A map of the Roman Britain shows that all the major towns and cities, sometimes hundreds of miles apart, were connected by a network of very direct/straight roads. Laying out the route for a straight path over a short distance can be done with taut string or for slightly longer distances by sighting along a line of poles. But clearly that is impossible for long distances across country where one cannot see from one end to the other. So how did the Romans survey the route for their roads to get them so straight/direct over long distances?



The only route of a Roman road with which I have some familiarity is Stane Street which runs from London to Chichester (Noviomagnus) on the South Coast. The road is only about 80 miles long but has to cross five lines of hills: the North and South Downs, and concentrically within them the North and South Greensand ridges of the Weald, and in the middle the central spine of the High Weald. Accordingly Stane Street does a couple of dog-legs firstly to take advantage of the gorge of the River Mole cutting through the North Downs adjacent to Box Hill at Mickelham, and then further south to use easy crossings of the River Arun in the vicinity of Pulborough and to follow a lower gradient route over the South Downs than would be needed by the direct route. But between these two fixed points and on towards the final destinations, the sections are remarkably straight, and overall the road is close to the direct line (nowhere is further than 6 miles from the direct line), despite being crossed by lines of hills and in the central portion, even now, being mostly covered in dense oak forest. In short you cannot get a clear line of sight for more than a few miles along the majority of the route. Stane Street is one of the shorter Roman roads in Britain and as I've said is actually sub-divided into three sections between the four fixed points (the ends and the two river gaps/crossings). The problems would be considerably more difficult over some of the longer distances elsewhere in Britain and throughout the Empire.

   

Without telescopic sights combined with a precisely graduated means to measure angles (ie basically a theodolite) the only way I can see to survey such long routes would be to raise tall markers every few miles, maybe less if you can put them on prominent hills, and then go back and forth along the whole line adjusting the position of these beacons  until each successive group of at least three were aligned, and so eventually the whole section would be straightened. But that's an awful lot of trial and error and still potentially prone to considerable error. Is that the way it was done or did they have some other method?

MM, you may be interested in this PDF document Roman Surveying which outlines the techniques used in grand engineering feats, including road location, that we can deduce from the scant records left by the lads themselves.

They were brilliant in both algebra and trigonometry, and both were used to amazingly great effect given that they were restricted to naked eye range when calculating projections of straight roads (and aqueducts which posed an even greater challenge as even slight deviations from the straight and narrow were horrendously expensive to incorporate into the design and structure). They didn't have calculus though - a legacy of their Euclidian mathematical principles inherited from the Greeks (who in turn had formulated them based on Egyptian practices).

The road they laid out from Rome to Terracina (90km) is still bloody impressive. It's part of the Appian Way and absolutely straight the entire run - most of it is still in use today, traversing hill and swampland along the way.

Adam Hart-Davies did a programme on this in "What the Romans did for Us" about a decade or so ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUoSO5Rip7I - I have linked to the YouTube video of part I of the relevant programme about roads - the "how" bit is roughly at 4.00 mins in - might be a little before.

The Groma seems to have been the basic Roman surveying tool;

Groma

The Groma was an absolute must for working out right-angled intersections. Not much use however when plotting a straight road over rough terrain for miles on end. That's where the trigonometry kicked in, and lots of string. There's some debate about chains having been used - they definitely knew how to make them to a high standard - though just lugging them about in the quantities/lengths required would have probably meant they were impractical apart from during urban surveying - streets and alleys and the like. That's where you'd have seen a lot of Gromas too, I reckon.

Another link:

Roman Road Building

Thanks for all those links.

So yes I was basically right in thinking that it was essentially a method of 'trial and error' (although that expression rather fails to do justice to the sophistication of the technique) in that it required the intermediate markers to be adjusted back and forth until all were precisely aligned using the groma as a sighting device (and which, although simple and rather dismissed by Nordmann, would I'd have thought still be pretty good at getting alignment over a distance of a few miles). Like Adam Hart-Davis I'd rather thought that in practice it must have been done by stationing a surveyor at each intermediate marker to allow each subgroup of markers to be adjusted essentially simultaneously, and that of course means that there must have been a system for communicating between positions (ie "left, left, left ...stop ... right a bit ... stop. Mark!" etc), such as by semaphore, to communicate to the adjacent positions which might be a few miles away and so outside of vocal range. Interesting that Adam Hart-Davis says records suggest Roman surveyors could typically map out a mile of road every 3 to 4 days, which I reckon is pretty good going even when compared to a modern surveyor armed with a theodolite and GPS.

What I hadn't realised until I read Normann's link was that Romans also surveyed by creating a base grid and using angular measurements and trigonometry (which as Nordmann says is generally a more accurate method than just using linear alignment). I'd rather thought that this method only came into use sometime around the 16th century. But of course it really only needs a knowledge of Pythagoras, Euclidean triangular geometry and the ability to divide a circle into sufficiently small angular increments (Babylonian mathematics) all of which were well known to the Romans. And, now I think about it, accurate angular measurment must have been well understood by them as they routinely were able to build aquaducts running for many miles with a constant slight gradient.

I am however still intrigued how the Romans dealt with division. They could perform division by a method of proportions, but I feel they could only have expressed the results in terms of the summation of simple fractions (as I think the Greeks did), as, having no understanding of a floating decimal point, zero and place notation, they couldn't write decimals ... but that is another point entirely.

Division was a process of multiple subtraction of the divisor from the total having removed all the subtractives from the numeric expressions in use. This is necessary to ensure the comparative size is understood and the sum worth even starting. After that it's pure agony - especially with high values. Here's a good example from a tutorial:



There was evidence found on Crete, I remember, that caused great excitement when I was there in the 1980s as it seemed to indicate the Minoans understood zero and base ten calculation, and this even led to conjecture that this was so useful a knowledge that it could never have just disappeared, and therefore even the Romans had access through certain slaves to it - in fact it might even have been the arcane basis of certain religious cults throughout Greek and Roman times. One inscription found in Rome scratched by an architect on a stone foundation wall seems to employ Roman numerals along with other symbols in a calculation showing the radius and pitch of a vaulted dome ceiling. The calculation, if the other symbols are ascribed numeric values, still only makes sense in decimal. I'll see can I find it somewhere.

Yes doing division long-hand on paper using Roman numerals is very tedious ... but in practice I think most Roman calculations would have been done using a type of abacus or reckoning board. The typical Greek and Roman abacus had balls moving in grooves, or more simply could be just loose pebbles placed in grooves scratched in the dirt ... doesn't the word 'calculation' derive from calx, the Latin for a pebble?



But the problem with Roman numerals is how one expresses the answer ... ie how one writes it down or tries to communicate it to someone else.

For example, what's 562 divided by 84 (or DLXII divided by LXXXIV)? In decimal notation the answer is simply expressed as 6.7276

But using either an abacus or the above long division method you still end up with an answer of 6 with 61 remaining (ie 6 and 61 84ths). Intuitively that's somewhere between six and two-thirds, and, six and three-quarters ... and so it can be expressed as six and two-thirds and a bit. Alternatively, as Romans were used to using twelths, unciae, in weights, lengths and currency (hence ounce, inch and the uncia coin of the republican era), they might have preferred to express the answer in terms of twelths ... so somewhere between six and eight-twelths, and, six and nine-twelths, giving exactly the same answer as above but now expressed as six and eight-twelths and a bit.

To be completely accurate, if one is to express the remainder in terms of the summation of 'standard' fractions, one has to express the answer as six and one-third and one-quarter and one-seventh (and it's no easier to express even using the Babylonian base-60 number system).

That's a fairly easy calculation and the answer can be expressed accurately using simple fractions all of whose denominators are less than ten. But what about more complex calculations and those whose answers are irrational numbers (eg the hypoteneuse of a right-angled triangle whose other two sides are each one unit long, or the circumference of a circle measuring one unit across the diameter)?

But we are drifting a bit 'off road'.

Meles meles wrote:

But the problem with Roman numerals is how one expresses the answer ... ie how one writes it down or tries to communicate it to someone else.

It's a good question, and the simple answer - especially with complicated fractions - is probably that they just didn't bother, at least using rudimentary notation. Geometry threw up the challenge repeatedly and mathematics wasn't always up to the task of expressing it. A lot of the "golden ratio"  stuff, for example, at least as it applied to building design and scaling up from rudimentary plans etc, was probably down to a need to avoid such complicated calculations, and one could even say - looking at the extant evidence - that Greek and Roman engineering (especially the Roman version) were prime examples of the KISS* principle in action.

But still you can't get away from the fact that along the way they developed a huge proficiency in theoretical projection when faced with massive engineering tasks which have - quite literally - stood the test of time. Stress distribution, material strength, "invisible structure" composition and design (such as foundations to roads and monumental buildings), and all the other aspects to these huge engineering undertakings, were obviously accurately calculated in their projection at the planning stage, and one must assume quite adequately expressed also to those involved in getting the thing done.

We are definitely missing something if, as with the Romans, we assume that everything we would quite reasonably insist should be expressed numerically today would have been necessarily expressed solely using their rudimentary numeric notations then. They must have used other means to compensate for the limitations of their standard notation system.

Mary Beard in one of her books referred to a grave inscription from Rome which went along the lines of "Josephus Bloggus, Master Builder. We didn't understand him, but we liked him". It could mean anything, I suppose, but I like to think it gives us a clue that these guys had developed an arcane language of mathematics unique to their profession. It's no accident, it seems, that "masons" took on the reputation for cultishness for millennia afterwards that they did.

*"Keep It Simple, Stupid!"

I was not by any means belittling the Romans for their inadequate maths, quite the contrary in fact, I stand in awe of what they (and other ancient peoples) achieved with the limitations of their number systems.

But actually I think your comment does correctly highlight the fact that "maths" isn’t just about numbers and calculations, and indeed that mathematical relations are so fundamental (I want to write true or pure but I fear that might be seen as a bit pretentious) that one can actually "do" maths in all sorts of different ways. Like a typical Roman carpenter, I mark out a metre long plank to be cut into 3 pieces by measuring 33cm "and a tad" (the fraction over isn't significant so there's no need to deal with irrational numbers), but if dividing a plank into two I rarely even measure it at all but rather just find the midpoint of balance.

I suspect that the Roman method of designing and constructing big civil engineering projects was much like the medieval mason’s approach when putting up a cathedral or similar large building, in that it was all done with scaling dividers and templates, with very little need to do any numerical calculations or write down any actual numbers.

For example medieval cathedrals are often typically 12 units long and 2 wide, with  the square tower (2x2) built above sections 7 and 8 which divides the total length into a nave 6 units long and an apse 4 units long. The relative dimensions  2:4:6:8:12 of course conform to Pythagoean philosophical ideas of "perfect" ratios, but more practically the whole floor plan requires no numerical measuring (it is independent of measuring system) and can be laid out using just string and pegs (even to get perfect right angles and a straight alignment). When it comes to doing medieval arches and even exquisitely beautiful and functional things like rib and fan vaults … again the whole lot can be sketched out on the design board using just a straight edge and a compass, then scaled up to full-size part drawings using scaling dividers, and finally these drawings used to create wooden templates to guide the masons in carving the individual blocks. Essentially one can build a cathedral, such as Chartres or York, without needing a graduated tape measure or doing any "sums" at all. The written records generally bear out the fact that the actual number crunching for such a project was usually limited to matters of how many carts were needed to move the required quantity of stone, and how much ale would be needed for the carters. Plus of course how much it would all cost!

Meles meles wrote:

I was not by any means belittling the Romans for their inadequate maths

Me neither, but it does have to be said that their notation system, while perfectly adequate for accountancy purposes (99% of its use, most likely) was woefully inadequate when it came to philosophical conjecture - probably as pithy a summary of the difference between Roman and Greek values as any other that can be found. There is no Roman equivalent, for example, of that famous debate (which we believe raged for nearly a hundred years) regarding how many grains of sand would it take to fill the universe and which occupied the greatest Greek thinkers of the period. While it sounds rather stupid a thing to quibble about, for these guys it had almost as much to do with challenging existing methods of counting and measuring as any great desire to find a definitive answer.

The two most famous participants in the great debate were Apollonius of Perga and Archimedes. Both were hamstrung by the Greek numeric system - essentially the Roman one but with more succinct a use of alphabetic symbols and even with an occasional zero when things got really hairy and conjectural - so that they, like all who contributed to the debate, each felt obliged to come up with a practical way of extending the counting system so that absolutely huge amounts could be logically represented without using up all the papyrus in the world just to write one answer down.

A guy called Aristarchus got the ball rolling when he devised a shorthand method of writing large numbers by placing a value set combination, represented by existing symbols for lower ordinance values, over another - so that M (being the "myriad", or 10,000, which was one iota above the largest "useful" number) with "PKG" over it, for example, became 1,230,000. This introduction of "forms" which opened the door to astronomical values being expressible, was probably what kick-started the "sand in the universe" debate too, but what Aristarchus's system still could not solve was the problem of how to express the really really REALLY big stuff, the very stuff astronomical debate still challenges mathematicians to express cogently today.

Archimedes, we know now, hit on the best answer. However being Archimedes he kept it pretty much to himself and so fifty years later it was Apollonius who got the credit for combining the "forms" symbolism (hitherto a "times" value added to the base value below) with the "power" concept. Now the qualifier could be used to express "to the power of" and the liberation of numerics from purely sequential representation was complete.

You can see why they raved about Apollonius from this remnant we have of his work:



This uses the simple formula "10,000 = 10 to power of 4" as its basis for employing the symbols already familiar to everyone in a new way. Archimedes, struggling with an even greater total to express, quite independently developed a "100,000,000 = 10 to the power of 8" raised to powers as his basis for reinterpreting the existing symbols. It also allowed him therefore to say with no fear of contradiction that the number of grains of sand which could fit in the universe was 10 to the power of 64, or as he would have said "of the order of the eighth octet".

While all this sounds very theoretical and esoteric, it is still worth noting that the medieval cathedral builders you mention, who may indeed as you say have worked as much using visual and tactile escalation methods as mathematical modelling in their projections, could well have benefited from using Archimedes' methods of calculation and expression when projecting stress, weight and mass in their designs. Unfortunately - even with their superior arithmetical tools - they worked for an employer who still officially discouraged anyone from thinking in really high numbers, especially ones which might be used to quantify or get to grips with (and thereby remove the divine mystery from) the extent and nature of God's universe. The resulting catastrophic disasters, when they occurred, were instead used in a "trial and error" approach to future projects, elongating the whole process by centuries and ensuring the worshippers' fatalities themselves became mere integers in that process, a candid and telling admission of a value system which - at least as expressed through its mathematics - itself could be traced back to Roman roots and which ultimately elevates accountancy above all else. At least no one had to die working out the grains of sand thingy.

Back to the roads: MM, this short paper has a good stab at working out how the Romans overcame the limitations of their principal tool, the Groma, in extending its accuracy beyond its main function - surveying of camps, urban quarters, and similar enclosures: How did the Romans achieve straight roads? by Richard J. Hucker

He mentions the Dioptra, the true precursor of the theodolite, but is understandably vague about its precise use. Its application in aqueduct building is well understood, its usefulness in two plains having been documented by the Romans themselves. However the same logic used to deduce consistent height could also be used to calculate depth and this might have been crucial in the initial survey of a planned route when assessing hilly terrain and the materials required to traverse steep valleys. Using triangulation and with sufficient time to plan before actual construction the Dioptra could well have been the most important tool in calculating the longest possible distances traversable in absolutely straight lines and then staking them out. Once under construction the Groma would certainly have come into its own in keeping each new stretch in line with the one before.

In heavily wooded terrain the Dioptra also had a crucial function. The erection of a very high sighting pole over the treeline could be used through triangulation as an "absolute point" of reckoning not only for distance but also to ascertain the true topography of the concealed ground within its radius of sight. One needed a good grasp of geometry to work out gradient, true height and depth, so whoever used it must have been considered something of an elite amongst surveyors. Anyone with good eyesight and minumum training could operate a Groma, but the Dioptra techies must surely have commanded a high fee, especially if they succeeded in linking two Roman forts in an absolutely straight line - the main purpose of the bulk of road building in conquered territories. Being some of the first on the scene after conquest must have also placed them into the "danger money" category too in many instances.

The fact that so few illustrations of their mechanics during Roman times exist points to a deliberate policy of classifying their use as "secret" in a military intelligence sense. But it is reckoned they had come a long way from their original Greek astronomical measurement use and were probably as sophisticated as they would remain until superseded by the theodolite much later.

Someone's guess:

Meles meles wrote:

Without telescopic sights combined with a precisely graduated means to measure angles (ie basically a theodolite) the only way I can see to survey such long routes would be to raise tall markers every few miles, maybe less if you can put them on prominent hills, and then go back and forth along the whole line adjusting the position of these beacons  until each successive group of at least three were aligned, and so eventually the whole section would be straightened. But that's an awful lot of trial and error and still potentially prone to considerable error.

Roman road building would indeed have been a case of trial and error in its initial phases. Only when the starting point and the ending point had been decided upon and then linked could any straightening have been attempted. The roads would literally have been works in progress for quite a while before finally being hardened – and even then there would have been subsequent fine tuning and maintenance.

Once the 2 ends of a stretch of road had been confirmed and linked to, however, it would have been relatively easy using polar and solar positioning to accurately straighten the road as is noted in the essays by Isaac Moreno Gallo and Richard J Hucker provided by nordmann. The Roman use of the gnomon (sundial) afforded them a very high degree of precision in terms of initial topographical surveying.

Several years ago I remember pondering this very issue after being almost blinded by the sunset one December afternoon while driving south-west on the A429 between Warwick and Cirencester. By chance on that particular day the sun seemed to be setting at exactly the point where that dead strait road met the horizon. Needless to say that the A429 follows a long section of Fosse Way the ancient Roman road between Lincoln and Exeter.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Adam Hart-Davies did a programme on this in "What the Romans did for Us" about a decade or so ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUoSO5Rip7I    - I have linked to the YouTube video of part I of the relevant programme about roads - the "how" bit is roughly at 4.00 mins in - might be a little before.

Lady,

I watched it too in the time and wanted to reply it now, while I was on holiday this weekend, but you were the first:


Kind regards, Paul.

Great minds think alike obviously PR - couldn't possibly be fools seldom differing, could it.

When I was at primary school I remember one book about English grammar (though they didn't call it that at primary level) having a list of proverbs or sayings and "Great minds think alike" and "Fools seldom differ were placed one under the other.

This isn’t a comment on what testing qualifications (in any) there should be for nonagenarian drivers wishing to drive powerful vehicles such as the Land Rover Discovery. It’s more to do with the idea of the low winter sun dazzling a driver on a British road. Part of the A149 (Norfolk Coast Road) follows the route of earlier Roman roads although probably not the section where Thursday’s crash took place. That said – almost parallel to the A149 is another Roman road in west Norfolk, the Peddars Way, which is famous as a road to nowhere but in Roman times went to Branodunum (Brancaster) an important fort on the Saxon Shore.

Today the Peddars Way forms part of a marvellous network of long distance footpaths:

Walk straight into Boudicca’s territory

Now as we enter the Quickening, i.e. about 3 to 5 weeks after mid-winter when there is a noticeable lengthening in the days, and in the interests of public safety, maybe the Baron Greenwich should consider leaving the 4x4 in the garage and instead take advantage of some of the most delightful walking, cycling and bridleway routes to be found anywhere in England.

Vizzer wrote:

This isn’t a comment on what testing qualifications (in any) there should be for nonagenarian drivers wishing to drive powerful vehicles such as the Land Rover Discovery. It’s more to do with the idea of the low winter sun dazzling a driver on a British road. Part of the A149 (Norfolk Coast Road) follows the route of earlier Roman roads although probably not the section where Thursday’s crash took place. That said – almost parallel to the A149 is another Roman road in west Norfolk, the Peddars Way, which is famous as a road to nowhere but in Roman times went to Branodunum (Brancaster) an important fort on the Saxon Shore.

Today the Peddars Way forms part of a marvellous network of long distance footpaths:

Walk straight into Boudicca’s territory

Now as we enter the Quickening, i.e. about 3 to 5 weeks after mid-winter when there is a noticeable lengthening in the days, and in the interests of public safety, maybe the Baron Greenwich should consider leaving the 4x4 in the garage and instead take advantage of some of the most delightful walking, cycling and bridleway routes to be found anywhere in England.

Vizzer,

thank you for your message about the "Peddars Way"
"almost parallel to the A149 is another Roman road in west Norfolk, the Peddars Way, which is famous as a road to nowhere but in Roman times went to Branodunum (Brancaster) an important fort on the Saxon Shore."
As I did some research about the location...you don't believe it, but I had to seek where Norfolk was located (With Belgium is it easy you have the Ardennes and the northern lowland )
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/why-the-romans-built-a-road-to-nowhere-1-689098
But there seems to be some controversy about the "roman":
http://www.heritage.norfolk.gov.uk/record-details?MNF3082-Stone-Road-a-possible-Roman-road&Index=2867&RecordCount=56881&SessionID=c9fb6498-a307-49cb-a09c-d8d27e34e5d6

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peddars_Way
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branodunum


Kind regards from Paul.

I'll see can I find the guy's name, but I remember reading in a journal many years ago a summary of a study of Roman roads throughout Europe that had been produced by an Irish historian whose own area of expertise was the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age in Ireland. What got him interested in this seemingly unrelated field was the claim, generally regarded as a truism, that Roman roads were typified by their straight trajectories, when it didn't take a hawk-eye to spot on European ordnance survey maps indicating these routes that they were anything but straight in the main. While some terrain simply could not lend itself to ever accommodating a straight road without engineering capabilities well exceeding those available to the Romans, other meandering routes were harder to understand, especially in places like Southern Germany, for example, where these roads acted as conduits for rapid military deployment to some very volatile areas (later the "Limes" as defined by Hadrian) over several centuries. Having worked their arduous and circuitous ways through the mountainous terrain of Cis- and Trans-Alpine Gaul, he imagined Roman engineers would have revelled in at last hitting relatively flat land in the approaches to the Rhine and spared no expense in ensuring that these routes at least would be as straight as possible. In the Eastern empire, he noticed, the Romans had certainly adopted this engineering strategy when building military highways across mountainous barriers and then hitting level ground between there and the equally volatile and soldier-hungry Persian borders. However in Germany this simply wasn't the case.

When he looked closer at this apparent anomaly he began to notice something else that was worth investigating, he reckoned. When one eliminated possible topographical changes over time (such as land now well-drained which then might have been marsh, dense forest, etc), and when one took into account that roads simply often had to take sudden detours to accommodate arrival at fordable rivers that nowadays are crossed quite easily by bridge at umpteen locations, one was left with a concentration of these apparently arbitrary meandering routes in certain areas which, at different times over many centuries, came within Roman political orbit.

What these areas had in common was that under Roman occupation these areas, sometimes quite large, very often occupied  the "space" between large concentrations of villas. When he checked this against British records he found this pattern even more pronounced and easier to see. Whereas we are inclined to think in modern terms that the the most important and best engineered routes connect towns and cities, in the Roman system this was not the case, and we often find after excavation that some incredibe expense and labour had been expended on building, mettling, and maintaining routes between points that cannot be readily understood as having been of military or urban prominence.

The key, he reckoned, to understanding these meandering but very well built roads was in the villa locations - not necessarily because villas contributed hugely to Roman coffers (though some assuredly did), but because the villas, operating as large horticultural, agricultural and industrial complexes, had been situated by the Romans in exactly the same locations their predecessors had also identified as fit for such purpose, mainly suitable for intensive arable use and situated ideally close to raw materials for industrial processing.

However what these sites also had in common, he noticed, was that those living there immediately prior to Roman occupation were also people who had linguistically retained more of the proto-celtic (as defined in modern linguistics) tongue in their various regional vernacular languages. This distinction pre-dates other linguistic "splits" such as between Brittonic and Goidelic "Celtic" for example, and is generally assumed to indicate a much older diversification in Europe, proto-Celtic having survived longest among people who, in the main, adopted the same subsistence standards and methods, often persevering with these in very stable societies right up into the Iron Age and Roman intervention.

One notable characteristic of this culture was their semi-nomadic lifestyle, and the most important elements of that lifestyle - their staple diets, their economic currency, their measure of power and prestige, their inclination to settle and/or move on, their tribal identities - were all defined by and combined within one single commodity, the cow.

In Ireland the importance of giant herds of cattle as a principal aspect of Iron Age society is well understood, as is also the fact that the first great cross-country routes were established first and foremost to accommodate the movement of these herds (the Irish for "road" is still "bóthair" - literally "cow way"). Which is where the Roman roads comes in ...

When cattle are left to find their own migration routes (and the same is true today with reindeer herds in northern Scandinavia), they have particular tendencies which engineers may never consider when establishing a route for a road to be used by humans. The terrain they tend to choose as favourite ideally contains several features - ample grazing potential being an obvious one, but also water table levels which ensure sufficient spring activity without quickly degenerating into a morass when traversed by several thousand tons of bovine itinerants. Sharp inclines are tackled only if necessary, and level ground is preferred over declines of any gradient. However both are negotiated if necessary, for example if representing the shortest route between two areas of good grazing/drinking potential. Dense woodland is not the barrier one would expect from modern observation of cattle, though tackled normally only by large herds under strong leadership and, once tackled, very liable to become a favourite route afterwards for herds that come later - the path being self-evident proof of earlier success in getting from A to B.

When all of these apparently anomalous routes, some of which the Romans invested hugely in maintaining, were examined in this study, they did often indeed tick all these boxes based primarily on their typical locations and in the clusters in which they're found - the culture of their pre-Roman occupants as well as their easily demonstrated appeal to bovines on the hoof. What the Romans obviously quickly understood when they came to absorb them into their network and improve on them in engineering terms, was that these routes inevitably connected sites of established agricultural worth and economic potential, and that they were guaranteed to run on very sturdy foundations.

Just for the record - driven herds, like Romans, also like straight lines once the terrain is suitable by their own reckoning (check out the Bealach Laigheann in Ireland - the "Leinster Way"). So even some of the much lauded "straight as a dye" Roman creations may owe less to the groma and the "surveyor's eye", and more to one particular animal's unerring natural ability always to score a "bull's eye" when plotting a route.

nordmann,

thank you very much for this interesting mentioning of quite a logical approach of that Irish historian. As usual well brought by you and I read it paragraph pro paragraph. I tried to find something on the internet with all kind of your mentioned combination, but the only entry that I found was this:
https://northstoke.blogspot.com/2008/04/
under "Roads and Rivers"
"One of the things noted by historians in this part of the country, is the fact that when the romans colonised Britain, great tracts of land such as Salisbury Plain and Cranbourne Chase, were farmed as Imperial Estates. They were there to feed the soldiers and perhaps export the food back to the continent. After all, as Caesar says, they came to Britain for our corn, dogs, horses and cloth. Roads were built and sited on particular landmarks such as barrows, in all probability some of the Roman roads followed the old prehistoric tracks, that in turn would have gone past prehistoric stones, barrows and natural shrines, water being an obvious stopping place, especially when that water had some sort of unusual strange power, the meeting of two rivers, a waterfall, etc.. The Romans invoked their own gods at these places, but also included the resident native gods as well."
I didn't found anything in this book:
https://archive.org/stream/phasesofirishhis00macn/phasesofirishhis00macn_djvu.txt

Kind regards from Paul.

Yes - his ideas were maverick (pardon the pun) ...

When it comes to the development of road networks, Ireland falls into a European category that includes areas such as Northern Scotland, Norway, Sweden, and several other places that the Romans never reached and which, even when they developed rudimentary early towns and cities, relied on maritime routes much more than overland connections when people and goods needed to travel regularly between them. This is not to say that roads - even some very well built and maintained ones - didn't develop as far back as the Iron Age in these places, but what marks them out as being of special historical interest is that the raison d'etre for having a road, as well as its function, route and design, tended to persist right up to the early Middle Ages, in Ireland's case right up until English colonisation of the territories (surviving in fact right through the "Norman Conquest" of Ireland in many areas). A road connecting two destinations in any country, when one thinks about it, involves a huge social commitment in terms of finance and labour that in turn implies an economy and social structure akin to modern "nation states" in terms of sophistication before even contemplation of such commitment might arise. What is always true however is that any road built to connect two areas must deliver some mutual benefit to both, or else if it doesn't must represent a viable tool of exploitation being exerted by one area over the other. Either raison d'etre involves the need for some form of measuring worth - be it of the benefit accrued to both parties at each end of the route or to the exploiter sitting at one point of termination. In Ireland this currency happens to have been cattle right up to the age of Viking settlement, and away from the coast this rather fundamental and basic measure of wealth (persisting in Breton Law right up to its replacement by English statutes in the 15th and 16th centuries), even as it grew less relevant in strict economic terms, was still the major (almost sole) element responsible for the road network topography of the land. So much so in fact that it is still quite easy to see this imprint on any modern Irish ordnance survey map - the roads classified these days as "primary roads" (as opposed to motorways or "national routes") owing an almost complete debt for their existence to Iron Age cattle movement and which, rather tellingly, are not always guaranteed to terminate in an urban conurbation.

nordmann wrote:

Yes - his ideas were maverick (pardon the pun) ...

When it comes to the development of road networks, Ireland falls into a European category that includes areas such as Northern Scotland, Norway, Sweden, and several other places that the Romans never reached and which, even when they developed rudimentary early towns and cities, relied on maritime routes much more than overland connections when people and goods needed to travel regularly between them. This is not to say that roads - even some very well built and maintained ones - didn't develop as far back as the Iron Age in these places, but what marks them out as being of special historical interest is that the raison d'etre for having a road, as well as its function, route and design, tended to persist right up to the early Middle Ages, in Ireland's case right up until English colonisation of the territories (surviving in fact right through the "Norman Conquest" of Ireland in many areas). A road connecting two destinations in any country, when one thinks about it, involves a huge social commitment in terms of finance and labour that in turn implies an economy and social structure akin to modern "nation states" in terms of sophistication before even contemplation of such commitment might arise. What is always true however is that any road built to connect two areas must deliver some mutual benefit to both, or else if it doesn't must represent a viable tool of exploitation being exerted by one area over the other. Either raison d'etre involves the need for some form of measuring worth - be it of the benefit accrued to both parties at each end of the route or to the exploiter sitting at one point of termination. In Ireland this currency happens to have been cattle right up to the age of Viking settlement, and away from the coast this rather fundamental and basic measure of wealth (persisting in Breton Law right up to its replacement by English statutes in the 15th and 16th centuries), even as it grew less relevant in strict economic terms, was still the major (almost sole) element responsible for the road network topography of the land. So much so in fact that it is still quite easy to see this imprint on any modern Irish ordnance survey map - the roads classified these days as "primary roads" (as opposed to motorways or "national routes") owing an almost complete debt for their existence to Iron Age cattle movement and which, rather tellingly, are not always guaranteed to terminate in an urban conurbation.

nordmann,

thank you again for an insightful message.

"A road connecting two destinations in any country, when one thinks about it, involves a huge social commitment in terms of finance and labour that in turn implies an economy and social structure akin to modern "nation states" in terms of sophistication before even contemplation of such commitment might arise. What is always true however is that any road built to connect two areas must deliver some mutual benefit to both, or else if it doesn't must represent a viable tool of exploitation being exerted by one area over the other. Either raison d'etre involves the need for some form of measuring worth - be it of the benefit accrued to both parties at each end of the route or to the exploiter sitting at one point of termination. In Ireland this currency happens to have been cattle right up to the age of Viking settlement, and away from the coast this rather fundamental and basic measure of wealth (persisting in Breton Law right up to its replacement by English statutes in the 15th and 16th centuries), even as it grew less relevant in strict economic terms, was still the major (almost sole) element responsible for the road network topography of the land. So much so in fact that it is still quite easy to see this imprint on any modern Irish ordnance survey map - the roads classified these days as "primary roads" (as opposed to motorways or "national routes") owing an almost complete debt for their existence to Iron Age cattle movement and which, rather tellingly, are not always guaranteed to terminate in an urban conurbation."

While I was thinking about what you yesterday said and now confirmed with what you today mention here, I did some research, while I was yet from the BBC time intrigued by the Roman network in nowadays West Flanders on the West Flemish "zandrug" (I will seek for an English term: sand back? sand ridge?)
https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/002/212/651/RUG01-002212651_2015_0001_AC.pdf
See fig 11 on page 18
And it seems that the Roman roads are following preexisting roads and if I recall it well also to do with trade and cattle...will seek it all in depth tomorrow...

And I found the same picture also in this article:

https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_vla016200401_01/_vla016200401_01_0039.php

And I read already about Roman and Merovingian rests in Sint Andries Bruges along the "Zandstraat" and was wondering if I was crossing that "sand ridge" along the motorway Brussels Ostend from near Bruges on...my fuel consumption going up and then after Jabbeke decreasing again? And it seems to be "that" "sand ridge" still there after more than 2000 years and perhaps more...also everytime nearing Sint Michiels to Bruges that same sand ridge? A brick layer, who knew very well the topography of Bruges said to me that that was the highest point of Sint Michiels going over the Zandstraat...

See you tomorrow for further explanation...

Kind regards from Paul.

There is in a dense wood where we children knew of a Roman 'stade' post that came to   light by the edge of a track with seasonal  undergrowth die-back. The track follows a contour for miles   -  I spent ages following it on maps today until it links with a main road. The stone marker disappeared in the fifties and there is no record of anyone knowing what we thought we  did.  The track would have been much older than Roman. It is on what was once  the ridge edge of the last glacial flood line of the Thames land now rich farming valley land. There was a spring and a well - both unmarked on maps - deep in a dark glade and parts of the track were, for no reason I could deduce. very eerie.
This is an interesting thread that bears out much of what I have long deduced. This is a natural one that was possibly labour wrested in  parts. 
The British army did a lot of that in the foothills both for movement and laying water pipes. Being barely a cart width, the sheer drop on the off side of those is often many hundreds of feet..... hairy in places where rockfalls means a nervous clamber.

At the time the housing estate behind the house where I live (now) was still a cow pasture there was apparently a well there once (though I can't remember the well - it must have been filled in [for safety's sake I suppose] before my time).  I do remember the field though (building commenced there in 1966) - I used to pla there with some of the other neighbourhood children and pick buttercups and daisies to make chains when we were still 5, 6, 7 or thereabouts.  When I lived in London someone told me that East Ham High Street and its successor roads used were a route in use preceding the Roman invasion of Britain and that the route used to lead to a ford in the Thames.  I never did any independent checking to verify or disprove that assertion but it might make sense considering that before its embankment the Thames used to be much wider (and presumably shallower).

There may have been some discussion on the board previously about the Roman Road (it is called Roman Road) in Bow.  It seems to peter out at Parnell Road nowadays but I heard that it (the road) used to go further but the land around Stratford (atte Bow - not "upon Avon") the road traversed was very marshy so the route was moved to the road that has various names along its length "Mile End Road", "London Road", "Ilford High Road", "Romford Road" and so on.  I hadn't heard of the theory about routes following animal tracks but it is certainly plausible.

Addendum

nordmann I have now read the two articles that I mentioned before
https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/002/212/651/RUG01-002212651_2015_0001_AC.pdf
https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_vla016200401_01/_vla016200401_01_0039.php


of the first link: pagina 18 under picture 11.
These Roman roads likely go back on pre-Roman transport and trade routes. These were unhardened roads of earth, which were used for local needs. They were no part of a planned or systematic network.

Have you already heard about a "method of least cost path" which is used to test against other data as a tracè of toponyms...?

What strucks me, is that existing topographic elements as this higher level sand ridge was during the history ever and ever again a site inviting for settlement even from the stone age on...everywhere on the excavations for the Roman sites they found also items from the stone age, the iron and the bronze one....the seeking of the people through history for natural advantages to settle seems not to have changed even from the stone age on...?

Kind regards from Paul.

It's worth adding that the theory linking cattle routes to later Roman roads of course concerns only contiguous routes, often well engineered or at least very intelligently sited, and provenly maintained over very long distances and over many generations of human use, a part of the myth associated with Roman engineering being that Europe didn't have any established cross-country routes on that scale before Roman military mobility became the motive to build such impressively long roads (as indicated by the unequivocal dismissal of the existence of long routes in the article you quote, when in fact we have many archaeological evidences for their existence before Roman intervention, from as far afield as France and Romania). And though it is tempting to impulsively ascribe any long contiguous route that may have existed before the Romans to "trade" this isn't borne out necessarily by what we know about dispersal of goods and services via trade routes in Europe even as late as the Iron Age. While overland trade must of course have been a feature of pan-European society, the model of dispersal as deduced from archaeology seems to suggest organised, rapid and high-volume trade conducted primarily by sea and river, with overland trade much more typically modular, stop-start, and indicative of a dependency on many very localised trade "nodes" fluctuating wildly in significance over time, rather than the more stable economic inter-dependencies and mutually administered trade routes such as, for example, the "silk roads" in Asia, already long established in the same period, represented. However, though trade may or may not always have provided primary motivation for establishing and using such cross-territorial routes, it is undeniable that they existed in some form, and with some proven degree of maintenance and continuous utilisation, before the Romans ever first made their mark on the same landscape.

When it comes to shorter access roads then we are on much safer ground (pardon that pun too) when deducing a continuous use of particular ways and routes that had already long existed before Romans and others arrived on the scene later to utilise them, admittedly to greatly improve them on occasion in terms of engineering and integrating them into more developed and extensive networks.

But we can in fact go even further and refer archaeologically to many instances of incredibly well-engineered roads that were effectively abandoned in Roman times, mainly because their original raison d'etre disappeared with significant social changes at the end of the Iron Age. A particularly good example of these would be the ancient wooden causeways, often reinforced with impressive embankment techniques using transported material, constructed in Britain and Ireland in fenland and bog and which connected highly sophisticated communities for their age who, in the political and economic systems that prevailed at the time, pursued very viable existences as far as we can see from their archaeological remains. These only became non-viable, it appears, once a prevailing social order involving more and bigger centrally administered "kingdoms" became the norm, with all the implications this subsequently had for commerce, economy, defence, and the opportunity for local autonomy. This process played out over several centuries in Ireland, whereas in Britain the obsolescence of such communities was accelerated tremendously with the imposition of Roman control. However in both countries the well preserved remnants of these often impressively engineered structures represent some of the oldest roads ever found in Europe, one in Ireland even long pre-dating the Bronze Age, indicating further proof not only that the Romans in no way held exclusive patent on road construction innovation, but that they were bringing their own version of it into territories whose own period of such innovation was already several millennia old in some places, and in some notable cases showed technical prowess in overcoming topographical challenges that even the Romans would have found hard to emulate.

Oh, and another thing that often distinguishes these ancient wooden causeways - it should also be added - is their very impressive straightness over quite long distances.

nordmann,

thank you again for your daily enlightenment. I tried to read more about it but about land roads in the bronze age and earlier there seems to be not that much on the internet. I guess you have to go to the specialist literature...
About the Bronze Age I found and read this:
The political economy and metal trade in Bronze Age Europe
https://goo.gl/kUDt2k
Handbook to life in prehistoric Europe.
https://goo.gl/h6qTes

And yes I can understand that people could act as cattle, when they sought for the best way for their long distance trade as the amber trade...and as humans they could look to the sun as guide...and they could learn from each other...everytime tested and tested again...they needed not the Roman sophisticated hardware to direct the straightness of their roads..?

Kind regards from Paul.

The theory I cited does not imply that people acted as cattle when mapping out overland routes for reasons of trade. It is confined exclusively to European communities who retained for the longest time a semi-nomadic basis to their respective societies due to a lingering dependence on maintaining healthy herds of grazing animals, especially cattle in areas of extensive deforestation and predominantly temperate climate.

One reason Google won't help you much in researching this aspect to Bronze Age / Early Iron Age Europe is that internet search engines, by design, will return data largely based on common assumption, and this particular subject - as with so many other areas of historical research - is one in which data derived from such common assumption hugely outweighs in published quantity more recent research results. Even if you try using this technique to research something a little closer to the actual title of this thread - how much of Roman engineering techniques regarding building straight roads was truly "Roman" - you will also find that Google will inevitably return results derived from the huge repetition of certain assumptions, such as for example that the Romans originated these techniques, or that when in their engineering prime they were responsible for all the best examples of such road construction. Neither assumption is completely correct - a perfunctory examination of ancient Persian pre-Roman road engineering and geometry for example may surprise you, and recent excavations in Romania revealing military/trade roads built by Burebista and later improved by Decebalus put even some of the Romans' most prestigious and well-engineered long-distance mettled roads to shame, both in terms of their construction technique and durability over tremendous distances (they were constructed to facilitate a trebling in size of the area controlled by their chief investors and to open an overland trade network that removed a reliance on access to ocean via treaty with Rome and unite the Black Sea with Central Europe and beyond).

Speaking of Dacia, an empire which thanks to Roman genocide we are only beginning to piece together again in terms of the extent of their influence and prowess before being emphatically written out of history by Roman conquerors who all but obliterated any trace of them above ground in their rush to acquire the vast mineral resources and wealth of that "enemy", all recent research is pointing to a Thracian (Celtic) confederation that functioned best and longest as a huge and loose cooperative stretching at its peak across modern Bulgaria, Romania, southern Poland, Hungary, northern Slovenia, northern Croatia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and even into Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Keeping such a network going involved engineering feats of huge complexity (an impressive aqueduct designed to transport both water and traffic in the Slovenian Alps long considered Roman, for example, is now attributed to Dacian engineers), and this complexity was echoed in an effective administration of common law (Heroditus called them the "most just" of any societies he knew about - including his own) that appears to have been extremely similar to Irish Breton Law, itself a system developed from very ancient Celtic social mores. The Dacians, unlike the Romans, also managed to stay on impressively good diplomatic terms with all the major powers outside their borders throughout their autonomous existence, and we are only beginning to reconstruct also the full extent therefore of the movement of ideas and technical innovation that must have occurred through this amicable association with centres of learning in Greece, Mesopotamia and even further afield, during the several centuries prior to its complete destruction by Rome. So it should certainly come as no surprise that they could build a good road, but neither should it be surprising to find similarities (especially in the extensive plains and river valleys that formed the heart of their "empire") between how their particular Celtic society developed into its modern manifestation immediately prior to being obliterated and how Ireland, with its own deep Celtic roots and extensive temperate plains, also developed as a distinct society over the same time-span and longer before being similarly subsumed forcibly into a an empire that enforced its own methods. It is an approach to appreciating history in which one must first and foremost abandon the old traditional ethnic labels of Celt, Gaul, Goth etc (inherited very much from a Roman perspective on what constituted "nationality" outside its own remit), and then also take with a rather large pinch of salt the contemporary Roman dismissal of these people as mere "barbarians".

All very interesting research and cutting edge historiographical theory, but I wouldn't like to be depending on Google to learn about it.

nordmann,

"The theory I cited does not imply that people acted as cattle when mapping out overland routes for reasons of trade. It is confined exclusively to European communities who retained for the longest time a semi-nomadic basis to their respective societies due to a lingering dependence on maintaining healthy herds of grazing animals, especially cattle in areas of extensive deforestation and predominantly temperate climate."

Thank you for your résumé of the theory you cited. Now I see fully what you meant and excuses for the misinterpretation.

"One reason Google won't help you much in researching this aspect to Bronze Age / Early Iron Age Europe is that internet search engines, by design, will return data largely based on common assumption, and this particular subject - as with so many other areas of historical research - is one in which data derived from such common assumption hugely outweighs in published quantity more recent research results. Even if you try using this technique to research something a little closer to the actual title of this thread - how much of Roman engineering techniques regarding building straight roads was truly "Roman" - you will also find that Google will inevitably return results derived from the huge repetition of certain assumptions, such as for example that the Romans originated these techniques, or that when in their engineering prime they were responsible for all the best examples of such road construction. Neither assumption is completely correct - a perfunctory examination of ancient Persian pre-Roman road engineering and geometry for example may surprise you, and recent excavations in Romania revealing military/trade roads built by Burebista and later improved by Decebalus put even some of the Romans' most prestigious and well-engineered long-distance mettled roads to shame, both in terms of their construction technique and durability over tremendous distances (they were constructed to facilitate a trebling in size of the area controlled by their chief investors and to open an overland trade network that removed a reliance on access to ocean via treaty with Rome and unite the Black Sea with Central Europe and beyond)."

Yes I have to admit that you are right. (not easy, as you "nearly each time" or "each time" are right ). But perhaps if you put the combination of the "right" keywords into the search engine? But therefore you have to know the right keywords from former knowledge or from "reliable!" keyworks on the subject?
For instance yesterday for the research on the war between the Israelites and Canaanites mentioned in the biblical "Judges" (in the meantime I learned what were the "judges") I came to nothing on Google as the known reality up to now is immerged in myriads of entries based on entries from Christian, Jewish, Israelian state related biblical references...only wiki gave some "real" information...but because I followed in the time of the BBC the Eilat Marat-Israel Finkelstein controversy about he wall in Jerusalem of the David palace
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2010/12/david-and-solomon/
And by adding Finkelstein in my equation I came to more historical knowledge about he historicity of the conflict...
https://www.academia.edu/1455259/New_evidence_on_contacts_between_Pre-Roman_Dacia_and_territory_of_Central_Poland

Res Historica is unbelievable slow now...I will start an addendum for my other entries...and comment further tomorrow...

Kind regards from Paul.

Addendum:

http://saa.uaic.ro/tag/pre-roman-dacia/
https://goo.gl/poRfm9
https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Pre-Roman_Dacia?page=2
https://www.unrv.com/provinces/dacia-and-modern-politics.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarmizegetusa_Regia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burebista


Kind regards, Paul.