The Road less Travelled

Tiberius

Esteemed Pedelecer
Nov 9, 2007
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Somerset
OK, this may be off topic. I could argue that it is about journey patterns established before the days of mechanised transport, but the truth is that I wanted to share this picture with you all.



This was taken today looking North from the middle of Somerset. The first observation is that the snow can even make Shepton Mallet look beautiful. (Bog Monster will know what I mean.) But the real interest is the dark line running vertically through the picture.

Its the ancient Fosse Way and it can be traced all the way up to Leicester. Some of it has become main roads, some is lost and obscured, but occasionally there are conditions like this when it really stands out.

Full size picture here

Nick
 
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Tiberius

Esteemed Pedelecer
Nov 9, 2007
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Somerset
Nice shot you've taken Nick, but I had to copy and paste it into an editor to view it, it's so huge. 3065 pixels wide! :eek:
I realised the problem when I test viewed it myself; I've just edited it so you should now see a smaller version and get a link to the full picture.

Nick
 

flecc

Member
Oct 25, 2006
52,764
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I've just deleted my comment post before seeing your latest response Nick.

My only memories of Shepton Mallet was escorting prisoners to the military prison that was there there during my army service.

Nice photo, do you hand hold or have you rigged a camera support?
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Tiberius

Esteemed Pedelecer
Nov 9, 2007
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Somerset
Hi Tony,

The camera was hand held, but it has an anti shake system. Only one hand was operating it but the beauty of digital cameras is that you can just click away and discard the shots that don't work.

Nick
 

flecc

Member
Oct 25, 2006
52,764
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Hi Tony,

The camera was hand held, but it has an anti shake system. Only one hand was operating it but the beauty of digital cameras is that you can just click away and discard the shots that don't work.

Nick
Yes, I'm all digital now, but I didn't have those advantages when I did some flying in the past. I never took any photos when at the controls but at other times it was sometimes 35 mm though usually Polaroid, both old and new type films.
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keithhazel

Esteemed Pedelecer
Oct 1, 2007
997
0
Hi Tony,

The camera was hand held, but it has an anti shake system. Only one hand was operating it but the beauty of digital cameras is that you can just click away and discard the shots that don't work.

Nick
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i have not used my latest digital cam corder which i got as a replacement for one that got smashed on holiday 2 years ago..:rolleyes: they do you know... well its small yet has a 20gb hard drive instead of putting tapes in so it holds a lot..like 10000 photo's or 25 hours video..which actually isnt that much now as i just got a memory chip (size of little finger nail)for my blackberry phone and that now holds 179000 photo's..but beauty of camcorders is you can just let the film run without clicking away and edit the exact picture you want later....no more "just missing" the perfect picture...
 

Bigbee

Esteemed Pedelecer
Oct 12, 2008
445
1
sort of on topic

I bought a top of the range Sony camcorder yesterday,worst part of £700 but its necessary as its HD and thats needed for our websites.Its got 60 gb hard drive!Amazing in such a small one hand held camera
 

Rod Tibbs

Pedelecer
Jun 10, 2008
123
0
Getting there

That absolutely splendid picture from Tiberius brings me to a subject that I am certain Forum member will have some thought about.

It is this. If you lived in this country prior to excellent roads like the Roman Fosse Way shown in the picture, how would you find your way from say London to Derby? Routes would probably only be trackways but certainly not signposted. You could ask your way to the next village and I suspect people navigated from church tower to church tower by line of sight. But how would you or anyone on the route know if you were heading in the right direction for your destination?

Most people were illiterate and certainly could not be relied upon for accurate guidance over several hundred miles. It is easy enough to get lost on a pedelec so how did they manage with no signposts and a horse?

And even when the Romans arrived how would they know a road coming out of London was accurately pointing to its destination at the other end of the country.

Well it makes a change from talking about helmets!

Rod
 

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flecc

Member
Oct 25, 2006
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If you lived in this country prior to excellent roads like the Roman Fosse Way shown in the picture, how would you find your way from say London to Derby? Routes would probably only be trackways but certainly not signposted. You could ask your way to the next village and I suspect people navigated from church tower to church tower by line of sight. But how would you or anyone on the route know if you were heading in the right direction for your destination?

Most people were illiterate and certainly could not be relied upon for accurate guidance over several hundred miles. It is easy enough to get lost on a pedelec so how did they manage with no signposts and a horse?

And even when the Romans arrived how would they know a road coming out of London was accurately pointing to its destination at the other end of the country.

Rod
From around 2000 years ago, droving roads developed on which animals ready for slaughter were driven to population centres, and I live alongside an important one on which countless animals from geese through to cattle were driven over a wide area of southern England to London and eventually the famous Smithfield Market. Journeys were often very long, from the coast to London for example, and taking many days, the herders sleeping with their animal en route. These would have been an important way of finding one's way about through local knowledge.

As for the Romans, they and the Greeks before them well understood navigation by the stars and that would have enabled them to plot accurate directions to destinations which they'd previously reached by battle to overcome the native population.

My ancient droving road is Featherbed Lane and the lanes running south from it, now a bit of it on a new route due to later road engineering, but the original route through a beech wood still exists and I often walk it. A local farmer friend, Tom Marden, tells of how his grandfather drove cattle from Fickleshole to East Croydon station when it still had a goods terminus, so parts of that ancient route were still used for the old purpose into living memory.

Of course, the further one goes back, the less people travelled and the need for directions rarely arose, most people staying in one village from birth through to death.
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flecc

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Oct 25, 2006
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Another way of finding ones way around would have been the tax routes. I live next to the 1000 year old village of Addington in North East Surrey, and there's another Addington village only a few miles away over the Kent border.

These were the tax towns to which the collectors brought the taxes they'd imposed to be added together before sending on to the royal palace, hence "Adding Town". This activity established a regularly used network of routes joining all populations together and eventually to London. Doubtless this would have enabled local directions to other towns and villages from any others, plus a rough knowledge of the direction of London and other major centres.
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flecc

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Oct 25, 2006
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Prior to the Roman occupation and the times I've written of above, the probable answer is that there was no travel to speak of. Taking my own district as an example, an area from Balham in the north to Purley in the south, and from Kingston in the west to Bromley in the east was occupied by a group of painted tribes who knew themselves as the Anefi. They were herders of sheep and cattle who also had some primitive agriculture.

The Romans have documented how the Anefi instantly attacked them when they arrived at their territory, and since the resistance continued almost permanently, the Romans built a fort north of what is now Croydon to protect the new settlement of Londinium that they were creating, destroying the settlement of Aneefi in the process. That area has been known as Fort Aneefi right through to modern times.

So that was the scene, travelling could risk instant death on entry to another's territory, and what purpose was there to travel, when the adjacent peoples would be doing exactly the same things, herding etc. There would have been barter trading, the fishermen alongside the Thames trading fish in exchange for hides and wool from the adjacent herders for example, and that was probably the limit of travel, to one's boundaries.

Looking at the Anefi's area that I've detailed above, it was probably quite enough to satisfy anyone.
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Fecn

Esteemed Pedelecer
Sep 28, 2008
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Warlingham, Surrey
The Romans have documented how the Anefi instantly attacked them when they arrived at their territory, and since the resistance continued almost permanently, the Romans built a fort north of what is now Croydon.
The residents of West Croydon still exhibit the same behavior today.
 

flecc

Member
Oct 25, 2006
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The residents of West Croydon still exhibit the same behavior today.
Yes, nothing much has changed except it's the women who paint themselves now, and sometimes lead the attack. :(
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bode

Esteemed Pedelecer
May 14, 2008
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Hertfordshire and Bath
If you lived in this country prior to excellent roads like the Roman Fosse Way shown in the picture, how would you find your way from say London to Derby? Routes would probably only be trackways but certainly not signposted. You could ask your way to the next village and I suspect people navigated from church tower to church tower by line of sight.
No churches prior to Roman times! Christianity came late in the Roman empire.
Incidentally, I live right next to a footpath between high banks, (also occasionally used by cyclists) which was once part of the Roman highway from St. Albans to York. Soon after we first moved here 30+ years ago, an old chap approached us while we were on a walk and asked "Would you like to see something two thousand years old?" We thought he was a flasher, but it turned out he merely wanted to point out one of the many large pits the Romans dug to extract flints to surface the road.
 

Rod Tibbs

Pedelecer
Jun 10, 2008
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I must say all the thoughts on navigating from one end of the country to the other have been really interesting. However I cannot subscribe to the theory that people just did not travel or if they did they went along sheep tracks.

If this were so hardly any battles would ever have been fought throughout English history because front line troops would have simply said to Harold or William or Charles I or Cromwell "Sorry mate, if it involves leaving the village count us out!"

If you found yourself in charge of a large army, you knew your enemy was say somewhere in the Scottish border region and you were just coming out of Shrewsbury I doubt if there was any point in going up to the main road and looking at a signpost.

You would have had only rudimentary maps, if any, and getting lost today in the countryside is very easy even with the aid of satnavs and good maps so it must have been difficult then. You would need to know the order of the towns and villages through which you would need to pass before you could even ask the way. And if the villagers had never left the place they would not be of much help.

I still think there are big unanswered questions here. History shows that people did move about the country, sometimes in the case of armies in large numbers and I still have not seen a satisfactory answer to how they knew which way to go when their destination was five hundred miles away.

Cogitatingly yours


Rod
 

flecc

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Oct 25, 2006
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However I cannot subscribe to the theory that people just did not travel or if they did they went along sheep tracks.

Rod
The near universal "did not travel" I mentioned was for the period prior to Roman occupation when behaviours were very tribal, and just as in places like historic Africa and Indonesia with tribal territories, travel then was a threat to life and had no point. It's also true that the vast majority of the British population travelled hardly at all until the coming of the railways.

It's not theory that from Roman times travel was primarily on droving tracks for the simple reason that we still travel on them after surfacing them and calling them roads, plus of course travel on the few Roman roads. That's why so many of our roads still meander on winding routes over the countryside and so often have steep hills on them, road engineering playing no part in the original route.

Of course I was answering for individual travel, but had armies been mentioned I'd have pointed out that there were maps of varying crudeness in existence over the last 1000 years and for the last 900 years the whole country had been detailed within the Domesday book, parish by parish, all this information available to the privileged who declare our wars. Also I've no doubt the Roman roads were as useful to our medieval armies as they were to the Romans.
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Tiberius

Esteemed Pedelecer
Nov 9, 2007
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Somerset
Before the Romans there were established travel routes by land and sea. In Britain there was the Ridgeway, which served much the same purpose as the Fosse Way - linking the SW and NE coasts. But it wasn't so much a "road" as a preferred route that kept to high ground and out of the lowland forests.

As for navigation, since the Celts didn't write things down, I imagine you had to take a guide along who knew the route. He would have learned it from another guide.

What impresses me more is that there seems to have been a sea trade between Britain and the Mediterranean in those days.

Nick
 

flecc

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Oct 25, 2006
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Here below for example is a highly detailed map from circa 1300 which would have made it easily possible to know the way to Scotland and all the places en route for medieval army commanders.

Prior to 1000 year ago, wars were primarily between adjacent kingdoms so maps were not necessary. For example, the famous King Offa conquered Anglia, Sussex and Wessex, all three adjacent. No kings travelled the length of the country to wage war at the other end in those times.

Map from circa 1300

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