Sir,—Most readers of Mr. Belloc’s book and Captain Grant’s book criticising it will agree with your reviewer that the valuable part of the latter is the twenty-one pages of information at the end and not the sixty-one pages devoted to slating Mr. Belloc.
Both writers have made a real advance in the attitude towards Roman roads in England by laying stress upon the fact that they are based on sighted alignments, and Captain Grant recognises that such alignments might have been for very long distances—as I know for a fact that they were in many cases.
But Mr. Belloc, Captain Grant, previous writers, and critics will all have to face the fact that they have started their investigations on an assumption so fundamentally wrong that a recognition of the true starting point makes their conclusions of little value.
The false basis is that the Romans found no systematically organised tracks or roads when they came, and started afresh to make entirely new roads on entirely new lines.
The true basis is that the Romans found on landing that Britain was covered by a network of trackways made on accurately sighted alignments, sighted ages before, over artificial sighting points, such as mounds, moats, groves, and camps on high points, mark-stones, &c. I have found in my own district a great mass of evidence proving this, and the fact is being confirmed by observers in other districts.
In my own district also, where we have many short lengths of Roman roads, I find clear evidence that some at least of these are planted on prehistoric alignments which continue through prehistoric sighting points beyond their Roman use.
I have no opportunity to investigate Stane Street. But my ordnance maps give prima-facie evidence that several of the sections reputed to compose it are sighted on prehistoric tracks. Both writers give indications of this, but have not followed it up. Borough Hill, for example, which both agree to be the point where two alignments meet, must be so called from an ancient barrow on it. Recognise this new basis and many puzzles clear up. The prehistoric surveyors who sighted up the stretch from Chichester to PoolboroughPulborough Bridge (which seems to be sighted from St. Catherine’s Head, Isle of Wight) went so much to the east because they did not aim to go to London at all. Probably there was no London and no Chichester when the track was first aligned, and it is preserved because of the good and long wearing stone surface which the Romans laid on it.
It is, I should point out, absurd to treat low-lying points as Chichester and London Bridge as being terminals of an alignment. Hill points are essential.
It is also unsound to assume that all bits of road bearing the generic name of Stane Street must be part of one
individual road. There is a Stone Street south of Canterbury, we have another in this district, together with other bits
of Roman road genuinely called Watling Street and Ermin Street. But none of these
are the same roads as those of the same names near London. The Romans used sighting methods, but in the main their roads
in England are an expediency patchwork on old sighted tracks.—Yours, &c.,
Alfred Watkins.
Hereford, February 1st, 1923.
Source info: Journal title and date in cutting.