The Great North Road and the Big Glacier

"Let's build a road!"

We know that the Romans built Ermine Street to get from London to their northern outposts beyond York to Hadrian's Wall. But, did they really?

When we ask, "What did the Romans ever do for us?" We say "Roads!" like there were no roads here before they came. The Celts had horses and chariots and so we must assume they had roads as well. Recent excavations near Peterborough have unearthed a lots of interesting objects, including a complete chariot wheel, just in the last few weeks. Now, this wheel was from the Bronze Age, maybe a thousand years before the Romans came.

I used to suppose that pre-Roman, Celtic Britain was fragmented into tribal areas so there would have been no through-routes, but this is nonsense really. We know that there was a lot of trade going on in pre-Roman Britain, both internally and internationally, so I find it hard to believe that there were no long-distance routes before the Romans came. In fact, I think that the Romans may have simply improved existing routes.

If you were in charge of a conquering army and you wanted to plan a new route from south to north you might just draw a straight line on a map and go for it, but it's more likely that you would use existing routes and look at the topography for alternatives.  I would also want to make sure that the local resistance didn't have the use of any alternative routes.

So, our north-south route is very, very old. Why did it take the precise route it did, and why do we still use most of the route today?

The big factor influencing modern North-South routes is glaciation.

When I went to school, I was taught that the glaciers never came south of the Wash in the east, or the Bristol Channel in the west. It turns out that they did and that their icy grip reached right down to the south coast.

Roughly 450 thousand years ago we went through an extremely cold spell and a glacier pushed its way south from the Wash, almost to London. It carved away the soft chalks and greensands to reveal the Jurassic clays beneath, unearthing fossils of ichthyosaurs, belemnites and ammonites and leaving piles of flints behind. The rivers Great Ouse, Ivel and Purwell were diverted into the resulting valley creating a level route for future settlers. Today the A1 and the East Coast Mainline railway follow that valley.

The Flying Scotsman in the Great Ouse valley
route today. By Kevin Gipp

That explains why the Celts and the Romans used the route but, like everything in life, it's not that simple. The river valleys have always been prone to flooding so you always needed an alternative route on higher ground. The result was that there was always a low road and a high road.

Today we have a network of routes that broadly occupy the valley created by that glacier; Celtic ridgeways, Roman roads, the Great North Road, the A1 motorway. and the East Coast Main-line. I live right in the middle of all this and I'm still confused.

When toll roads were introduced, people found ingenious ways to bypass them by creating a network of drove roads, often along lost, ancient highways. And so it was in my village where geese and sheep were herded along a lane to a watering hole, the village pond, which became a muddy eye-sore. It is now totally filled in.

I find all of this fascinating, and I hope you do too. If you are interested in wildlife you will not be surprised that it was not only people who used the glacial route northwards; flowers and insects populated England along the same route.