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

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It’s a meandering journey, journal, essay, something, written with that very specific British wanky-ness that some people just love.

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 41 CE. Then I became overwhelmed with the micro detail of the local landscape and although many of stories and folklore Hadley draws in are compelling, as a reader I ran out of steam! The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Christopher Hadley is a journalist and author writing at the murky, wonderful intersection of history and folklore.This is no dry and prosaic history, but a work of imagination and a deeply literary book… wonderful prose . Campaign roads rolled out to all points of the compass, forcing their way inland and as the Britons fell back, the roads pursued them relentlessly, carrying troops, supplies and military despatches. Temporary campaign roads followed, rolling out west towards Rochester and the first major battle at the Medway.

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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. For two thousand years they have determined the flow of ideas and folktales, where battles were fought and where pilgrims trod. 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. Loving The Road , [it’s] about a Roman road but also a rumination on the past and our relationship with it. I found the author's interpretation of a Boudican war origin for the fort at Great Chesterford of particular interest.

For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. 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. The joy of this book though is not simply to be found in how Hadley attempts to reconstruct the Roman past from trenches and ceramic shards buried in the landscape.Along the way we learn about how roads were sited, construction methods, how roads were used by and against (e. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. Whilst a portion of Hadley’s road appears at start of each new section, a fold out version which showed the entire road in a broader situational context would have been useful. 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.

For two thousand years, the roads the Romans built have determined the flow of ideas and folktales, where battles were fought and where pilgrims trod. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). 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. 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. Great book, engaging, thought provoking, interesting, informative and poetic - a connection with the past at a time when we need to remember that the past is still with us.Year after year the heavy clay swallowed whole lengths of it; the once mighty road became a bridleway, an overgrown hollow-way, a parched mark in the soil. 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. 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. 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.