The Road: A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past

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The shock and awe experienced by the bewildered Britons that the construction of a rapid troop transport system by a supremely organised and skilled group of soldiers can only be imagined. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Nowadays a long straight road is considered boring and dangerous to drive along - we prefer curves to keep us awake - but the excitement of realising we are sometimes travelling a road initially constructed 2,000 years ago along our exact path helps connect us to the generations who have undertaken the same route, marching, riding, droving, walking (or driving) for two millennia. A bad elevator pitch might have been something like, 'So I have an author who's written a book about a walk along a minor Roman road and a few interesting tales that arise en route. Hadley traces the path of a single Roman road in Britain and uses this trek as a tool for explaining much that is possible to know about all such roads in that country.

I found the author's interpretation of a Boudican war origin for the fort at Great Chesterford of particular interest. Sir Dover is the only one afflicted by the deeply self-obsessed British public school old boy mentality, in my opinion, who has ever so honestly and openly recognised it for what it is - wanky sybaritic self-indulgence. Hadley's writing moves seemingly randomly from descriptions of hedgerows, to parish history and into archaeological analysis and then back again.

As the Britons fell back to the Thames, the road pursued them to the river’s edge, carrying troops, supplies and military despatches. In the beginning was Watling Street, the first road scored on the land when the invading Romans arrived on a cold and alien Kentish shore in 43 CE. Loving The Road , [it’s] about a Roman road but also a rumination on the past and our relationship with it. Hadley leads us on a hunt to discover, in Hilaire Belloc’s phrase, ‘all that has arisen along the way’. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit.

A wonderful read which gives you the real sense of being a Roman in Britain, revealing how the world you know around you was shaped by your very ancestors. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall).His pieces have appeared in The Independent , The Guardian , The Times , London Review of Books , Esquire and his local parish magazine, among many other publications.

Thought there'd be more to it, but there are some interesting historical asides here and there, even if, for some reason, I felt it'd be a lot more focused on the attempt to follow a forgotten Roman road than it was. These kind of books just aren’t for me but somehow I find myself pulled in again and again, tricked by good reviews or cursed with a gift I feel obligated to try.Gathering traces of archaeology, history and landscape, poems, church walls, hag stones and cropmarks; oxlips, killing places, hauntings, immortals and things buried too deep for archaeology, The Road is a mesmerising journey into two thousand years of history only now giving up its secrets. Drawing on the findings of years of work by dedicated archaeologists, aerial photographers and historians, Hadley travels the length of a spur of Ermine street in the direction of Great Chesterford pondering how and why it was built and the lives of the people who travelled or lived along it. I read through the references, I've bought more books on the subject and I went back and forth between the book and Google Earth at several points.

For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. But the attempt to truly and earnestly show the road as it has been throughout all of its history is such an ambitious one that I can forgive him those topples into pretension, because there is so much that is fascinating and beautiful and wonderful, and I think he gets quite close to what he's trying to do.

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