Second paragraph of third chapter:

If the buried won’t help us, perhaps the invisible can prove the way. Where the road has lost all substance we must call upon the boundaries of the land it travels through, because ‘a genuine ancient long-distance road is nearly always a parish boundary at least in places,’ claimed Margary.

Having greatly enjoyed Hadley’s Hollow Places, I was eager to catch up with this story of a single Roman road in Hertfordshire and Essex, running 22 km between the small towns of Braughing and Great Chesterford, and coded RR21b by the great Ivan Margary.

The book has roughly one page for each 70 metres of the actual road (depending whether or not you count the notes). For most of its length, the road has simply disappeared to the unaided eye, though cropmarks do show its presence as a straight line between two points. It appears to have cut directly across hills and valleys.

Hadley meditates on the effect of the road, and on its meaning, and speculates about how long it would have taken to construct – and also to destroy; he reckons that locals simply removed most of the stones from which it was made for building. This is a fairly quiet bit of English countryside, and possibly was at its busiest in Roman times.

The emphasis is on the Roman Empire, and how it affected Britain; and on tracing the records of RR21b in maps and elsewhere; and also on the fauna and flora that currently inhabit the fields through which it runs. It’s a great meditation on history and the countryside. With 340 pages (including notes and acknowledgements) that’s about one page for every 65 metres of the road. The illustrations are lovely, though I wish they had been labelled on each page rather than referenced in the endnotes. You can get The Road here.