thrown off through a pass between the marshes of a mercy in the penine range in the district of Manchester and so on through Lancashire but at some very early stage there was established a crossing below lambath in the neighborhood of London bridge even before that bridge came into existence it is true that there is here a belt of marsh on the right bank but the considerable gravelly hill on the left or north bank there would give an opportunity not to be lost it had three great advantages it was a large area of dry land for settlement it had defenses all around it marshy land to the north the fleet to the west the lead to the east it had a considerable area for the drawing up of boats and a steep shore for

2:40:48warfudge under these conditions whenever men could first construct a causeway it would have been worthwhile to have been at that labour across the southern marshes in order to establish a permanent crossing by ferry and later by a bridge upon the site of London bridge at any rate from that centre London bridge at some very early period you get trackways radiating there is the main one in the first place through Canterbury to Dover and the Canterge ports next there is the eastern one to call chester along which the chief Roman invasion marched to the capture of that town which was the capital of the enemy section three next we may presume for evidence is lost especially under the later Roman work there was a track towards the centre of Norfolk next there was some great road going northward east of the penines following the dry land which skirts the fens and reaching the great fertile plain of york and so on northward through Durham up to the crossings of the tine where

2:41:50this original main track went we cannot say we know the trace of a Roman road which followed it we may presume that the divigations and modifications of this road the dark ages and the middle ages which ultimately built up our main road to the north reverted in some degree to the original track but the whole thing is guest work one thing seems fairly certain this eastern road to the north the twin to the great north western road by chester to langcher must a split about halfway to one branch making directly to the plain of york itself the other obviously running along the inevitable ridge which points right north through linkinger to the humber there is here no bridge possible it is not too broad for a ferry but though the Roman roads who preceding the earlier track went on northward it is a fair guess that the original trackway stopped at the river of crossroads we have fragments of course in the penines but we know nothing of their history it is clear that the main cross communications between the people area of yorkshire plain and that of the langcher

2:42:53plain must have gone over by shiply the obvious gap in the chain but more we cannot tell that is the natural way and there was so to speak no avoiding it what was mainly used further south we cannot tell it was a tangled land there is no clear and certain trace of cross communications which must have existed across the midland south of trend we do not know what great patches of wood may here have determined the windings of an original road there are no serious obstacles it is highland and dry with no marshes or large water courses but there was less reason for continual traffic here from east to west then there was for traffic from north to south therefore there was less potential than was created by the traffic on cross communications further south the original system of trackways radiating from solsbury plain was simple they led in radiating lines straight and curved directly to the lower tems to the ports of a channel to the

2:43:54southern estuaries to the northeast that is to the wash and to the north direct by the cotswolds but true cross communication was lacking to this set and was provided by the great road from the X to the humber which still survives in the form of the boss way it runs throughout the whole of our history from very long before the first records nearly to the present day and is today traceable throughout and used in many places as a hard road this main track was one of the dominant factors in the character of English travel it is decayed under modern conditions because its potential has there is no driving power today urging travel from south west to northeast and it is only in partial experiments and the linking up of separate lines that even our railway system serves that end but before modern times the boss way played a very great part for some reason there was a perpetual necessity for passing from the southwest devan and dorset to the northeast coast two

2:44:55permanent potentials that between north and south and that between east and west helped to explain the boss way England has always tended to fall into two cross divisions a northern and a southern one separated at first by climate the northern more rude the southern more gentle then by agricultural conditions the northern far less people the southern more people and more wealthy and to an eastern and western division separated by type of landscape to some extent by climate always to some extent by soil difference in race emphasized whenever an invasion came from the Welsh lands on the one side or from the north sea on the other the boss way broke both those cross divisions and was a sort of reinforcement as they say in modern concrete taking the strain of cross tensions across the island section four in this short sketch of what were in some cases certainly and others only presumably the original british main tracks we have to note three factors which have

2:45:57always determined travel in Britain the centers of internal economic production the ports and the channel crossings before the modern industrial system the economic centers of production were the wheatlands and these were the open land of which Winchester was the center the dorsetor center summer set certain separate centers in the midlands separated by great woods which have disappeared and their exact site not certain the cheshire plain the Lancashire plain the great Yorkshire plain and last and most important of all East Anglia the central eastern plain Essex in particular was the granary of the early time in England tracks connected all these places they also connected the centers of population with the ports every one of the tracks makes ultimately from port to port you have a connection through London earlier perhaps as we have seen through Lambeth between the port of Kent and the north western ports of which cheshire is the great original example and Liverpool the modern between the north eastern ports of the

2:47:02Humber and the Tine and the south western ports at south Hampton water and pool which was of great early importance and once we shall find a Roman road starting further west the mouth of the X was a more important approach to Britain in the past than it is now you have also the estuary of the Severn it'll provided with natural harbours but forming in its upper reach as a harbor of its own with the peculiar advantage of a lower Aevan with a secure pool at Bristol approached by the curious and exceptional gorge at Clifton lastly you have the great port formed by the crossing place at London made as we have seen by the tendency of early travel right up to the appearance of railways to penetrate a country as far as possible by its waterways and to carry cargo as well in land because water carriage was so much cheaper than land transport the third factor that of river crossing also has its effect though a letter one upon the trace of the old British ways if for instance you carry along any one of the tracks which follow the chalk you will see how

2:48:05carefully the water crossings were picked it is the characteristic of chalk that the river's lie transfers to it cutting gorge through the hills and each of these crossing places was chosen where hard land approached from either side the chalk and the sand associated with it provides at certain points in the valleys twin spurs approaching the water on either side hence you have the track along the north downs crossing the way it's St Catherine's Chapel and alternatively by Guildford and again the mall that picks them near Doorking and the medway it's notland with an alternative at Rochester the southern track along the Hampshire and Sussex Downs takes the Aron at a similar advantage and opportunity at Houghton and alternatively at Aron Dell it takes the Ader at Bramber and the Uzz at Lewis this fake sketch of the old trackways is all that we can lay down so far as their main lines are concerned and it is very imperfect but we must bear it in mind in order to understand the Roman system which was largely based upon those trackways and which

2:49:08superseded them there was one kind of soil and one only which could compete with the chalk as good going for primitive travel and that was sand had we sanded in continuous lines in Britain it would have given a dry passage for the trackways and here and there advantage is taken of it by such trackways but sand in point of fact is not to be found in these continuous lines it comes in patches and hence we cannot talk of any one of the great trackways as dependent upon a sandy soil the chief exception that I can call to mind in this respect is the run of the old pilgrims way a prehistoric track from the neighborhood of Farnham to the crossing of a mall near Doorking though chalk lay on the main direction it seems to have preferred the southern dry sand to the chalk immediately north of it and it keeps to the sand until the cessation of that formation a short distance west of a mall there is here a curious piece of political geology which has been I think of great effect upon the history of England had the ridges of sand through the

2:50:12wheeled of Sussex been continuous the wheeled would have been developed early its iron industry would have furnished a basis for export and it would have become one of a centers of population there are ridges of sand which you can trace all the way through the wheeled from close by the Hampshire chalk in the neighborhood of Midhurst right away to the valley of a rather but they are not continuous and the interruptions are formed of deep clay impossible to pass in winter the result of that lack of continuity has been that no such track ever developed through the wheeled of Sussex Sussex therefore owing to the stiff clay of its wheeled remained cut off from the rest of England and that throughout all the dark ages it falls out of a national history indeed the linking up of Sussex with the north was only affected by the Romans at the cost of great labour through the artificial causeway of the stain street between Chichester and Lunton and after the breakdown of western civilization in the fifth century there was no regular approach to the southern coast

2:51:14from the Thames Valley in a direct line the traffic either went westward down towards Southampton Hampshire Dorset and Devon or eastward to the straits of Dover the Norman conquest and the rule of Yarngeva restored Sussex to something of its rightful place in English communications because the coast of that county lay immediately opposite the centre of the foreign region which then governed England but the interlude was not lengthy in the later middle ages and onto quite modern times to the middle of the 18th century the interruption due to the clay made itself felt again and only the railway and great increase of population have been able between them to restore direct and frequent communication between the Thames Valley and this part of the southern coast end of section 10 section 11 of the road this is a Libravox recording all Libravox recordings are in the public domain

2:52:17for more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org the road by Helaire Bellock chapter 11 the making of the Roman road the great initiative the mark of the Roman military engineer the theory and practice of the straight line modifications of the straight line how it was carried out the method of odds and events one the making of the great Roman roads was the one great initiative in the story of English communications it originated all that followed and there was no new real development no essentially new departure between the planning of that military scheme and the coming of the railway it can only be compared to what the future may have to show if we find ourselves able to reform our roads as they should be reformed for the new conditions of modern travel and even this

2:53:17change would not be anything like as great as the change made by the throwing of those great highways to stand forever across a country which had hitherto been half barbarous the Roman road had a structure and character of its own which it has retained the present day so that even where it was only the straightening and the strengthening of an old trackway upon which it was founded it would follow the mark of the Roman engineers throughout all the remained of its course it was essentially a piece of building and in this the Roman road differed from every other form of communication before the modern railways it had to be of this kind on account of two things which the Roman military engineers particularly desired to serve both of them connected with the military character of the west first they wanted a platform raised as a rule above the surrounding country so that troops passing along it should be the less liable to attack so that a view could be had from it over the immediate surroundings which were cleared and so that any sudden stroke against

2:54:19a marching column could be checked the raising of the way had other object of course it kept the surface dry for instance but the main object was that of security upon the march and the same object was one of the reasons for making the roads as a rule in straight lengths or limbs sometimes two three or even four days march in extent a road was planned without windings so as to be safer from ambush and surprise and where it had coupled to it's straightness its elevation above the surrounding country the chance of ambush or surprise was almost eliminated but the habit the Roman military engineers had of driving their roads in these great straight limbs which are still so clearly marked serve many other purposes besides this military one of which I speak it has been condemned as a waste of effort for it is clear that a winding road avoiding steep gradients and turning difficulties of marsh or wood requires less effort to construct mile for mile than an

2:55:19artificially straight one and that even when you have allowed for the extra length of a winding road the formula of least effort will never give you a long straight but your straight road has the great advantage of rapid planning the Roman engineers especially in the north that is in Belgium gall and in Britain were working under campaign conditions or in countries but recently occupied they were under an imperative necessity of providing good communications as quickly as possible and for that object the straight road was obviously the best once you had determined the two points which you had to join you established a track between them and carried it over all but the worst obstacles taking all but the worst gradients if you met marsh you built a causeway whenever you came to a river crossing you threw your bridge when you came to a sharp narrow ridge you made a cutting all that meant labor but as in any case you were intending to make a great built constructed

2:56:22raised structure along the whole trajectory the extra labor involved in a straight trace was not proportionally as heavy as it would be for one of our ephemeral modern roads in other words the Roman engineers set out upon a plan necessarily expensive they set out to make a great public monument as it were and the extra expensive its straightness did not weigh in the bill two a modification of this tendency to straight lines is found proceeding from three causes first wherein when an established track already existed and the Roman work was only required to harden and strengthen it even there the Roman engineers would straighten portions which were too winding to fit in their scheme but apparently where the track was fully established they tolerated the good many curves especially if their work came sometime after the conquest when the land was settled the second modification of the plan is to be found in hilly countries in the mountains or

2:57:23very hilly regions the Roman engineers of necessity gave up the straight line and as these regions were also the districts where on the heights large garrisons were least necessary they were the better able to abandon their general military plan if you look at a detailed map of the Roman road system in Gullard-Britain you will see how the moment it comes to a broken district the straight lines are replaced by a waving trace such as you would have in a modern English road for instance beyond the faus in Dorsetcher in Devon the Roman coast road is as winding as any modern road can be the same is true of the crossing of the apenines and of course of the crossings of the alps and the apenines it seems to be equally true of the Ardenne gorges but the trace here is often so much obliterated that it is difficult to say exactly how the Romans dealt with that mixed problem of wood and ravine the third modification was that of gradient the Roman road would take a very steep gradient indeed but there was a limit and when the slope was too steep the road diverged or zigzagged

2:58:29or took a comb in a great curve or swept around the base of a hill we have examples of all these points upon the map of England the best of which I think are the great sweep of the stain street on Bigner Hill in Sussex and the great loop round down barn north of andover on the road from Winchester to Gloucester the greatest ingenuity was shown by the planners of the Roman roads in the choice of trace granted that you were to make a trajectory of many days march in large straight limbs each limb had to be thought out very carefully straight though it was to yield something like a minimum of effort you had to make your turning points or hinges in the system at places where the straight lines joining them would cross water or hilly country to the best advantage and it is astonishing with what skill these terminal points of the straight limbs were chosen for instance that one road of them all which has been most certainly of purely military use and designed to join chitchester with London all of which I have worked out some years ago and on which I have

2:59:31written a monograph has its first bend from chitchester just after the end of the first day's march at the crossing of the Aeron on Berg Hill the angle of the bend is one of 17 degrees the direction is north by 22 degrees east now this direction of the two limbs which join at Berg Hill exactly secures two things essential to the minimum of effort one plain street from chitchester to leaf hill would have involved heavy efforts in gradients and water this plan of two limbs meeting at the Aeron crossing gives every advantage one it makes the road cross the intervening range of the downs just where by a slight curve a reasonable gradient can be used two it makes it cross water and march at the narrowest point between hardham and pulbura and at the same time just avoids the double water crossing of the Aeron and the rather it is true that there is here something of a coincidence but it was planned and survey which discovered that coincidence three how were these

3:00:37great straight limbs plotted out that is a question which has been fully debated but not yet settled where two ends of a trajectory were in sight one from the other the matter was simple enough but what was the method used when the straight line exceeded the horizon when it was carried on for instance for more than 30 miles as is the case over and over again in the great northeastern road from Paris to Cologne and in the road from Amiens to Bologna what was the method when even for lesser distances one end of the trajectory could not be seen from the other on account of intervening hills or where in flatland forests were sufficient to impede the view one theory has been that of smoke signals a method which has been found of use I believe in barbarous countries on our own day we must I think certainly reject it in such a climate as ours such signals could only hear be used upon a few days in the year specially picked and the Roman engineers would not have depended upon the caprice of the weather there has also been suggested I adopted that suggestion

3:01:41myself in the monograph of which I've just spoken that use of high movable platforms but I now think that this also should be rejected on account of its clumsiness and of the fact that in an unclear country it would often be quite impractical the most probable method was suggested to me by a correspondence some years ago based upon its own experience in the planning of roads in new countries it is the method of odds and evens and requires some description with the aid of a simple plan suppose that you have to construct a straight line from a to b a and b not being visible one from the other and the distance between them being considerable if you have plenty of men with which to work and the Roman military commanders did not lack these you will proceed as follows you send out your men from either end in two chains as it were each individual easily inside of his next neighbor but not nearer to him than is necessary for the observation of signals these chains of men are either directed from the two ends of the line or if you can work only

3:02:43from one end you send them out from that end instructing the head of the chain when he comes inside of the other end to work towards it and establish himself there at the end of the process whether you have been working with two lines approaching each other from either end and joining hands in the middle or from the one end only you will end up with a line which will certainly not be straight on the contrary very regular but which will at least join your two goals probably if you have been working from both ends a and b you would have something like sketch six while if you be working from one end only a the head of your column would probably be widely out at the conclusion of your experiment your column would have to double back sharply onto its goal when at last it was caught sight of and you would have some such trace as on sketch five at any rate having established this rough winding line you next make the men number themselves as a line does when it is dressing by odds and evens or by ones and twos so that the first third fifth seventh man etc counting from one end make one

3:03:51or all the ones make one lot if you are going by ones and twos and the second fourth sixth eighth man and so on make another lot you did one of these sets say the odds to face towards one goal say b and the other set to face towards the other goal a lastly you bid them space themselves out so that an individual of one set can at least clearly see his fellow in the same set along the direction to which he faces and the man at the other set in between for instance number 39 looking south towards b must be able to see number 37 who is facing the same way as he is and must at the same time be able to see number 38 who is facing towards him similarly number 38 must be able to see number 40 clearly and number 39 in between it is clear that in thick blind country as for instance in woods or in tumbled land your men will have to stand fairly close together but in the open country

3:04:52they can be at considerable distances up to half a mile or more so long as every unit can see the next unit of the same set clearly and have his signals received by the unit of the other set in between the conditions are satisfied your line being thus instructed and as anyone may discover and practice it is not a very long business once the first rough chain has been established the numbers of each set signal to the intervening numbers of the other set alternatively to move to right or left until a straight line is locally established for instance in sketch seven you begin with the evans looking northward number 38 looking north towards number 40 sees that number 39 who faces him looking south is somewhat too much to the east and does not stand properly between him and number 40 he signals to number 39 to move westward as along the dots until number 39 is at a new position shown by the dotted circle exactly between number 38 and number 40 next number 36

3:05:56signals to number 37 who is too much to the west until number 37 is exactly between himself and number 38 when this has been done all along the line by the evans the order is given to the odds to repeat the process from their new positions number 39 looking southward from his new position at the dotted circle sees that number 38 is too far to the east to be in perfect alignment with number 39's next odd neighbor number 37 at whom he is looking southward number 39 signals therefore to number 38 who is looking northward to move westward and number 38 does so until the signal stops him when he is just in line between the new positions of number 39 and number 37 it will be evident that after this first stage of the process the original irregular line between a and b will have been much straightened you have but to repeat the maneuver half a dozen or a dozen times to get the whole body of men into a strictly straight line between the two extremities

3:06:56many miles apart and that although those in the middle cannot see either extreme and neither extremity can see the other in theory this method can be used for an indefinite extent of country in practice it seems to been used if it were indeed that upon which the roman engineers relied her space is sometimes as great as a three days march and quite often as great as one days march or more for the scheme of roman roads following in the main these great straight limbs covered the whole country and was for the most part completed we may presume by the end of the second century it must not of course be imagined that these great military ways were the only means of communication in roman times many historians have fallen into that grotesque error with the result that history becomes meaningless to their readers these great ways were only the main arteries which were linked up in all the intervening spaces by a mass of local ways not specifically

3:07:59constructed or engineered most of them presumably aboriginal and also maintain presumably by a local authority end of section 11 read by Justin Hilton soul January 2023 section 12 of the road this is a liberal box recording all liberal box recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit liberalbox.org the road by Hilar Bellock chapter 12 the dark ages the decline of the roman road the period at its occurrence gaps the roman road which fell into disuse the relationship of the modern to the roman system

3:09:07wattling street stain street the shortcut between pancridge and chester peter's way the coming of the new civilization in the 12th century one the next phase in the development of the english road is the very gradual breakdown of the great roman ways the dark ages that is the 500 or 600 years between the 5th and the 10th or 11th centuries formed the period during which this process took place the roman road in england suffered the fate of all our ancient civilization it very slowly declined and coarsened but remained the one necessary means of communication we have no dates and no contemporary record after the 4th century

3:10:07for Britain but we have the analogy of northern France in which we know that the upkeep and repair of the great roman roads continued until well into the 7th century and we have the evidence of the roman roads as they now stand before us with the result of their very gradual and only partial breakdown in a use of centuries we have also the fact that much the most of the great battles took place on or near the roman roads until the 12th century that most of the new great monastic and other houses were built near them or on them and that the ports most commonly used in the dark ages were nearly always ports with a roman road serving them we can thereby roughly judge although we have no direct evidence what happened to the system in the first place the roman road was so solidly built that centuries of neglect did not

3:11:10entirely destroy its usefulness sections of each road disappeared some from causes which are easily explicable some under the most obscure conditions the causes of which it seems impossible to discover every great roman road in Europe and even those in Britain which are better preserved than those in the most part of the continent shows these gaps sometimes a whole great section of road will almost entirely disappear more often it is a stretch of a few miles thus the whole of the shortcut through Pincridge to Chester which certainly existed and some elements of which can be reconstituted has disappeared so that most maps of roman Britain erroneously mark the connection between London and Chester as going round by Schruzbury as an example of a short part utterly disappearing one can take any one out of hundreds best example near London typical of many others

3:12:16is the gap in the roman road between the Epson race course and merton the road is evident as a clearly marked high embankment above the steep rise at Juniper Hill near the dorking road to within a mile of Epson race course then it suddenly ceases there is no change in the soil it is on chalk before and after its disappearance and yet just here at about a mile from Epson race course it completely and totally disappears there is no trace even of its foundation left from sense onward northwards until you get to the site at merton which was state land and almost certainly the last camp and halting place on the road before London how the road crossed the marshes of the wandel we can only conjecture as we can only conjecture where it lay exactly between Epson and those marshes why it should disappear in the marshes is evident enough

3:13:16causeway sank in why it should disappear under the plow to the south of the marshes as roman roads nearly always do on arable land can also be explained but why it should wholly disappear on the last mile or two of chalk is inexplicable one theory put forward is that in the great wars of the dark ages portions of the road were deliberately destroyed to impede the progress of an enemy just as a railway may be destroyed in modern warfare but this theory will hardly hold water the gaps that have disappeared thus often come just where you have the best soil for marching independent lay of artifice and where therefore an interruption of them would least incommode and advance for instance there are perpetually found on high chalk and further the disappearance is hardly ever connected with a defensive position from the point of view of the

3:14:18development of the english road system much the most interesting point in the fate which befell the roman roads is to be found at the crossings of rivers especially of rivers which have marshy banks or flow through wood or sodden valleys then elected roman embankment across the marsh fell out of use in the dark ages probably the bridge first broke down and the barbers time had not the energy or skill to repair it then the mere process of time caused the swallowing up of the roman viaduct unreleaved by repair in all marshy land it's difficult to affirm a negative but i can recall not one example of a long roman viaduct still wholly in use across such an approach to water what happened then in these sections was this the bridge and the viaduct disappeared in the dark ages that is sometime between the fourth and eleventh centuries

3:15:21sometimes this gap led to the complete isolation of the district immediately concerned the best example i know of this is the breakdown of the crossing of the aron at roman's wood in the county of sussex there the roman road was a hard causeway over very thick clay land quite impassable for armies in winter and rapidly overgrown by oak scrub and thorn when neglected the result of the breaking down of the roman bridge at the roman's wood crossing was to isolate west sussex there was no other way from the north for the clay and thorn scrub rapidly arose and obliterated the road it was in use as far south from london as oakley but the breakdown of the bridge at alphaldine broke the continuity further on and that i believe is one of the reasons why sussex was so isolated as only to be converted to the christian religion a hundred years later than

3:16:21the rest of the country i saw that the embankment having been swallowed up and the bridge broken the men of the dark ages had to find for themselves some new way of crossing and it is interesting to note that they here fell back upon the primitive methods common before roman civilization came they abandoned the straight line and picked their way by the driest bits they could find so that the new crossing of the marshal district grew up senus and haphazard later when the new road system developed with the middle ages this new road was often straightened and a new bridge thrown across the river upon its line but save for a very few exceptions the roman approach had disappeared there are scores of examples of this up and down the country the most prominent usually bear such names as stemford stanford stafford stratford stratford etc all of which come from the word

3:17:25street or the word stone coupled with the word ford they thus signify that in the valleys of the river the going or passage had been hardened artificially with stone derived from roman work a very good example of the way in which the newer track replaced the older one is to be found at stamford in north hamptonshire the accompanying sketch shows the trace of the roman road from its leaving burly park to the old crossing of the river and beyond there are still broken traces of the old embankment on the north side of the stream but it is clear that this straight line across the march broke down that a new way was picked out and slowly hardened and a new bridge built to suit it what the men of the dark ages did here was to keep to the drier patches to the east where Ford crossed the river and then curve round again westward again to join the road on the heights

3:18:26north of the river this new passage took over the name of the stone ford where the old road had crossed a bridge was thrown in due time across the new ford and the town shifted towards the new bridge and acquired its new name from the crossing one form of the roman road and one only a very rare form never disappears it is the cutting through hard sand here and there in England I know not how often but I have myself found few traces of them I should doubt if there were much more than a dozen you get a clear cutting upon a roman road serving no modern or useful purpose and almost certainly dating from the construction of the way there is the trace of one at Asher's near my home that with which I am most familiar and which I have measured most carefully if the cutting be made in dry sandy soil for fair consistency and hardness it can remain almost

3:19:28indefinitely with an unmistakable outline there may naturally have been many other cuttings originally in softer or more yielding soils which have got filled up but the only ones I know are through sand which soil also tends to form those sharp ridges through which a cutting might suggest itself as more economical than a too steep gradient two the roman road not only disappears through causes which I have called inexplicable and under the obvious influence of marsh or of cultivation it also fell into disuse even where it did not disappear for reasons both explicable and inexplicable there are cases where the falling interdisuse is frankly not to be explained though these I have found mainly upon the continent for instance in the road from reams to shalom you have the roman road running almost parallel to

3:20:29the later road the later trace having been made for no reason that we can discover not serving any new towns or villages a mere duplicate of the old way but there are more cases where the disuse of a section of the roman road can clearly be explained by the need for visiting centers of population production and commerce the roman system for the serving of places off the main straight road was by side roads perpendicular to the main road the relics of these you still see on many of the continental roads a direct perpendicular lane or avenue joining up the chateau and its dependencies or the neighboring town with the main highway and the dark ages came and the main roads degraded the by lanes and paths which had grown up as offshoots to them and which led to the estates and villages and towns and ports and quarries etc to one side or the other of the road came to be used more frequently the main travel between distant towns was less

3:21:32the local travel grew more important in proportion and as this development preceded sections of the roman road tended to fall into disuse the local roads would be maintained and the section of main road would be left unrepaird we have seen that the main cause of the breaking down of the roman road was marsh and the crossing of river valleys not only was this process true of natural marshes especially at the sides of a river it was true of a special case which is reproduced over and over again on the map of England and for which I take as a particular example a very fine case near northern park in north amptanture here is Watling Street the great roman road from London to the northwest cross the valley of an insignificant stream there was no marsh originally there is none today there was only a small running of water over which a culvert was thrown a stream ran under

3:22:36the main roman embankment through this culvert now when the dark ages came and the roads fell into disrepair the first things to go naturally were the culverts they got blocked up once they got blocked up the water dammed up on the higher side and began to undermine the embankment by the time this had made the road those still standing impassable travel had found a new way usually down the stream away from the mirror thus formed further centuries and the recovery of civilization cleared the ground the embankment either was washed away or swallowed up in the mirror and its subsequent marsh the stream resumed its original course the dry ground reappeared but the trace of the roman road upon either side across the depression was lost forever and there was substituted for it the modern road making a curve out of the direct line and only recovering it again after the obstacle had been passed three gradual decay of the roman road in the dark ages was

3:23:46not everywhere the same the consequence is that the remaining fragments of roman roads are connected in different ways with the modern road system which gradually grew out of them there are four types overlapping of course of the fate attaching to the roman roads in this country they are as I have said the root of all our road system all English roads subsequent to the period of the roman occupation have grown out of the great network laid down forever by the roman engineers fortune which the original road suffered the way in which a modern system developed from it were not uniform there were four divergent developments which ran thus one the roman road is preserved as a basis of the modern road and remains a main artery of this the great example is the Watling Street in the first few days marches northwest of London two the roman road remains

3:24:53clearly the basis of the system of local roads which developed from it and though disappearing in sections is upon the whole preserved of these the great example is the stained street road from Chister to London three the roman road having produced a system of local roads based upon it has almost entirely disappeared and has left the local system alone to witness to its original importance just as filigree work remains after you have melted away the core of wax upon which it was built examples of this are very difficult to discover precisely because the original country has gone the process can be followed here and there by a careful examination and I think that upon the whole the best example is that of the series of roads which grew out of the shortcut between Pencridge and Chester four the roman road remains in some parts at least but its original purpose

3:26:00having been such that it was of no continual use in the dark ages the local system of roads can only indirectly be referred to it of this the great example is the famous pettersway running through East Anglia four one the preservation of the Watling Street is an example of a continuously used roman road for several days march northwest of London is due to various causes in the first place it was very little interrupted by marsh it ran everywhere on dry land and the main cause of breakdown the swallowing up of a causeway after the destruction of its bridge did not affect it but this is the least of the causes which have preserved this piece of road second and more important was the establishment along yet of set stations which remained inhabited

3:27:02the chain of which was not interrupted by active warfare Watling Street here presents very interesting evidence of what really happened during those early pirate raids which are generally but erroneously called the Anglo-Saxon conquest they did not so seriously disturb the life of the country as to break down this main artery of communication it lies transfers to the raids and yet it was maintained and in this connection we must also note the continued importance of London great roman town suffered of course from the pirate raids between somewhat before the year 500 and the year 600 as did all the rest of the island they suffered not only from those raids of pirates across the north sea but also from the raids of pirates from Ireland and also from the raids of Highlanders coming over the wall from the north but though they suffered they kept their place in the national scheme no province in

3:28:06the Roman Empire lost less of its town sites in the dark ages than did England no part of Europe has so large a number of old towns based upon Roman foundations and London was the chief of them all London may have been disturbed by the raids it probably was there was probably a certain amount of looting from time to time and a good deal of fighting outside its walls but it always maintained its permanence its character of being the economic centre of the island it is particularly noticeable that every great Roman road out of London has remained intact and wattling street beyond others the third cause of survival was probably the excellence of the original construction though here we must hesitate a little because we cannot but note that the great north road to York which was quite as important and which was twin to the northwestern road has suffered very grievous modification indeed there can be no doubt that the construction of the wattling street was

3:29:09very thorough and that this expenditure of economic effort preserved it through the dark ages as much as anything did oddly enough what is in most cases the strongest motive for all the preservation of a road was here entirely absent and that is what I have called the potential between the two terminals and there is a long and continued motive for joining up to terminal points the road has a cause of survival superior to any other there was and remains to this day an extremely strong potential of this kind between the ports serving the channel streets with their nucleus at Canterbury and the economic capital inland at London it therefore as the Roman road between the one terminal and the other remained permanent throughout the centuries with the exception of the deflection towards the Thames which grew up in the dark ages to serve the landing places at Gravesend but such a potential is entirely lacking for the north western road communication

3:30:13so far as we know to go between London and Chester the trade with Ireland ceased almost during the early dark ages the northwestern road led nowhere if it was preserved therefore as it has been preserved it must have been due to other causes which escape us there it runs however still almost uninterruptibly used from the marble arch in London to Ogangates in Shropshire and in places still acts as part of the main archery leading from southeast to northwest five two stain street the stain street which I must be excused for quoting so continuously as I know it in great detail is I think the leading example of a road still remaining for the most part and clearly showing how the later systems were built up upon a Roman backbone

3:31:16I will take the liberty of recapitulating here my argument developed at greater lengths in my monograph on this way the original motive of the stain street was the connecting of the Chichester harbors and indirectly of Portsmouth harbour with London by a road which should overcome the difficulties of the wheeled the wheeled is a mass of stiff clay impossible to general traffic for six months of the year unless one uses artificial means left to itself it turns rapidly into a waste of oak and thorns scrub save in the dry months there is no going over it in its natural state for armies or bodies of wheeled vehicles its water courses are numerous muddy difficult of approach and soft at bottom it produces nothing save in moments of hike civilization when it can be heavily capitalized by draining and penetrated by expensive artificial communications the supply of

3:32:20good water is rare and capricious the wheeled was therefore the great obstacle between the south coast and the towns because it was such an obstacle the Romans drove their first great road from the main harbor of Portsmouth to the capital round westward by Winchester, Silchester and Stains but they needed a supplementary road for two reasons first they wanted a shortcut to serve Portsmouth and the lesser inlets collectively called Chichester harbors bosham appears to have been an official port throughout the dark ages and secondly they wanted to be able to reach quickly for purposes of travel and commerce the very fertile sea plain of which Chichester is the capital therefore did they construct the most purely military and most direct of all the Roman roads in the island the Stain Street it ran from the east gate of Chichester in a direct line to the crossing of the

3:33:24Aron at Polboro with a camp at the end of this first day's march to defend it since it made in another great straight limb for the shoulder of Leith Hill with a camp at the second crossing of the upper Aron at Romanswood, thence by a series of much shorter limbs to the third camp at Dorking, thence over the mole at Bertleard Bridge and over the Epsom Downs past the race course to the fourth camp at Merton and thence to London Bridge a five-march stage in the dark ages the wheeled became impassable again the causeway on the Aron marshes broke down and was swallowed up the bridge at Alphaldine broke down and Sussex was isolated from the north further with the absence of any exit for direct and rapid communication between Chichester and

3:34:25London the meaning went out of the road between Dorking and Merton Merton was close enough to London to give the road vitality again and between this and London it was never lost it runs to this day and is the main line of tramways upon which people still travel from St. Em and Ballam to the borough it is only deflected at the end by the intricacies of the southward streets now if you look at the present scheme of roads surrounding this original Roman core they look at first as though they had no connection with it but when you examine them in detail the way in which they grew up out of the Roman road is clear every deflection can be accounted for and the development of the local systems from the original continuous backbone becomes evident first of all you have Sussex south of Poulboro marsh and again south of Alphaldine bridge

3:35:28isolated what happens there remained no reason for using the stain street as a continuous line it now led nowhere when it meets with the first great obstacle going north the woods near Erdem it makes for the next center of population petworth where there was a fortified post going back to some very early time the wood deflects the road towards Dunton Hill I have quoted this example in my section on vegetation in the earlier part of this essay beyond petworth it had little function so this first 10 miles of the stain street becomes the parent of the local chitchester petworth road which grew up out of it leaving a gap where the woods intervened next you must note that local roads beyond this gap Poulboro bridge probably survived but the causeway could not be kept up or was ill kept up

3:36:31in its original line when it served the camp at Hardham it ran over a wide part of the marsh in the dark ages men picked their way over the narrowest part of the marsh and then followed the hard bank above the Aaron flooded levels linking up the villages as far as Bigner but there the use of the road ended the potential was from Poulboro to the nearest seaport which was then Aaron Dull and all that the Roman road did in this section must have throw out this bow or curve of lateral road eastward between Poulboro and Bigner line of main local travel being diverted from Burry over Aaron Dull Hill and so seaword in the section north of Poulboro the Roman road still served a few scattered homesteads in the dark ages up to Billingshurst at least but again it led nowhere because the bridge at Romans wood was broken down and the high-wheeled beyond was a massive scrub growing

3:37:34on stiff clay road petered out and began again with harder going near Oakley but it was not used over the shoulder of Leith Hill because that trace subserved no local use and yet compelled the traveler to steep gradients travel was deflected round the base of the hills to dorking linking up the more populated part where the water springs were this new trace growing up obviously out of the Roman road opens up to the eastward for a mile or two of the way until it joins up in the heart of dorking itself where the third camp was out of which the town of dorking has grown and where in the churchyard the Roman road can still be traced passing through from dorking onwards one might have imagined that it would have survived all the way to London why did it not do so it was a matter of gradients and of centers of population in the dark ages when there was little necessity for making a

3:38:38direct line between dorking and London no continual marching of great Roman forces no conveying of the orders from a centralized government men took the easier way they abandoned the up and down of the spur of land lying immediately north of dorking and went round by its base to save the trouble of the little climb they used the Roman bridge which apparently survived it berford but the very steep leap up onto the Epsom downs they abandoned especially as the further progress of the road over the chalk connected no centers of population the way curled round by michaelum and leatherhead and came round to Epsom all places suitable for centers of population with low water levels and no heavy gradients in between the Roman road on the high waterless chalk above was left abandoned what happened between Epsom and merton has already been described there is only one divergence in

3:39:40this section which is where the road of the dark ages deflected somewhat to the left and was used to avoid the low wet ground below clappen common for the rest it maintained its use three the best example i know as i have said of a Roman road the evidences of which have nearly disappeared but round which local roads have grown and which can still be identified as the core of is the shortcut between penkridge and chester it is very puzzling why the Roman road should here have disappeared it is perhaps best to be explained by the continual fighting between the eastern and the western troops which must have ravaged all the country between the first of the raids and the full conversion of england to civilization and the christian religion which was the of the seventh century but whatever the cause or circumstances the phenomenon is quite plain

3:40:41the local roads developed for purely local purposes on either side of the original roman line and that line since there is no longer required any continuous traffic along it disappears six four four lastly we have the petters way it has presented a very difficult problem to all historians but i think a solution is to be guessed at though not to be too strongly affirmed petlers way runs as a main archery right through suffoc and norfolk its origin was clearly strapped for st. marries on the southern edge of suffoc and it was built to link up that water crossing with some harbor now disappeared on the wash its use has dropped out local roads are only concerned with it in a short section and men argue thus why i was it ever made and if made why did it fail as a means of communication i think the answer is military

3:41:48the petters way never linked up any centers of population it goes through land where men have never built cities or even large villages but what it would do as a military road what i think it was designed to do was the holding of all that solid block of east anglia which apparently exactly corresponds with the territory of the isinei for we must remember as i have said above that our county system is probably roman in origin and most of it corresponds to tribal divisions earlier even than the roman administration it is a point that has often been denied but those who deny it fail to remark the analogy of the continent the evidence of Kent Sussex, Dorschtshire and Essex apart from the striking list of that massive counties which all center around a roman town or a town grown up as the suburb of a roman town bestisher Worstisher, Huntingtonshire, Gloucestershire etc. The petters way cuts right across east anglia

3:42:56through its very center so that a chain of stations along it commands the whole territory it further divides that territory into two territory which was the scene of a great revolt in the beginning of the roman occupation it continued to subserve a certain function to the very end because from it as a base one can radiate to threatened points upon the coast when the pirate raids began in the middle of the roman occupation when in the dark ages the whole island fell into districts fighting one against the other each with its local king the whole a chaos and a welter the petters way entirely lost its meaning and value there was no longer one government or one army there was no need for the controlling of a subject populace for the populace had ceased to be subject saved to its local chiefs such few men as still came over the north sea were not until the Danish invasion enemies and as the petters way served no line of villages or of towns

3:44:00it fell completely out of use there's one very curious puzzle about this famous road in which has never been settled and to which I offer no more than an attempt at a solution we are fairly certain that one of the great roman stations for the repelling of raids lay at Branchester upon the wash it the petters way does not make for Branchester but for a point about four miles to the east along the coast why is this there has been suggested a ferry across the wash but that hypothesis cannot be entertained the distance is one of 11 miles over very difficult water and leading to no important district we have I think the key to the position in the presence of a harbor which has been destroyed by erosion all that coast has been modified perpetually during the last two thousand years through the vagaries of the sea of the great harbours of the middle ages

3:45:00done itch to the south has disappeared orford is blocked and is decayed the armoth on the other hand has grown up from a shingle bank into a town and braiden water has changed from an estuary into a landlocked broad cannot doubt that there was some harbor at the end of the petters way which the sea has destroyed Branchester the military post was established near it but not actually within its confines for some local reason the character of which we have now lost you must remember that Branchester is a late fortification and the petters way was settled before Branchester came into being seven we must imagine this process of gradual local development continuing uninterruptedly throughout the dark ages the Roman road serving local purposes gradually ceasing to have continuous use save for the foss way the wattling street and one or two of the other greater roads the local

3:46:05ways very ill maintained growing up out of the Roman system and the dark ages came to an end and when the medieval civilization succeeded it that is in the five centuries between the conquest and the reformation this new system of local ways was hardened and became the national system which we still inherit when i say the medieval system i mean the system which must have had its origin or denierate its main spring in the 12th century and which substituted for the use of the decayed Roman roads a competing system of roads no longer identical with them though originally based upon them as a framework here again we have no direct records but we have indirect evidence sufficient for our purpose the 12th century was the moment when civilization was arising again everywhere throughout the west and nowhere more strongly than Britain that was true of the architecture and

3:47:09town life and education and of letters and we may justly presume of the road system as well again from that date onwards you begin to get sites unconnected with the old Roman road system and their number increases rapidly as the middle ages advance again we learn from any amount of evidence the comparative rapidity of travel after the dark ages and that even over roads which certainly were not Roman we can trace it in the marching of armies the transport of grain and other provisions and the travel of individuals we may take almost any district in England and discover for ourselves by a little study how the medieval road system which continued to develop until the change in its use by the turnpike grew up out of the Roman road and we can thus show how the Roman road system is at the foundation of all our English ways there was no regular plan or order in all this

3:48:10local usage local necessity developed the torturous network and has left its stamp upon the face of England end of section 12 section 13 of the road this is a Liebervoxer cordon all Liebervoxer cordons are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Liebervox.org Read by labuna the road by healer bellic chapter 13 wheel traffic and the modern road the transition from the horse to the vehicle the distinctive mark of the later 17th century the turnpike system and the making of the modern English road the underlying idea of the turnpike

3:49:12and its effects for good and ill its decline and the first emergence of the general national system in 1810 Tom Steilford and his work the movement connected with the name of McCannum the coming of the locomotive and its results on canals and roads one the next great change came with the change in local government to which I have alluded it gave us the first acts of parliament taking the place of the old customary upkeep of the roads but acting oddly enough at a period during which the roads was declining everywhere even the civil wars did little to a man who had become a badly decayed scheme of communication one of the reasons for this was the great arm of the civil wars was the cavalry and cavalry is not tied to roads as infantry is another and better reason was the comparatively small numbers engaged the civil wars loom large in our political

3:50:14history because they marked the destruction of the monarchy and the beginning of aristocratic government but in military history they are no very great affair a son of local applocked to the thirty years war and the great religious struggle upon the continent what did make difference was the sudden increase of wheel traffic with the end of the seventeenth century there has been a great deal of exaggeration in this matter sundry historians have written as the wheel traffic were unknown until very modern times that of course is nonsense but the distinctive mark of the later seventeenth century and early eighteenth was the gradual substitution of ordinary passenger traffic by wheel instead of a horseback the public vehicle comes in much as the same time as the private vehicle developed by the no great landlord class for their convenience in their country rounds as has been the case with the internal combustion engine in our own time the instrument

3:51:19preceded the change in the road as wheel traffic for passengers becomes more common you get increasing complaints on the condition of the roads an increasing motive for improving them and out of that grows the turnpike system which with its later development has carried us to the present day to the turnpike system by process which originated in small beginnings and ended with a revolution in general communications made the modern English road it sprang from the character in the economic society of Brynn closely connected with the no aristocratic government of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whereby in the destruction of the monarchy individual action became supreme the same force which had forbidden great national roads to rise to it the absence of a central all-powerful authority such as was the French monarchy just over the channel with its great roads planned and constructed throughout the whole realm on one model which had

3:52:25maintained local diversity and local usage and kept back the proper development of the road made for change which would be due to private enterprise we all know what value this individualist an aristocratic economic system was to the expansion of the English trade overseas and how it is at the foundation of what it's today called the empire in domestic affairs it meant of course the sacrifice of the interests of the community to a comparatively small wealthy class but that did not prevent this wealthy class from acting very efficiently under the opportunity for gain within its own sphere the mass of Englishmen became and have remained impoverished but the total wealth of the country and its population have vastly increased the idea of the turnpike was to give a small body of capitalists the right to exploit certain sections of road they would improve the surface and broaden the gate were necessary etc but they would put up gates where they could charge for

3:53:30the passage of all and sundry and thus earned the interest upon their money they had also powers to borrow they had certain powers for using the public rates etc and in general through this system the roads of the country were more and more given over to what we call today capitalist exploitation for although very often the sections of road thus exploited were short they formed an interruption to general travel popular resentment against such an innovation was of course bitter especially when it extended to large areas there were periods of riot in which the toll gates were destroyed and there was something like the little civil war in the matter in south Wales but the interest of the wealthier class was supreme the populist were suppressed and the system continued it also vastly extended while it had the social disadvantages just mentioned it had the economic advantage of

3:54:30creating bit by bit longer and longer sections of really good road up and down the country to the turnpike system we owe the development of the English roads which made English coaching and gave us in the generation before and during the Napoleonic Wars on the whole the best system in local communications in Europe though we still grievously lacked continuous national communications between distant centers three the date to which must be referred the great change in this respect the date from which we must count the growth of general national communications continuous throughout the island is the year 1810 the turnpike system did indeed die slowly and only much later it lingered unto well within living memory and those who are curious to watch the rise and decay of institutions may even argue that some relics of it remain among a still but in practice 1810 is the date of the first experimental change which was ultimately to produce

3:55:37the road system of the day if we consider the use and character of the road its texture and appearance its effect upon the landscape its connection with society as distinct from the legislation connected with it 1810 is much more of a pivotal date than such dates as 1555 or 1822 which mark the political changes in the statutory powers of dealing with the roads all already stage coaches driven from the box and every year increasing the rate of travel had been upon the road for generation for 26 years and already great lengths of turnpike truss roads had come to a sufficient excellence of surface to permit travel at an average rate over those branches of 10 miles an hour but as I have said there was not as yet one continuous piece of road designed to connect to important termini of equal value throughout and ordered in all its length towards that one end of making equal and rapid transit possible between the two extremities that is the point the thing

3:56:43had not existed in this island save in the four eagle ways since the breakdown of the Roman central government in the fifth century what happened in 1810 and what makes it such memorable day is the appointment under the pressure of the postmaster general of a stone Mason who had risen to the practice of road engineering Thomas Telferd to the overlooking of the holy head road the initiative came from the post office department the administrative and engineering genius came from Telferd incidentally we should remark as one of the innumerable examples of unforeseen and exceedingly important site developments in history the fact that this great revolution in British roads ultimately derived from pizza act of union with Ireland which was already nine years old was the necessity of communication between London and Holy Head and specially of postal communication which did the business Telferd had been in the employment for some years past

3:57:44the Highland Road's commission he had therefore proved his capacity and from it he was appointed to the government position in the restamp of the holy head road after the affair had been examined by Parliamentary Committee in this year 1810 it was not only Telferd scale it was still more his energy and intense application to detail which wrote the chain his nominal masters were 10 commissioners and three ministers at their head his real chief was Parnell later Lord Congleton but it was Telferd by his caseless traveling an investigation an overlooking of everything hope pushed the thing through the whole distance to be recognized was one of 194 miles of this the larger part was 109 miles fell under 17th English Trust their remaining 85 miles were under 6th well-strust the latter was far less local traffic to provide them with income and it would seem also of general efficiency Telferd's task may be appreciated when we remember that the

3:58:50new palsy gave him no direct statutory power to override trust each one had to be argued with bargained with and persuaded this at least was true of the English Trust and the six well-strust the commissioners or rather Telferd and Parnell despair the trust controlled so very much the larger part of the trajectory that it was necessary in some way to dispose of them more than seven years passed before this could be done but Parnell succeeded in persuading them by industry's attendance before various meetings to accept an act of parliament which cast them only to one body of 15 and they were by statute compelled to employ professional civil engineer who was of course Telferd the 85 remaining miles were taking over scientifically divided into sections under assistant surveyors and foreman below them and by 1830 after the labor of 20 years the whole thing was done a suspension bridge had been thrown over the minis straights

3:59:56holy head harbour had been improved these with the reconstruction of the road had drowned from parliament grants of three quarters of million from that moment there existed at least one complete road in Britain uniting two definite termini and everywhere making possible the rapid travel at the time the tolls were of course maintained their costs were increased by one half the anomalies complexities and corruptions involved in the system were no more done away with on the holy head road than on any other except in so far as closer supervision helped to alleviate things and is so far as malgommation of truss also helped butter and your aid there was at least one continuous and excellent road from the capital to a distant poor and we have the date 1830 for the completion of the great task which was begun in 1810 four contemporary with this first

4:00:56great complete model of a road in England when the movement connected with the name of McCannum was far less of a revolution than has since been represented the continent had made experiments similar to those of McCannum long before him and what he affected over here was no more than an improvement for it was not holy novel the real point of McCannum in our road history is his intense devotion to his task he was one of those men who having seen clearly a principle which others have also seen and which indeed should be obvious so emphasizes it and represents it that he brings it into practice where other men would have abandoned it the obvious principle which McCannum grasped and reiterated to weariness was the principle that perpetual legislation and experiment in the type of vehicle best suited to a road was of less importance than the surface and way carrying capacity of the road get the best road you can first and after that discuss the traffic

4:01:58along it in certain technical details posterity has criticized it in his insufficient allowance of foundation for instance in its postulate that a well-drained natural surface was sufficient to bear anything in the way of road traction such criticism can only be conducted by experts but it is certainly true that McCannum transformed the surface of the English road not perhaps by any special or novel conception of his own either in the material or in the sizes of that material but rather in the unique insistence with which he carried on his whole task just as the post office had been the government department for using telford so the board of works was the government department backing McCannum these two men between them and these two departments between them had remade the English road and the system was fairly launched towards such change as with perhaps have given us a completely transformed road system the value of which we should have appreciated

4:03:00when the new traffic of the internal combustion engine presented us with the problems of the present for instance telford himself had suggested and there was nearly achieved a reformed stretch of the great north road between Peter Bowen-Jorke on straight line avoiding the windings of the old trace and 20 miles shorter worthy to rank in every way with the great roads of the continent this had it been realized might well have proved only the first of great number of similar constructions until we should have had all the great centers of England united in the same fashion and habit of road straight and excellent roads established unfortunately a great historical accident in Irvene to sidetrack the whole business was an example of the way in which the advantages of spontaneity and inventiveness making normally for the benefit of the community as a well if there is no central direction do incidental her which has later to be repaired

4:04:04if at all a great expansive energy the reason we have today the innumerable narrow winding roads of England the lack of any general system the absence of any system of good road from London to the ports to this day have the exits from London are blocked by absurd bottlenecks the most notorious of which of course is that on the west road which is now a last being remedied is that the English genius produced the locomotive five Stephsons great revolution was begun in 1829 the great holy had road was completed in 1830 the coincidence of dates is significant England developed immediately an immense system of railways not only was she 20 years ahead of the rest of the world in this business but she alone for a long time could produce railways the railways on the continent had to be built often by English engineers and always upon an English model the transformation which

4:05:07this affected in the national life was so rapid that it robbed judgment man began to talk as though the road would follow out of use was the same sort of exaggeration as let people about 10 years ago to tell us that shortly horses would no longer be seen in the streets of London or even on the country roads the introduction of the railways had to deplorable effects upon the economic life of England each of which was great and one of which we must if we can immediately remedy on peril of decline neither of them can be remedied save at a new expensive energy one it killed the canals two it killed all the schemes for widening straightening and rebuilding the national road system while upon the continent and especially in France the great board straight roads of the 18th century formed the model continuously applied so that the most recent examples today are in the same tradition as those of 200 years ago and yet imply fulfill their

4:06:12function here the whole story of our roads from the middle and the end of the 19th century and onto the beginning of this century is the story of improving the surface while keeping the old widening and narrowness here and there we have had extensions of space which create really new roads in the neighborhood of towns especially as exits from towns but no where as yet have we complete scheme for the remodeling of a road in the fashion whereby a century ago the great holy head road was remodeled and ob section 13 section 14 of the road this is a libravaks recording all libravaks recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravaks.org the road by Hilary Bellock chapter 14 the future the new vehicle compelling us to make new roads arterial roads for the new

4:07:21traffic the five necessities of these roads ways and means the national fund taxation according to fuel used the question of the land contiguous to the new roads one we have come to the point where some great initiative is imperatively needed for the reestablishment of communications corresponding to modern needs but while all feel this no one yet has i believe thought out the main elements of the scheme we cannot remake all the ways of England or even change the main part of them to suit the new kind of traffic we have been taken aback as they say in sailing and caught all standing our charming narrow hedged tortuous lanes our haphazard county communications even our main ways have suddenly proved grossly in apt to the new traffic and our towns unaffected by the great continental movement which i have heard called the boulevard movement of the middle 19th century are in the same case if we cannot and obviously we cannot

4:08:26remodel the whole thing what can we do so far as i can see we can proceed upon certain main principles with which i propose to conclude i distinguish between the problem of the street traffic in the towns with which i am not concerned and that of the main road as it seems to me what we need is and that immediately a certain number quite a large number of great arterial roads very broad and straight with a special surface confined to motor traffic alone these including circular ways around the towns to avoid the present unnecessary and congested passage through the towns would act as ditches act in a fin they would gather towards them the main streams of traffic as such ditches gather towards them and drain the moisture of a fin that having been done the remaining difficulties upon the byroads would be cut down to a quarter or less of their present evil i will develop this too it is clear that our new vehicle the internal combustion engine

4:09:27will compel us to new roads just as the vehicular traffic for passengers at the beginning of the seventeenth century compelled the creation of the turnbike far seeing man grasped this the moment that the internal combustion engine appeared in our lives i have myself heard the details of an idea which very nearly materialized and which was on the point of becoming law an experimental road to be driven from one great center to another to be reserved entirely to the new traffic and to be made specially for these new necessities private interest defeated the scheme and in my opinion that defeat was a very bad thing for the general development of the country but though the first attempt failed the very fruitful and sensible idea underlying it is worth describing a very few great arterial roads joining up the main centers of population would have far more effect upon our present difficulties than their mere mileage would seem to warrant there could be no question of stopping the new form of traffic upon the ordinary roads remaining which in length might

4:10:29be twenty or fifty times those of the new roads but it would be of such advantage for long distance travel to use the great arteries that at the expenditure of greater mileage you would find the new traffic seeking them at the nearest point upon one side and clinging to them for as long as possible suppose for the sake of hypothesis a simple case suppose a great arterial road to be built joining the heart of London and the heart of Birmingham in a straight line it would pass just by tring and bucking them and then on through the gap between Liemington and Warwick a man living at Windsor and desiring to reach Coventry and using the new method of fast travel would seek this main road at its nearest point and leave it again at the nearest point to his terminus it would be a less picturesque but a much safer and quicker way of doing his business it would add a dozen miles to his total trajectory but it would save a much more than corresponding amount of strain and expensive energy in following the series of narrow and winding roads most nearly connecting

4:11:32the two points the same would be true of any other trajectory not directly served by the new roads the advantage of safe and rapid travel on a first class surface of very broad gauge free of horses and pedestrians would make people take a sea to include as much as possible of such a road rather than cling to the shorter line the final effect would be the relief of congestion upon the typically narrow winding roads which cover the surface of England they would be relieved in the case we have quoted not only of the great mass of urban traffic between London and Birmingham they would be also relieved of their very considerable local traffic not entirely relieved of course but relieved in a proportion large enough to make a very sensible difference to modern communications though the things still remains pure theory and though the political and social obstacles to it are very serious indeed any trajectory you name in this crowded island would destroy much which all our people let alone the owners love to preserve yet it is

4:12:35worthwhile to analyze the conditions of such roads because only thus can we establish the main rules which under whatever modification must ultimately govern the change that should come 3. We need five things one a very strong foundation upon which depends to a permanently good surface 3. The avoidance of sudden curves in which is included the avoidance of obstacles hiding the approaches to any curve 4. Great width 5. A fifth point almost as important as these first four the necessity for the providing of crossings the great arterial road reserved to the internal combustion engine would be for people who had to cross it an obstacle a great deal worse than a railway our forefathers protected in all sorts of fashions the road crossing the railway at a level crossing by insisting on gates and an attendant by compelling the road if possible to pass

4:13:36above the railway upon a bridge and so on or attention was paid to this point in England than in any continental country and we benefit by the results of that care today but the arterial road would be far more dangerous it would have a continual stream of very rapid vehicles in both directions and the scheme had better not be envisaged at all if the cost of providing for cross traffic is not faced the problem is by no means an easy one it means necessarily embankments for bridges are tunneling at every crossing and these will have to be more numerous than the road crossings they will have to serve rights of way and private approaches as well I think it will be found when the scheme is first attempted that this obstacle will prove the most serious of all it is for experts in the science of which I know nothing and illusion to which I have therefore kept carefully out of this essay to decide what these details of surface widths foundation etc mean in practice their expense and character they know from experiments made what materials and

4:14:38foundation may be best what minimum width suggests itself I have occasionally heard the minimum width of 100 feet suggested but whatever the detail practice when the experts set to work on the new motor roads it must be with these five main provisions before them there are minor considerations you have with the new traffic to consider a gradient somewhere between the old road gradient and the railway gradient there again it is for experts to determine what the maximum useful gradient should be the trouble in our present road system is that in any trajectory you will have one or two places where the new traffic is perilous there are even exceptional points in England where it is almost prohibited by excessive gradients another pointing connection with such great arterial roads is the capital one of exit from the greater urban centers it is of little use to relieve traffic to diminish the strain and expense of energy connected with it and the peril and all the rest of it between two urban centers if the exit and entry from and into each

4:15:41are blocked now the trouble here is a purely economic trouble urban sites have a special value even in the outskirts they're not as a rule sites to which anyone is attached but the cost of buying them up has made reformers hesitate to drive the arterial ways which are so urgently needed once your grade road has reached the inner ring of a large town its traffic disperses and there is no need for continuing its dimensions but the new system can be of no real service if on the approach to a great town we retain the narrows and guts which disfigure for example the western road out of London it might even be said that from the political standpoint it would be better to begin with the assurance of good exits and entrances than with the planning of the road as a whole at present we have in the particular case of London one and only one good entry that is the entry from the northwest all the others are hopelessly congested for there will occur in connection with all this

4:16:41discussion of the necessity for a modern change in the road the point of ways and means somebody must pay how shall the payment be made it has already become a matter of politics pretty well all that can be said upon it has been said but as yet there's no agreement i would maintain very tentatively hardly as more than a suggestion that we shall never get a satisfactory settlement until we found ourselves upon three main principles one the making of a few great arteries coupled with the making of proper exits from the great towns and of byways round the urban centres is a national concern you cannot in the present state of society regarded as local nor even as chiefly concerning the direct users of the road for even these who are apparently the people upon whom the burden should most justly fall developed by their travel the district through which they pass i suggest therefore that you must start in this case with the fundamental principle of a national fund and a national fund not proceeding from earmarks receipts alone but also drawn from

4:17:45general taxes two the second principle which i should suggest is that insofar as you text travel for the purposes of this fund you should tax it not by any complicated combination of weight, power, fuel and so forth but through some one factor alone otherwise you will be perpetually remodeling your scheme and is perpetually causing a grievance now the most obvious factor is fuel one way and another the fuel a man uses for his machine is the nearest test to the use of seemakes of the road a heavy weight needs more fuel great speed and consequently greater wear and tear needs more fuel and greater horsepower needs more fuel the curves are of course not parallel you can get equal speeds between heavy and light for nearly the same consumption of fuel one type of machine will do more harm to the road surface for every gallon of fuel than another and so on but if you want to have easy revenues simplicity and taxation is vital

4:18:45surely the taxation of fuel is the simplest and most direct method it's easily collected it does away with all chance of confusion it can be imposed at source and in bulk and it has that invaluable quality which has often been lost sight of in the last two generations that it is paid gradually and at will and yet paid inevitably so long of course as a false distinction is maintained between the commercial and the private use of vehicles you will have gross anomalies and injustice to draw the line between economic waste in the use of the modern internal combustion engine and what is part of the general and normal life of the community is impossible it would be better where the distinction to be wholly removed we do not ask a man who takes a ticket from Birmingham to London whether he's going for fun or folly for business or necessity men pay the same price for the ticket whatever the motive of their journey it is an absurd anomaly as things now stand that the man who travels in a little Ford car from one town to another with say two members of his family

4:19:49and travels therefore much more cheaply than he could upon the railway should pay the rent of a house for the privilege of having his car while the heavy vehicle of a tradesman who is distributing an advertising matter sheer economic loss to the community should tear up the road for nothing three the grant for the new roads should include the purchase if not of a continuous belt along each side but at least of blocks of land especially in the neighborhood of existing communications near railway stations near villages or other centres now established etc the price to be determined by arbitration upon the old price basis before the scheme of the road was developed if this were done the great difficulty for certain purposes not residential but other of using these sites would accrue to the public purse and would gradually relieve the cost of construction this project touches of course upon one of those political theories which have been debated as have all political theories in our time with too much violence and with too much generality if it be contended that

4:20:53we here introduce the principle of the single tax and of the nationalization of land I can only say that nothing is further either from my thoughts in this essay or from my general politics as any number of my public pronouncements suffice to prove but we have here a very special case these new roads if we drive them as we ought to drive them soon between the main points of the island will unless some such scheme is adopted make a direct and immediate present of millions to the chance owners of land upon their trajectory it would be a gross case of actual endowment at the expense of the community conversely the reservation of land on either side of the way for the purpose of helping to pay for the new scheme would be of direct advantage to the community and of disadvantage to no one at any rate just as we must soon have a reform of the road system or suffer decline in our communications and therefore in our national life so we must soon settle a reform in the matter of road maintenance and road taxation for the new main arteries

4:21:58that should be built we must depend upon the general resources of the community while for special taxes upon traffic we must establish as soon as possible a simple and universal system I need not add for it is obvious that such a scheme of new roads would involve a certain amount of individual hardship it is impossible to avoid that but it is in the temper of this nation to compromise closely and in detail upon all such things nor need it be added that the scheme would have to proceed by trial and error and could only be at first tentative and applied experimentally to one or two chosen trajectories but I think that it is upon these lines that the problem can be solved end of section 14 read by Sandra Nurematerial 2022 end of the road by Hilar Bellok