This one came about in the usual circuitous manner.
I re-used that earlier post on Michael Pye's Antwerp on politics.ie site. The exchanges drifted onto how mediæval monasteries were roadhouses on cross-country travel.
A poster made what, for me, was a strange claim: Europe's road network was near non-existent, and long journeys were dangerous. That begs the question: how soon did those Roman roads fall into disuse?
I take a passing interest in that, for my home cottage is none too far from the A19 from York to Thirsk — and that, once upon a far distant time was how the Roman legionaries and auxiliaries tramped from Eboracum's Porta Dextra to Cataractonium (Catterick) and the Roman Wall.
The Itinerarium Antonini (the Antonine Itinerary) is a listing of the major Roman roads of Augustus's Empire, and lists some fifteen main roads, two thousand miles, across Britannia.
As Chesterton said:
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
They weren't English: those Mesolithic track-makers came along eleven millennia ago. Perhaps here I reach for David Miles, The Tribes of Britain — or, better, leave that for another occasion. Whoever they were, they filled the landscape, and must have got around somehow. One of those ways, though not necessarily as claimed 'the oldest road' would have been the Ridgeway:
If these routes pre-dated the Romans (as is generally agreed), they certainly took back their significance after Roman power in Britain fell.
Henry of Huntingdon was commissioned (1129-30) by Bishop
Alexander of Lincoln to compile a
Historia Anglorum. Henry identified four royal highways:
- Ermine Street, from Bishopsgate to Lincoln, and onto York;
- Fosse Way, from Exeter to Lincoln;
- Watling Street, from the Channel ports in Kent, via Westminster, to Utoxeter on the Welsh border;
and
- Icknield Way, the line of the chalk escarpment that runs from Norfolk to Salisbury.
You may remember that this post was instigated by European history, not merely English. And that I'm not convinced mediæval routes across Europe were there to get from one Cistercian house to the next. More that the Cistercians needed to move their fleeces and sites their monasteries in good dsheep country, but also convenient to transport.
All this brought me to:
19: Graham Robb: The Ancient Paths.
This one, though, is a bit of a lost soul: it wanders from travel (above right shoulder) to ancient European history (sort of near left side) as it feels appropriate.
I reckon that's because I haven't quite nailed down what I think of this book.
Its subtitle is Discovering the Lost Maps of Celtic Europe. For me, it's all a trifle too 'New Age-ist' — especially when he constructs a whole nexus of oh-so-precise geometrical connections. Try this one (page 275 in my paperback):
Hmm: too convenient, think you?
So I'm not leaping to accept Robb's thesis of a Road to the End of the Earth following a solstitial line, bearing 57.53° east of north from sunrise through the Alps at the Col de Montgenèvre, near Briançon, all the way to sunset at Cabo de São Vicente.
I don't chase ley-lines; but cannot avoid the 'sense of the numinous'. The trend in the 1920s was to look for spiritual markers. Alfred Watkins was the prime-mover in Britain. Wilhelm Teudt and his similar „Heilige Linien" were doing something adjacent in Germany — but that was absorbed into the Völkisch movements, all that went with them, and so into post-War disrepute.
I am, though, prepared to accept that our Celtic (and Germanic) illiterate forbears were (in every sense) crafty, and used 'natural knowledge'. Then, again, I've read too much Arthur C Clarke not to apply his apothegm, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And yet ... and yet ...
Even before Rome, there were tracks across Europe. They may have been seasonal (what wasn't?); but all the evidence is they were there. Some were transactional (something as universally essential as salt needed to be moved): others seem to have particular and spiritual significance.
The Camino de Santiago — the path to Compostela — follows the Callis Ianus. That notion stems from a belief there was a cult of Ianus as far back as pre-Roman times. Ianus gets absorbed into the classical pantheon as the two-faced door-keeper of the classical gods — but curiously takes precedence in some prayers: Livy's History of Rome, Bk 8, chap 6, has the priest invoke:
Ianus, Jupiter, Father Mars, Quirinus, Bellona, Lares, divine Novensiles, divine Indigites, ye gods in whose power are both we and our enemies, and you, divine Manes, — I invoke and worship you, I beseech and crave your favour, that you prosper the might and the victory of the Roman People of the Quirites.
Ianus is the deity of 'beginnings' (January, anyone?) and so, inevitably, of endings. That's where we are all travelling: visit headlands facing the sunset, and spot the pre-historic burial grounds: the Celts and Scots chose Iona. All the pilgrim need do was follow the sunset to the 'field of stars' (campus stellae, in case you miss the significance).
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