Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. Weaving in culture and local history, plus countryside insights, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing read.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Christopher Hadley is a journalist and author writing at the murky, wonderful intersection of history and folklore.Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit.

A touchstone into one of the most fascinating periods in British and European history that still has resonance today. Although this book stuttered and stumbled at times - a bit like a traveller on The Road itself - I nevertheless found it of the greatest interest, full of information that would be hard to gain elsewhere.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. This is no dry and prosaic history, but a work of imagination and a deeply literary book… wonderful prose .

Some of Hadley’s most interesting comments are about ghost roads that no longer exist but which still serve part of their original function - no spoiler. 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.

It's not perfect, and there are definitely moments when Hadley loses control of his prose and both he and you get a bit lost. 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. And good for him and anyone who genuinely enjoys 275 pages of a bloke slipping into verse and panegyric over the remains of a road!

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. Then I realised that the last time I thought much about the subject was when I was at school in the 70s and my brother and I used to play with 1/72nd scale 'Romans and Britons'. 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. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. He explains how roads initially built by the Romans for military and strategic purposes became economic highways for spreading trade, especially in pottery, and ideas.Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. We all think we know about Roman roads because they are straight, but this book shows there is far more to them than that. Any shared joy I can glean - such as over the use of delightful antiquated words that are doubly delightful for their utter uselessness - feels somewhat unclean. 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. 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.