EVERYTHING you know about Roman Roads is WRONG
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- Опубліковано 28 кві 2024
- Welcome to this weeks musings. This week we take a look at 5 Roman Myths about Roads. From their construction to a horses rear! Plus a little in between.
Big thanks to: garethdennis.co.uk/ - / @garethdennistv
and The Roman Road research Association: www.romanroads.org/
EDIT: PLEASE NOTE: This video is made relevant to the UK.
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/ @pwhitewick
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Credits (Public domain if not stated):
Filter: Snowman Digital and Beachfront B-Roll
Credits here unless stated.
Roman Road with Ruts: Ad Meskins
Roman Road: Carole Raddato
Harrow Way: Adam37
Black and White Maps: Neddyseagoon
Tribe Map: Myself
Groma 1: ThreeCharlie
Groma 2: MattiasKabel
Gromaman with alignment: DTOnline
Chariot with male and Female: Biga
Roman Wagon: TriggerHappy
Roman Wagon 2: Marcus Cryron
Maps: Google Maps
Maps: National Library of Scotland
Maps: OS Maps. Media License.
Stock Footage: Storyblocks
Music: Storyblocks
Music: Epidemicsound
chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:20 - The Groma
03:51 - The Construction
07:04 - Ancient Trackways
09:50 - A Horse's rear!
11:32 - Maps - Розваги
Please note, this video discusses topics that are relevant to the UK and its Roman Roads but is relevant to most of the empire outside of Italy AND towns and cities.
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John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
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Hey, don't diss Roman Rhodes match... Cody Rhodes had his first chance to beat Roman Reigns a year ago after he won Royal Rumble, but he definitely will do it at some... future... Wrestlemania.
Romans have built different roads, with different technology on different terrain for different reasons. The roads, that you call a myth do exist and are quite well documented. Which does not mean, that the bigger part of the roads were made to that standard. This would probably have been too expensive. I have to drive a gravel road to my friends house ... which is not exactly proof, that highways don't exist.
Ok, so apart from the roads, what did they do for us?
More on that soon!!!
The aqueduct...
ua-cam.com/video/Qc7HmhrgTuQ/v-deo.html
@@wednesday8939 and a gazillion other stuff
@@wednesday8939 Well, apart from the roads and the aqueduct :)
I don't know about the Roman roads in the UK (even though I visited Bath) but I do know that here in Germanica Superior near Augusta Vindelicorum on the so-called Limes there are Roman roads built like the ones you called " a myth ". :)
And the pictures of them wouldn't be in our history books if they didn't exist.
But I admit that they are rare and only built in case those roads were needed for trade and heavy "traffic". The Romans here preferred using our rivers to roads anyway.
Greetings from a German history teacher. :)
Ground conditions, the availability of materials and the purpose of the road would determine what solutions were adopted. Sometimes, and moors are a good example, a good well drained foundation and hard paved surface using local stone would be more or less essential. But not always. It is like the question of whether roads were (roughly) straight or not. Many Roman routes were anything but, because of topography.
The video was talking about various different types of roads including various types of "Viae Publicae" used for trade purposes and open to the public which were probably built and maintained in different styles and standards by local/city authorities throughout the Empire depending on resources (when Emperor decided to visit an area or game from that area did it suddenly get nice new or re-surfaced roads?). But the Video did not mention the military roads known as "Viae Militares" built by the Legions in places like Germanica Superior. Take view that if you are a Roman Legate and have tens of thousands of highly trained combat engineers under your command who are not doing a lot you might as well use them for something and armies throughout history seem to love going in for a standard approach and the highest spec going. Which would explain why the Roman military frontier in Germany has some of the best Roman Roads going. Can confirm that the Roman military frontier in Britain also has a paved military road linking forts and going from one side of the country to the other plus its stuck on the top of a bloody big wall. Can anyone confirm if you find the same type of thing in the Danube frontier area and on the Eastern frontier of the Roman Empire? As for Roman Army prefering to move supplies and small troop formations by water rather than road if possible. I assume that movement via Rhine Boats probably cheaper and quicker than by using mules and the like. Plus harder for locals to hide behind trees to ambush and "re-purpose" the stuff being carried if you are in middle of the Rhine. Assume Germans no longer do that type of thing but I note Germans still prefer to move stuff via the Rhine barges rather than road if possible.
Would you not consider that say the Romans wished to generally travel from Axminster in a direction toward the north east, then using a combination of celestial navigation and their various surveying tools, they set off until they came across a navigable/tidal river and when they found such an.important location, nearby Gloucester, they actually created a town or fort at that spot e.g. Cirencester. Did a sizeable town exist before the Romans built the Fosse Way ? Don't know, or perhaps it did, but only as a market town.
And then so on as they pleased.
As for a six foot depth, bloody hell, motorways aren't even constructed to that depth
@@stuartbailey9287 The Rhine wasnt that nice water road it is today, it had lots of waterfalls, white waters and wetlands 2000 years ago, so the Rhine wasnt really an alternative to move legions (wich would also need a lot of boats to transport them).
The roman roads in germany wasnt only a fundament and pavement (wich was outside of citys mostly only compacted gravel), straight through a forrest. Left and right of the road was also a ditch (for drainage and to make it more difficult for traders to go around "toll stations") and then a few dozend meters of cleared land, to prevent ambushes.
A few years ago I spent a while working for the team that does maintenance on parts of the A5, among other roads. Much of that road is Roman. I can confirm that we never encountered anything in the way of Roman road surface under all the accumulated layers, But there *is* some solid Roman material under there - in some places the culverts that carried the road across ditches or small streams are still there and still have their Roman bricks. Even with the culverts, most of the old ones only go back to Thomas Telford, but there are a few with the distinctive Roman brick shape. I remember talking to one of the engineers, who was wondering why the culvert he was looking at on a map had the strange name "Roman Culvert", and I explained to him that it was slightly older than the others...
Just slightly older!
Yet you can go many places across Britain and see former Roman roads on routes no longer used, usually on moor lands and guess what, they still have their paving on them. You don’t think centuries of use, robbing, and rebuilding might have removed much?
@@SciFiFemaleThat's something I love about the Brits using their language. It's impossible not to - at least - chuckle with their mild teasing/mocking when they come down to subtleties like those.
@@xr6ladThey could've "picked up some useful materials" (using British subtlety here - haha!), however, they would go as far as they could on foot, at most dragged by oxen or horse, and back home without breaking their backs or spending the night on the countryside. Thus, if they did, which must've happened, it certainly didn't imply the "recycling" of the entire Roman network. 😀
I actually doubt a doco regarding this just as humans cause climate change 😑
In the French city of Narbonne (Narbo Martius in Roman times) you can actually walk on a preserved section of the Via Domitia, exposed in a pit some six feet under the modern level of the main square. In this case, the claim that the roman road network improved on existing pathways holds true, since before the Roman, the Greek used the same axis under the name Via Heraclea. Aristotle mentions this Hercules road, that connected Italy to Spain.
I LOVE that place!!! Having a glass of Rosé - and just contemplate the history of the south of France...❤️❤️❤️
"...You'll have to forgive me because every so often I'll dive into a hedge..."
This is one of the many reasons I watch this channel!
This time next week.... you're going to enjoy another video....
@@pwhitewick Love your work. Always worth watching.
At 75 I do much the same, though at my age the reason is somewhat more practical!...
@@pwhitewick it does seem that you like diving down into a bush... ;-)
I dug a few roman roads back in my commercial archaeology days and as far as I recall, all we saw was a layer of gravel in a shallow cut - with the caveat that we don't know what had been ploughed/scalped away in the intervening centuries.
Definitely adds up from my minimal research onto various local digs.
from where are you talking? is this just in britain or whole roman empire?
@swissarmyknife7670 these were all in England and all likely to be minor roads.
People do not understand that others put stuff on top of the roman roads as well so hard to find original roman roads as well
@@pwhitewickWelp, this explains why this video dispels facts and promotes myth.
I have always assumed that the standard of road construction would vary a LOT across the Empire. Especially when you head towards the extremities the roads would have been little more than metaled tracks. In my neck of the woods (western Scotland) the mapping of Roman roads is very limited. You can see where they should be, but when you get boots on the ground it's difficult to identify them on the landscape. Lidar does give some clues, but even that has limited coverage.
there are only a half dozen roman roads here and they're all under modern roads.
I mean, I'm from North America so they're not relevant to my day to day, but I always figured the Romans built roads basically the same way everyone else has since the dawn of civilization: find the existing routes where they exist, blaze new ones when you have to, and improve them enough for slightly heavier than the expected traffic to allow some headroom. Save the overbuilding for temples and monuments, roads are built to purpose.
Why would there be Roman roads in Scotland? I thought the Romans never conquered Scotland. What was Hadrian's wall all about if the Romans were going around building roads in Scotland?
@@purplelibraryguy8729 Antony temporarily held the south of Scotland as far as roughly the Forth/Clyde line, there's an ''Antonine'' Wall too..
@@thearmchairspacemanOG Oh, thanks.
Check out Arpino Italy, they are one of the 6 cities that founded the building of Rome. They have exposed their town's old roman road layers for display. Also the town has one of the free standing keyless arches in Europe.
Campania regna
The Roman roads that are still taught in universities are like the Appian Way and the streets of Pompeii, with large stone slabs. These were roads in their urban section like the Appian Way on the outskirts of Rome, where the cemeteries were. In the countryside, the foundations were made with various sizes of stone, which was compacted with sand and the rolling surface was made of gravel, so that the carts could roll well. And they were raised above the ground by embankments of 1.5 to 2 meters, so that they would not flood.
So road from the capital to the favoured holiday locations of the Roman Senatorial elite has some of the best and most expensive construction of any road in the Empire. So nothing much seems to have changed in 2000 years when it comes to handing out road construction contracts.
@@stuartbailey9287 well, you can also add the big cities of the time. You can see today the Roman roads leading to the Agora in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, which was a very big city at the time. You can walk on the well preserved big slabs of syenite paving of the very large road, you can see also the pipes and sewers, the buildings around... Overall, cities of that size had the fancy roads, viaducts, circuses and so on. The rest, it was more function than anything else 😉
Thank you so much for your videos. As a 17 year old USA citizen I was fortunate enough to travel to England in 1987, and the most singular thing that overwhelmed me was the concept of history and dates. Where you are, you date your modern history back thousands of years. Where I live, we date modern history back hundreds. We are not fortunate enough to have stone and metal remains so the woodworks if any are gone and the mounds are what we see. Thanks for this all. It brings back great memories and the understanding of how small we individuals may actually be.
I visited Silver city in California in the 70s...The first stones used to grind the Comstock lode were just left lying at the side of the road with a plywood sign saying what they were..Thats history too...
You're 17 and was in England in 1987?
He said as a 17 year old not he is 17 now
You DO have history going back thousands of years, it's just not white history, so gets ignored and built over.
@philipharris5201 by the 1870s it was one of the lead funding for the union Civil War.
The American schools system has failed us in more ways than we could ever have imagined.
Regarding railway gauging: I may still own a copy of Model Engineer from 1959, in which, responding to this very subject, a correspondent wrote that his grandfather had been George Stephenson's works manager and told his grandson that gauge was originally measured across the outside of the rails, as early rail vehicles had their flanges on the outside. When the flanges moved inside, the gauge was reduced accordingly, from a sensible five feet to four feet eight and a half inches.
I seem to recall that the Nantlle (?) Railway had outside flanges.
@@creamwobbly Is this really talking about different gauges or different ways of measuring the guage?
@@creamwobbly I wonder why we have invented a 750mm, a 760mm and a 762mm gauge.
I recently rode a 760mm train, was quite a lot of fun (longest narrow gauge here where I live, and surprisingly modern). but I cannot understand what would make such a difference that somebody needs specifically a 762mm gauge.
@@robertheinrich2994 In all likelihood a bunch of people just came up with different gauges in isolation and only noticed they were almost but not quite the same when the standards got collected together for records purposes.
as for the 2mm, that's probably just a conversion from another measuring system thing.
You have got one classical paved Roman road in Northumbria - its on the top of Hardrians wall and was for Roman Army use only. The rest of you 2000 years ago probably had to make do with the usual tracks. Bit like these days how many six or eight lane motorways has Northumbria got?
I first heard the rail gauge story in the 1990's and was part of a far longer chain linking the Challenger disaster to the width of two horses backsides. The story went that when they were first designing the space shuttle, the dimensions of the boaster rockets were dictated by the fact that they had to be moved from where they were manufactured to Cape Canaveral. Because of the size required they had to be hauled by rail on standard gauge track, so the circumference was limited by the dimensions of the tunnels on such track, meaning they had to be built in shorter sections, then assembled using couplings. It was those couplings that failed under the heat that caused Challenger to explode.
The width & height of the tunnels were determined by their general period of construction, the mid to late 1800's, when most US long distance rail services were using UK standard gauge. The leading rail engineers were coming to the US from the UK at that time & training the Americans to use the same standards. UK standard gauge had emerged because many of the UK engineers were following the standards set by the Stephensons. The Stephensons, in turn, were simply using a gauge that was common in the coalfields of the North East of England by the horse drawn lines then in use.
These lines were determined by the standard width of the wagons that had been used for coal haulage for over a thousand years, and was assumed to go as far back as the Roman era, as mining was known to have occurred from at least that era. Wagons were thought to be at the same gauge due to the rutting in the roads. Thus the width of wheels were determined by the width of the horses/mules etc rears.
The only part that I did not hear was the link to Roman war chariots, as the implication was it was the heavier wagons, not the chariots that caused the ruts
The problem with that theory is that in Britain we had two main gauges, but in America they had many different gauges, maybe as many as were railway companies in America.
The American railways did not chose to have a "Standard gauge" until much later than we did.
When it comes to the container trains, the Americans can place one container on the wagon, and another container on top of the container which is already on the train, so their tunnels can take a deeper train, than us.
@@petermostyneccleston2884 Of all the weaknesses the gauge issue is relevant, but as the dimensions of the shuttle were only determined in the 1960's & 1970's, by which time most of the US was on standard gauge. As for the size of containers, that is irrelevant as the boasters were never placed inside container's, thus it was the shape of the tunnels, not the dimensions of shipping containers, that were relevant. Though, I should state that this was described to me by a number of Americans speaking a business conventions in the 1990's.
The punchline sometimes added is, the next time you look at the specification for something and think whoever drew that spec was a complete horse's arse, you may be right!
@@petermostyneccleston2884 you are talking about loading gauge which is different to rail gauge, the UK has one of the smallest loading gauges but runs on standard gauge track, a result of being the earliest adopter of steam powered railways is that we built our tunnels and cuttings to fit the earliest trains, the US had a slightly later start and adopted a larger loading gauge to allow for later much larger locomotives and train consists to be designed and built
@@andreww2098 that's the main issue, loading gauge is only loosely related to track gauge: some lines in Japan on 1067mm gauge have a similar loading gauge to the UK on 1435mm, and US trains totally dwarf ours (they double stack containers on standard height wagons on some lines, but on the flip side have parts of the network that can't allow double deck passenger trains)
The real story of the railway gauge is something like: the Romans made a standard chariot/wagon wheel dimension based roughly on the width of 2 horses; many hundreds of years later the first tramways used a wide variety of gauges based roughly on the same sort of requirements. Stephenson used an existing gauge he was familiar with, and it became so dominant because he was hired for engineering management on pretty much every early railway project in England (apart from the GWR, and his gauge still won in the end)
The GWR won in all ways over the normal gauge , speed comfort, and loading capacity . But this being Britain we used the normal gauge as it was cheaper !
No, the first railway here in Norway was standard gauge 1435 mm, it was 50% british owned, and thereafter all railways that connected to Sweden was also standard gauge, but most of other railways was 1000 mm, from 1858 onwards, they changed between 1900 and 1928, a few closed down, but we have a few that survived on other gauges until the 1960s.
Raiway gauges had nothing to do with Roman 'wheel dimension'. Since so much equipment was made for railways with standard gauge, it eventually became cheaper to adjust to that, but before year 1900, there was no real reason, all manufacturing was bespoke in some way, so the cost was the same if you made locomotives and coaches in any gauge, there was no savings.
My little midwestern farm burg has someone 2.2 miles down the road who breeds paint horses and has a therapeutic riding center, from what I've seen of horses' hips there after both riding and volunteering you are going to need more than 5 feet width to get in 2 horses plus the drawbar/ draft gear/whatever it is called to hook them up to a wagon; 1 you can get within that width, 2, no.
@@perolden I said the Romans had nothing to do with modern track width, only that they were working with the same sort of requirements the early tramways did. That's why the width is vaguely similar enough to fool poorly researched article writers.
It does cost a little more to build larger equipment, and terrain also does have some say in what gauge is practical to build. That's why the Welsh and Colorado narrow gauge lines exist
@@christopherjames5895 The GWR did have the superior gauge, but the 4' 8.5" had pretty much won already by being everywhere first. Kind of a shame we didn't get wider gauges
Like many others, I grew up with the idea that Romans made far better roads than we do, but later on I realised that while we had all the Roman remains in Northumbria nobody had dug up one of these amazing 6' deep roads. Top stuff as always.
My take on this claim was that A: Roman's maintained their roads while in use, B: the roads that lasted centuries after the fall were either locally maintained or were abandoned then dug up later.
In Norway we never had any Romans except for the drunken sailor, so we built our own roads, heaven knows why. And some roads is 3000 years old.
I was driving on a road with my nephew some 20 years ago, and on the side of the road there was the old road where we had driven when I was a kid. I told my nephew that that was the road his father and his siblings had traveled on when we were kids, and already then the road was 2000 years old. When our viking forefathers traveled here, it was already a thousand years old.
The 8-year old thought about it for a very short moment and said: -Why? Didn't they have boats?
He spent a lot of time on the sea, so I could see this.
-Oh yes, they had boats and ships, som places you could reach by going up a river, but not here.
-OK, he said, why is it so big, they had so small carts.
HE had seen the viking carts from the yaer 800 in the viking ships museum.
And that is correct, the road vas 4-5 feet across, enough for a horse, but hardly for a horse and a cart. They used handcarts, or horseback, never horse and cart in one, atleat not before the year 1000. Reason? The roads weren't really wide enough, they were paths.
How do we know that these roads are up to 3000 years old? Because of the richness of discarded shoes, lost coins and other things, so much material means it was heavily trafficked.
However, sometimes the really built large wagons, but since they hardly could go any distance because lack of wide roads, they were for showoff.
And the roman iter was just a path, nothing uniquely Roman about it
Yet there’s plenty left on the moors and still paved.
@@xr6lad yes they look well cobbled, I suspect the theory has always been modelled on this sort of road. They may well have needed to go the extra mile ( excuse the pun) for some roads. The moors would have been extremely boggy. The other theory propounded for boggy terrain is that they were built on a raft of logs to stop the road material sinking.
@@DrewLSsix I think Vindolanda roman writing tablets refer to the state of the roads, there are also records elsewhere of roads being repaired or not repaired by parishes or the church or monastries.
Brilliant story Paul👍👍👍 ! As a measure how this got me: I didn't miss Rebecca. But please don't take this as a hint for the future.
I miss Rebecca's cheekiness!
I miss Rebecca! It's just not as good without her 🙁
I never really beleived that these efficient romans would make roads with such a hugh effort. It just didn't add up. 6 feet deep? That's deep! Foundation deep. So thank you for this!
A pleasure
Extremely interesting. I grew up with those drawings in history books about Roman roads too. Still have O/S maps dating back to my teens as well. I hope they never privatise O/S because that would be the end of it.
it was given a commercial remit to maximise revenue, but I'm also glad that more recently the Government's Open Data people have made them open up more of their mapping for free, including OpenRoads, which is a full road map of the UK that's so big (in data terms) that you can only get it one lettered grid square (eg SE, a 100x100km area) at a time
To explore Britain, often check for public domain OS maps online posted by National Library of Scotland. Can pin a current location on the map and it lists the OS maps and aerial photos available, most being 1800s to 1970 and great quality. Sometimes find names of mills, collieries, steel works and farms whose names are lost on modern maps to explore further in other text resources. Pleased how Bits keep history readily available and the OS maps.
I love looking on maps and trying to work out if they could be Roman Roads or just re-used ancient tracks, or even when you find what looks like a track in the landscape and wonder what it could have been before it stopped being used.
Great video as ever!
Researching 18th C transport in my area, a lot of the straight roads are (were) turnpikes, often constructed between two competing Turnpike Trusts. A nice example local to me is 'New Road' between Ditchling and Clayton north of Brighton in Sussex - maps.app.goo.gl/dA8DftPKAqg32koe8.
The turnpike road over Ditchling beacon is very steep and expensive,so that trust eventually gave in and built a road across to the competing trusts's road through the Clayton gap
Depending on terrain, a straight line would probably not be the least expensive route anyhow, so it stands to reason there would be deviation.
So glad you did this one. This stone roman roads myth is so silly.
In the area of Verulamium & Hertfordshire, all road roman roads are just hard packed gravel and sand. The the Roman's weren't stupid, they built with what was local.
Not just what was local.
Ever tried riding a bicycle down a cobbled road, and I don't think stone paving was much good on the horses hooves nor the life of wooden wheels. As you say, hard packed gravel surface, probably bordered with stones to keep them from being washed away.
@@stephenarbon2227 This was what got me wondering too. Cobbled roads, especially of the kind found in Pompeii and similar sites, are hard for wheels, and your horses need to have horseshoes for them. The main reason to have cobbled roads in towns was that they are easy to clean, and thus better for pedestrians with sandals or expensive shoes. That's why you find them mainly in towns: Only there you find many pedestrians with inadequate footwork for long walks.
@@SiqueScarface Why would they care about the roads being hard on wheels? That would be a 'you problem' - if you want to drive your waggon on our publicly funded streets then suck it up, sunshine. In town, where the streets are narrow, then obviously the surface will become rutted AF (see Pompeii). And in town you walk on the footpath anyway - you dont want your expensive sandals getting mule shit on them, and between your toes.
But if you travel the major highways then there is less need to follow the exact footprint of the proceeding vehicle - if you weren't taking your waggon/chariot into a major town then wheel spacing could be whatever you wanted. Going into town has always been a faff, you don't take your lorry in unless you have to.
Rome still has some examples you can drive on eg the Via Appia going south from the walls to the ring road. It's a bit lumpy by modern standards but the big paving stones are still there (would they have had a gravel topping?) and it probably hasn't been maintained properly and people like me have driven heavy, modern, cars over it as we like. It isn't noticeably rutted so I suspect the surface was gravelled and they possibly had teams of slaves, in high viz (slaves cost money), putting cones out and repairing the surface and shutting lanes down on bank holiday weekends, because nothing changes.
@@pd4165 Cobblestone roads are loud. When a wheel or a horseshoe collides with a cobble stone, it's much louder than with a sand or a gravel path. This is an "us problem", to stay within your terminology. Before the invention of rubber tyres, a softer ground meant a smoother ride. And the Romans didn't have rubber tyres. But they had loud and noisy towns. Read an ancient author! That's one reason why every wealthy Roman citizen had a second home somewhere in the countryside, the villa (ever wondered where the word 'village' comes from?).
And a loud ride means a stressful ride - not only on the nerves of the travellers and the bystanders and on the goods, but on the mechanics of your cart. A cart, that can easily go hundreds of miles on gravel roads will break easily on cobblestone. And you need more pulling power. While on country roads, a horse might be sufficient, in the town, you need an ox. Or two of them for heavy loads. (Horses in ancient times were not used for heavy pulling tasks, as the horse harnesses of the time were not suited for it. The horse collar is an invention of the Middle Ages.)
@@pd4165 And a John Cleese-style Centurion handing out traffic tickets! 😉😁
I've often looked at diagrams of roman roads and thought "Where the heck did they find all the material for so comprehensive a road?" Thanks for debunking that myth.
I suspect that they used the materials they had when they had reason to do so.
How hard to find the material when your empire can just exploit convict criminal and war prisoner as slave to work in quarry and build the road.
@@thatsawesome2060 All evidence suggests it was built using military labour. There are roman quarry remains along a lot of the length where they have left carvings.
@@thatsawesome2060zero knowledge was put into this sentence 😂
@@thatsawesome2060Uhhh... most Roman roads were built by the Roman legions during their service...
Great investigative work. I feel like I'm going to become the annoying parent when my kid comes back from school and starts showing me these things and I'll be shooting off emails to the teachers debunking their lesson plans! :P
Paul, the section about 2:23 is terrific for getting across your point graphically. You discuss how the groma was used, but the big win is those “signal fire” graphics.
How better to explain the straight road line problem in real life terms?!
I know adding graphics and visuals is time-consuming, but whenever possible, PLEASE consider how helpful they are to the finished product.
Many thanks mate!
Cheers, yup completely agree, this has got legs for a video in its own right!
Dude beside google search no digging to show something?
As a man that's moved some earth, I always wondered about all that earthwork and stone sourcing and transport. Seemed impossible overkill. And it was. 🤠
in italy almost all the roman roads you find are exactly as described in the book
I mean... Yeah... Just like every civilization on earth and even modern ones, not all roads are Paved, highly engineered and made like the one from the books.
Even in modern times, not all roads are made like a Highway/Motorway; perfectly asphalted, reinforced and has proper drainage.
Some low intensity traffic or rural areas uses Tarmac and are only reinforced with basic concrete layer, and not concrete reinforced with rebar; some even still only uses Compacted gravel.
Romans are still bound by logistics, and the roads that are made like "in the books" are highways and urban centers, where better roads are required not only for commerce, but also defence and communication
i think the claims in the books are exaggerated, but they definitely had really solid roads, just like their aqueduct they were way ahead of their time. Although i think that their main trading routes or ways are build like that. Of course they don't build every road that way lol... and i think that's where the misconception comes from.
Also, the main reason Roman roads are as straight as possible is not that it created the shortest distance, though this was obviously a factor. The main reason was that they were military roads, and a bend gives you poor visibility of the road ahead so is vulnerable to ambush
Actually straight roads are more vulnerable to ambush since the surrounding terrain may or may be passable. For example if the terrain is not passable in a section a enemy would more likely attack the points it is and pin down entire Roman troop formations. It also would force more refugees to flood down the roads in case of war which can bog down troops.
@@bmc7434 You may have something there. But if I were travelling in a hostile wooded area I would prefer to see as much of the road ahead as I could. I believe foliage was cut back 50m each side of the road to prevent attacks
There was a dig in the north of England a few years ago where the road met a river bridge at an angle. The dig found a large levelled area at the bridge approach and they said it it was so that the wagons could be turned and re-aligned with the bridge direction. If wagons were that unwieldy I can imaging a straight road was very useful, and also to deal with oncoming transport.
@@bmc7434 Most Roman military convoys had scouts, lots of them, to help eliminate such surprises. For a long time, the Roman military machine was literally two steps ahead of everyone else.
@@TEverettReynolds "Literally"? I imagine it was more than two!
In the flat lands of Veneto, where I'm from, the modern highways still trace the ancient roman roads, which were remarkably straight.
In those times, large swathes of that area that were previously forested, were cleared and subdivided into rectangular plots (centurization), and you can still see this clearly by taking a look at satellite pictures of the countryside. Other vast areas of my region were subject to frequent flooding, and most of the areas closer to the coast were marshlands. The roman roads leading to the sparse settlements in those areas were and still are elevated above ground level by a couple of meters (maybe that where the expression "highway" comes from, in English??)
High originally meant that they were NOT toll roads. It was common in medieval times for the peerage to install toll roads (usually just a sequence of bridges) across their vast estates, and then recover their expense via tolls. Such tolls were normally exacted solely from transiting outsiders, non-tenants.
Said tolls were almost always exacted at choke points -- river crossings, hill passes, etc. The tolls were just a cost of doing business when the alternative meant even more expense/ time in transit.
The resistance against herd traffic across grazing lands can be witnessed as a plot element in no end of 20th Century American western films. ( Barbed wire wars. )
The 'high ways' were originally based entirely upon pre-existing (Roman era) roads upon which the king would not allow anyone to lay tolls. They all belong to him. This royal ownership shows up in many a Spanish road name. "xxxx royale" -- meaning highway, of course.
The first to describe what a Roman road actually looked like was a French archaeologist who is still alive. He was invited to give a conference at the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1988 to present his studies in the field, it was very interesting. There is a Spanish public works engineer who has a UA-cam channel that talks about roads, aqueducts, mines and Roman engineering. Is very good. Isaac Moreno Gallo+UA-cam
¡Absolutely! And he also made an incredible documentary series about these topics.
About 80 Years ago in the area of Bontfaen ( Cowbridge ) Roman Bonium, there was work carried out on the A48 Road which follows the old Roman Road from what was Glwyr (Brythonic) Gloucester ( Glevum ) to Caerfyrddin ( Carmarthen) it was Wartime and there had been Americans stationed all over South Wales, they run their Tanks on the Road and in one place ripped up the surface of the Road to a depth of 6ft, where they actually came in to Contact with the Roman Road, I was told this story by a Farmer who lived at Pentre Meurig which is on a crossroads of which another Roman Road cuts across it, from Llantwit Major to Pencoed and beyond to join the Sarn Helen to North Wales ,he said that the Roman road was built of Local stone and was really solid, so solid that the Tanks did not break that surface. But they made a mess of what was the A48 . So Romans made excellent Roads. But 1940's Britain was no match in their surface, the Sherman Tanks ran about 300 to 400 Yards on the Roman road I was told found it had Two Lanes and was wider than the actual A48 . they did not destroy any part of it.
but the title says, that everything we know about roman roads is wrong. guess, somebody else built that road.
Marcus Agrippa@@robertheinrich2994
@@robertheinrich2994 He's telling a story that was told to him by a farmer. All due respect to the farmer, but word of mouth stories of stories don't tend to be the most accurate representations of history.
@@RyTrapp0 I'm more complaining about the clickbait-titles of such videos. not "new interesting discoveries about something" but "forget everything you already knew about -topic-"
@@robertheinrich2994 Except it isn't even an inaccurate title - the vast majority of people think of Roman roads as that classic illustration of this absurdly extensive road construction. And the vast majority of people don't realize that there isn't actually a Roman road constructed like that.
There are WAY worse examples than this one
First time visitor at 72 yrs old. Got interested in the Romans quite early as living in the South Wales valleys I visited Caerleon and Sarn Helen. There's actually a Roman camp just up the valley from me. Now live in Canada, so interested in new ideas and developments.
People forget that even in our super standardized world 2 different smart phones will have a slightly different charger and cable. Same with roads today, every country has a road building standard witch is often different from their neighbor country.
At school we were taught that Romans built their roads, in this amazing cross section too. It was in the history books, so why would we argue?
A week or so later we visited the remains of a Roman road somewhere on the outskirts of York, needless to say there was no stone (metalling) anywhere to be seen.
The teacher suggested that the stone had been robbed out over the centuries to build housing. (That old chestnut). Yet there were no houses, and those that had been known to exist we were told had been made of wood, etc.
Surely there would have been some remnants of these amazing structures?
It seemed a bit of a lie even back then, but it was in the books, maybe we thought it was back home in ancient Rome.
Hey ho! an ancient scholar mistook a description of the footings of a house for a road. - All is clear!
HOABL
If you are saying German history texts are works of great accuracy, lol. If you are saying photographs in the books show detailed cross sections of Roman roads in situ, great. Please upload to the site and let's see them.
Thanks.
It was an entertaining video. One thing that surprises me about *every single* documentary vid, is that each time they say: "And here we can see...", we, the viewers, can't actually see anything. Not sure if its the camera, or lack of care, but its an universal feature regarding documentaries, unless they're showing, I don't know, a major fortress, or the pyramids or something.
The itinerary part is interesting because in the early days of computer aided navigation (late 90s, early 2000s) it was common (or at least some people did it) for a while to plan out a route and print it out, but not the map, just the steps you needed to take so in a sense that was quite a roman way to travel.
Oh yeah, I remember! Like printing out directions from Mapquest or Old Google Maps!
This method was also taught to me whilst on basic training in the NZ Army in 1999. Study a map and then make written notes about the route.
I have to shout out the TV series Time Team for teaching me a lot about this and more more of history. I hope for a Whitewick / Time Team collab someday! You guys are perfect together if it were up to me.
Oh yeah! Paul with Stewart Ainsworth 👍
@@amandachapman4708 I would love to see that
I lived in Naples. Many of the roads are Roman. When they get too bumpy the road crew pulls up and stacks the basalt pavers and then relevels the top half meter or so of sand and gravel, adds sand, and re-lays the basalt blocks. So the roads are re-usable in a heavily seismic location.
A major difference between roman and current roads is distance driven on them. They were durable for sure, but didn't have thousands of cars driving on them each day... and even more at such speeds (causing vibration on its structure) as we drive currently. I'm sure they wouldn't last long with current traffic constraints.
Nobody would like to drive on a Roman road either with modern Vehicles speed. Most of them are lined with flagstones or cobbles. I imagine driving 60-80 km/h on a Flagstone lined Roman Highway is not pleasant for both you and your car's suspension
Pretty sure we used Tarmac, and later Asphalt, for that reason.
The school I went to was on Roman Road, and in my lifetime, it hasn't needed to be resurfaced, and is still absolutely solid. It has massive lorries going down it all the time, and is a busy road. We have roads now that can't last a couple of years.
@@Hellybelle505 - Yes but as said : how much weight, how busy and how fast were people driving on it ?
That's why trains roll on steel bars and not cardboard. Load, traffic and speed are the most restrictive... and it's not mentionning price, grip needed, weather or geologic events.
@@Hellybelle505 Your school being in front of the road explains enough.
Since it's near a school zone, the vehicles that passes through wouldn't be moving past 40km, probably even less.
Also, Since it's near and/or inside an urban residential area, the lorries would be no more than 3-5 tons... Whereas an average highway can get big Freight trucks that carries Containers and such... those can surpass 18 tons.
@@aribantala yes, and I totally get that. I don't mean to sound sarcastic/rude at all, so I hope that doesn't come across in my responses; I just got called a smart alec (in response to another comment) when I didn't mean that at all 😳 I mean the fact that it has been load bearing far, far more than it was designed to do, and doing it for about two thousand years, whilst modern roads are supposed to have it all factored in, and can't hold up for a fraction of the time. You are right about the vehicles not going as fast, but it was designed for chariots, and it has double decker buses, lorries, cars, work vehicles, and all sorts of other things going up and down it all day long, and it still has the same surface it had before I was born! I'm going to be fifty this year. I don't know of any many roads, even much slower ones outside of schools that have stood up like that 💞
I have never been convinced that Roman roads were all multi-layered engineering masterpieces. It all would have been a colossal effort and expense for little to no return. The logistics of locating good sources of material, quarrying it, and then moving all that material around; would also have been impressive, even for ancient Romans.
That would be the same romans that built aqueducts and castles that are still in use? Cloaca maxima built in the third century AUC and still in use 2500 years later
@@gertkaiser4273You mean that stuff where building it that way has immediate use? As opposed to six-layer stone-topped roads?
@@gertkaiser4273 There is a big difference between building infrastructure in cities and other population centres, and building hundreds or even thousands of kilometres of very complex roads in the countryside.
Even today, we don't build massive multi-lane highways absolutely everywhere...
@@cerealport2726 I’m intrigued. Roads connect and good roads do that better. If you move goods (important ones like fermented fish sauce) there is a profit to be had by better roads. If you have an almost unlimited supply of slaves - just go on a raid- the cost factor is limited. And we are talking about imperial Rome it isn’t just a sign of power it also allows you to move legions quickly. Just saying don’t discard ideas because the cost seems to be high where the value might be in itself or unknown reasons. A bit like the Autobahn. They certainly couldn’t be justified on economic reasons but come a dictator with other motives…..
@@gertkaiser4273 Good roads between major centres make sense to anyone with a brain. A good, serviceable road does not have to be paved with stone though...
If this wonderfully over-engineered road network was so widespread, as you seem to claim, where is the evidence for widespread road building at this level of engineering in rural UK?
Where are the quarries? where are the sand, and gravel pits to support such massive infrastructure? The Romans were crazy about documenting everything...Where is any of the documentation showing the movement of thousands of tonnes of materials and people to build such high quality roads?
You claim there is an almost unlimited supply of slaves... but said slaves would have had to be managed. Such infrastructure would have also had a military guard to protect the workers (the UK was not peaceful for the Romans), necessitating large encampments while building very very high quality roads at a snails pace compared to building lesser quality roads much faster. Where is any of the evidence for this in the UK?
Every time I drive up the Fosse Way I cannot help thinking that the romans did not build it straight, just from hill to hill !
Yes topography deserved a mention here.. even if you had the tools to sight perfect lines over distances of 100km, you probably wouldn't want to build a perfectly straight road because it probably wouldn't be the optimum route over hills and valleys and other features.
Some years ago I was working on a project on the A6, just north of Market Harborough, where the modern road is built on a Roman road. We had to arrange for an electrical service from the opposite side of A6 into our site. The electricity supplier's contractor had to thrust bore across the A6 at a depth of about 2m to miss the foundations of the Roman road that were at about 1.5m deep. Had the Roman road or the limited post-Roman road constructions been less dense then the contractor would have thrust bored at a shallower depth. This to me confirms the notion that Roman roads we deep structures.
Also, natural ground surface level grows at about 1" per decade, a meter every 300 years or so on average. So old roads constantly used and repaired, etc will rise in due time as well.
I saw your title and thumbnail, and my first thought as a draftsman was: this looks remarkably like how we would build a slab foundation, complete with the wall footings around the side. My second thought was, that would be insanely expensive to stretch over any distance.
Two Horses Backsides 😂 (Sorry had to giggle on that one) Great video Paul and nice to see Stephen Fry as well
Makes perfect sense. Imagine the anount if work and costs to dig 6' down, then produce and handle all the material to fill it! So gar away from large cities, with low traffic, a mix of sand, dirt and gravel would have been just enough.
There was a prototypical "Satnav" in the 1950's which was a roll of paper with directions. You connected it to your speedo (so it could guess the distance covered and show instructions at the right time) and it would note lanmarks, turns etc.
Ancient Chinese armies had this in wagon form...
The railroad gauge myth has been around a lot longer than the internet. I was a train nut as a kid growing up in the 1960's and read that in multiple books about trains.
I love the full circle comment. I've noticed this as well, going from an itinerary of landmark/point to point full circle through rough then detailed maps... back to point-to-point navigation. I'm old school though. Grew up being the navigator on family trips, checking the map, then with friends, acting as the same whilst looking for shortcuts...etc. Still don't like GPS systems and prefer the beauty of a map.
The Romans were pragmatic in their road construction. They did Imo follow the rough course of already established routes, perhaps straightening the old twists and turns and following high ground above flood plains and only uses these to transverse to higher ground on the other side in most cases. There were long used passes of 'bwlchs' in Welsh that linked one valley or watershed with the adjoining valley, often later these long used routeways were ‘upgraded’ by the Romano British and many of these are still used today.
The classical Roman ‘Via’s’ were the equivalent of our motorways today and many of these probably did roughly follow previously existing routes. In Chalklands where there was no hard rocks , packed sand and gravel was used, in rocky geological area’s, stone and gravel was used and sometimes wood was used too.
Wood was used going through wet/swampy areas. It was prevalent enough that the construction was standardized .
It consisted of logs placed at right angles to the direction of travel and dirt/sand/gravel used to build up the road itself.
If you wanted 2 way cart traffic (10 to 12 ft) 3 feet above the ground you started with the base roughly 16 to 18 feet wide.
The modern word is corduroy where that type of cloth got its name from.
Interesting topic. Wide wide range of implications. One thing I learned growing up in Michigan running around on 'old Indian trails,' is they were basically just paths, in other places where there was an undeveloped patch of ground and people cut across it... it doesn't take much to wear down the local grasses, etc to establish one. The 'old Indian trails,' weren't deeply worn into ruts. If you think 10,000 years of bare feet and moccasins? Of course. How 'actually' ancient were these trails? Well, where there was a rise in the terrain, hills, ridges, they never ran along the top of the ridge. Instead where there was a ridge these trails were always just below it. Don't want to be 'day lighted,' silhouetted against the sky to potential enemies. Then when I hiked the Wessex Ridgeway in Dorset I walked on a lot of sunken lanes. Of course I figured several thousand years of foot traffic... But wait. These lanes were always wider than just the width of a person walking. Near Nettlecombe Tout was a horse farm. I saw two teenagers on the largest horses I've ever seen. The part of the Ridgeway trail near by? Churned up like it had been harrowed. So sunken lanes? Hooves, shod or not, wheeled wagons, and lots of rain.
Did the Romans just follow the old Briton Celt trails? In some places I'm sure they did. Researching the history of Los Angeles I knew roughly where the Native American village Yang Na was located (near downtown Los Angeles) and the San Gabriel Mission, where they were sequestered and enslaved. But what path had they taken? Obviously along Valley Boulevard. Why? It's the flattest most direct route, there's only the Los Angeles river bed to cross, no forests. What else follows that same route? The Southern Pacific Railroads, railroads also want to travel the flattest route. I've since read that the cross the L.A. River at 6th street, a bit south of Valley, but there are hills in the way, so they'd have crossed the river at the widest, shallowest point (except most of the year the old L.A. River bed was dry). I don't have a source for the 6th Street crossing, and of course when they crossed there was no 6th street, or a Los Angeles.
Foot trails tend to wander , if a part of its is washed, blocked by a fallen tree or something then people would just move that bit of the path left or right.
What a great set of questions/thoughts/challenges. Thanks. I suspect the answer for all of them is "yes, partly, not wholly"...
Groma: a great tool but just one of the tools in use, similar to how a modern surveyor uses multiple tools to do their job. There are some great channels showing how these tools were used and how the iterative refinements of direction led to straight(ish) lines between two places - so obvious when pointed out how it works, but also very clever and simple too.
Construction: another yes, partly, because some roads were built like that. All of them? hell no, just the really important ones and likely the ones in major settlements where foundations and roads necessarily merged as one being different to another could cause problems. Besides which the locals would just steal the stones when nobody was looking - a practice which continued for centuries, hence "pot holes" and also why there are so few remaining examples of Roman roads as they were because they were a good source of ready quarried and sorted stones.
Ancient trackways: The Romans weren't stupid and roads were where roads needed to be. If a road was already in place for their needs, then improve it if necessary. That's very different to every road and with so many roads and tracks, it would never happen anyway. Great point about the many kingdoms/tribes that made up the British Isles and how the Roman invasion pretty much united them and how this defined the later history of the nation, it's so easy to forget this.
Train gauge: Other than variable sizes, early trains were built as cheaply and as efficiently as possible because otherwise it'd be very expensive. Part of this was just replacing the wheels on existing carriages and ensuring that all these were the same distance apart and this arbitrary choice of donor carriage quickly became the standard on that rail because the incentive to change the spacing of the tracks every time a new design of train came out just wasn't there (for very obvious reasons). Therefore for a given track the standard size was whatever the track was built with at first and anything that ran on it later had to have the same sizing. With many independent railways springing up, the same process will have repeated which was why there were so many gauges and the cost of standardisation was a huge thing when the rail companies merged over time. Countries that developed railways later could define an initial standard saving a lot of pain. The engineering behind tracks is oddly fascinating as well...
Maps: Roman maps were not maps as defined in modern terminology, after all most of the space would have been useless wasted space that the average map user wouldn't care about particularly when media was very expensive. In some ways they were probably better visualised as a separate record of the way stones where from a given point the distances to the next (worthwhile) location was recorded. In other ways, they could be seen as more equivalent to a modern London Underground map - great for navigation, as that was their purpose, less great as a scaled 2D representation of a landscape - add in the times between stops and you'd have a quite comparable modern equivalent.
Good summary.
While I am shattered by this episode (I will recover soon) the 2-wheel chariot is called a carpent, hence, carpenter.
Here across the pond, you can leave Boston on Route 2 or 20 or 90 and end up in Seattle or Everet Washington. If it works, it works. I love roads. I grew up by the turnpike, although the pikes were long gone, and the post road, although we used trucks.
I've heard the story of the cart wheel tracks before. Know some of the history of early railways, I had doubts. Thanks for the debunking link, it's an interesting site.
Thank you for creating and sharing this informative episode. I found it pleasing to get to know about this.
What an eye catching title ...
Your enthusiasm is palpable.
Nicely edited content plus the music is just loud enough to complement rather than annoy or overpower the content.
Your voice is a morph of Michael Palin & David Attenborough.
This is good enough (as is) for mainstream.
🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
I was an ardent OS maps porer, whenever the local charity shops got some in I would have them and on my bedroom wall I had the local area of south London and north Kent seamlessly matched making for very interesting wallpaper. When I joined the forces, I was so adept at orienteering I ended up teaching it for a while, its also known about me is I cannot ever get lost here in Britain, if I want to drive to a place in Scotland I just head off and go, no looking at maps or sat navs as I had in the eighties driven to every part of mainland Britain in my old Hillman Avenger before it finally died on me coasting into Liverpool having thrown a rod. I can also much to some people's surprise tell where north is day or night, its a weird thing but I feel like a "pull" and that is where north is, which works quite well with my spatial awareness as I think in 3d pretty much. You might see me about in my 3 wheel van, dirty yellow and I do wander about these Dorset roads and venture into Wiltshire and Somerset as right by the borders of both, so much history in these lands round here, am hoping to get my old Vespa up and running for next summer and maybe do some camp outs.
Sound like a myth... Lone Brit knows his land and history
I’ve never seen this bloke’s channel before but have to say I love UA-cam. The only possible platform where someone who (apparently) works in a paint shop can pontificate on absolutely anything outside his sphere of knowledge and, it seems, some take him seriously. Marvellous!
What, you looked up my education and qualifications as well as my other job!?
Don't forget independent podcasts also! They really are a brilliant media platform to listen into others' passions and interests in the world, with their own spin.. I love others' opinions and the way they think and produce what is an extention of them and their creativity 👏 thank you! 😊
P.S. I highly recomend: The Blindboy Podcast.
Love the myths, and the perspective on GPS use. I often wonder how many people know "where" they are from a mental "map" perspective, in relation to the physical geography. It seems to have become both more physically accurate and concrete, yet more abstracted.
I really enjoy seeing the countryside as you walk along speaking. I’m an American with family roots in England, but never been there. Seeing your countryside makes me want to visit before I’m too old.
Thank you for this really informative and educational video.
I asked my Dad a long time ago why Scotch Corner is called that as It's far from Scotland, it was an old Roman road junction. The Romans didn't like the Scots very much.
Look where both of them are at now...
I read an article written by an engineer many years ago. He said that the width of Roman chariot wheels was not determined by the width of the horses. That measurement can vary by the size of the horse and the person making the measurement. The accepted length of a cubit is 18-inches. If you take a wheel one cubit in diameter and turn it one revolution, its circumference would be 56.52-inches. That would be a very accurate measurement at the time. After all, .020-inches would be about the thickness of 5-sheets of paper. Measuring wheels would also have markings on them to indicate shorter distances. A yard is a double cubit.
It has been an age-old practice to measure distance by counting revolutions of a wheel. Even our early settlers heading west had an odometer (road meter) attached to their wagon wheels to measure distance. There were no tape measurers, so early carpenters carried a measuring wheel to mark off distance.
Measuring wheels can be purchased at any big box home center.
In Germany I drove on Roman roads. Roads that were built 2,000 years ago. I now live in El paso. I have watched the same section of road being totally repaired 4 different times in the past 10 years.
Super video Paul! Love the clear debunking of what has become fairly engrained ‘fact’. Thank you!!
When I was a boy I had a collection of USGS maps that I used to plan hikes but now it's all on my phone and computer. I miss the contour lines on the paper maps, it's not so obvious on the electronic maps.
Likewise the rumor has been that the old state routes were based on Indian trails. A little of this may be true, in the sense that an obvious land contour would be used whether by Native Americans, native British, Romans or modern people. But not slavishly.
In NorthAmerica you’re right but the Romans were famous for not following geography and just go’n straight
@@seanfaherty Having just finished dipping in to my copy of Margery's 'Roman Routes in the Weald' - one of the seminal works - they weren't quite as fanatical about straight lines in the way a lot of people think. The ground does come in to things, as does who constructed the route, when and why.
The Romans were great engineers and that does mean that they weren't completely mad! If you follow their routes in detail you will, for example, see a turn of a few degrees onto another straight alignment to cross a river at a more sensible angle, before heading off on another straight alignment. Or dog-legs round a bit of boggy ground.
They did like their straight lines though. When they followed a ridge-top ancient route they would do so in short lengths of straight road rather than follow the original curved track. And where they could they did try and stick as close as they could to long distance straight alignments.
thanks for the correction and the reading list@@rickansell661
Paul!
It’s 2 am and you now have me looking up groma and the history of railway gauges ! 🤔👍🤣😴
Great vlogging as always, Paul. You've done well to cram 5 parts into 14 minutes, found this really interesting. Learnt a bit
Thanks 👍
Ah man, you took all the fun out of it.
still though, you did answer a lot of questions in the back of my head as I read about Roman roads over the years.
I learnt so many of these 'facts' at school and the various museums over the years. I did know the rail guage one was rubbish, but really interesting to hear about the others. Thanks
On subject of railway gauges original design of the Great Western Railway was based on a wider guage than what became the UK standard guage. This is why at Bristol Temple Meads and some other GWR stations you have to be really carefull to not fall down the gap between the train and the platform. Bristolians still say Brunel and the GWR were right about using a wider guage (more space for passengers and goods) but wider guarge would have involved wider railways needing more land/cost so we ended up with crappy narrow standard guage and train delays when people (outsiders) continue to ignore the warning and fall down the gap.
Finally "the algorithm" pointed me toward your channel! Liked and subscribed. Map nerd, land surveyor and halfwit explorer and man of general curiosity. Thanks for your curiosity and work.
Myths often fill gaps in our knowledge. But, they can also endure in the face of contrary evidence - which might suggest they also fulfill wider social or political functions. History is littered with them, including it seems, accounts about the construction of Roman roads. I particularly like the one about the depth of construction being 3 to 6 ft. As you point out, this sounds more like the depth needed for the foundations for a substantial building, rather than long-distance highways like Fosse Way or Watling Street. Likewise, surveying the route of a Roman road with the help of a Groma, still leaves the problem of how the Roman's managed to navigate their way across such variable contours and long distances. Room for myths, such as the one you mention, but also room for informed conjecture. It's not always easy to distinguish one from the other.
Hi Paul, really enjoyed this vid, you gave it your all 110% as usual, love the myth debunking, you hit the nail on the head with this one.
Absolutely superb video Paul. Possibly your best yet.
Thanks Kate.
I was just getting interested, when you stopped.!
Thoroughly enjoyed the information you conveyed, back in the 70s as part of a highway construction course which also skirted the surveying aspects, we were taught all about Roman road construction and how the names for the various layers have carried over into todays terminology , pavement being the obvious one. When it came to determining levels we used a set of three "boning rods" made from identical T shaped wooden pieces, one at each end of the distance to be covered and the middle one moved up or down against pins driven along an established string line, crude but surprisingly accurate, look forward to further revelations.
But isn't the Appian Way, which is preserved outside of Rome, a good example of 'classic' Roman road metalling?
Yup, as are a couple of others, but not 6ft deep and not in the UK
also the Via Campana that is still used for car traffic
They gave us peace. Apart from some initial resistance from Boudicca, who almost beat the Romans, their occupation was the longest period of peace this island has ever known.
I mean... peace through fear. Sure
You'd have _loved_ the peace the Nazis brought to vast chunks of Europe in the 1940s. It was very, very peaceful for a while.
@@frontenac5083 yes.ordnung mus sein,when they had to torture someone it hurted them more as us!!they were not as mean as those in ukraini
Agree with the above; Stalin and Hitler brought peace to millions and millions of deaths.
Some might call it enslavement.
Reg. rail gauges, there are 100 year old films from the US (I think New York) where horse drawn wagons are blending in with traffic with automobiles and trams, and the wagons get into the tram tracks perfectly with same track/wheel distance, and then suddenly turn off the street/out of the tracks like nothing. So might be true in one way; tracks are made to fit horse drawn wagons, just not the Roman ones.
As an archaeologist I've excavated numerous Roman roads,including major military highways, and never found anything even approaching Vitruvian construction. 30cm depth is pretty average, with rammed gravel above a layer of heavier stones.
I can believe that the heavily trafficked roads through central Italy, especially close to Rome, would have very substantial foundations.
Also, while I enjoyed the video, I was waiting for you to show the actual Roman road! I mean a handwave towards some mossy underbrush is not the same. Are the surfaces completely buried, or are they gone entirely and the only things left are the lines on the map of where they once were?
We tend to just have the projection of the Agger here in Britain. Check out our Roman Road playlist and we go into a little more detail.
I'd love to hear you make a video on the mystery Roman Villa in Eastfield Scarborough. It has experts confused and your opinion would be very interesting.
I remember reading the "funny" email of the horses backside theory. As a train geek from an early age I knew instantly it was made up. Early rail gauges tended to be from mines where small trucks were pushed along by the miners themselves and were only a few feet wide. In fact one might argue that nearly 5ft was a bit wide for mines. At some point, when railways had spread across the UK, there were two very similar dominant rail gauges of 4ft 8 and 4ft 9. To make them interoperable, the "Standard" gauge was defined as 4ft 8 and a half. So thats been the standard for 180 years(ish).
That said, the amusing thing for me is the places that didnt use this gauge. Ireland, Spain & Portugal, Russia....and of course, the remaining mines and mineral workings in this and other countries.
So nothing to do with Roman Chariots.
Our concept of Roman roads are ones built in Italy radiating from Rome itself. They cut straight thru hills & mountains, I've seen the foot markers myself left by excavators.
It's admirable that your work is correcting the standard (and still on going) information about Roman roads. Question, have your received criticism for these corrections? I have seen many times when a well intended historian bring to light the actual facts that they are attacked and sometimes ruining thier lives.
Thanks Anthony. Just take a delve into the comments and you'll soon find just that. What's frustrating is that I definitely do not consider myself a Historian. Just someone with an interest in various subjects. This information isnwidely available and doesn't take a lot to dig up. But as you suggest, people often don't want to hear it.
Can you give an example of a historian whose life was ruined as you said?
the mention of Vitruvius piqued my interest, not least because I finished rereading his Ten Books on Architecture a couple of months ago, and there was little mention of roads (there was some, but not much on construction, of course his focus was on the form and construction of buildings...)
I came to see the multiple layers I thought existed under Roman roads, I searched for that exact thing! Its weird to think that a misunderstanding got so widespread.
Multiply layers were a thing for sure. Just not quite to the degree we have all believed.
I love your style, sort of hands on, ignore the text books they gave us at school as it was all a narrative. To me, Pluto is still a planet as well lol. Very Refreshing attitude. Lets use our eyes and do this in a practical manner instead of relying on verbal hand me downs. I am 70 and in five minutes I just learned more than all my school days ever taught me. Thank you, genuinely.
Very interesting and killed a few beliefs I held. I particularly like the railway gauge one
Scary haircut though.
Who me!?
I grew up in a village on Ermine Street. When the council came along to put in mains sewage pipes they dug down and in doing so they hit the original Roman road. We were able to study the cross section of the road. The actual thickness was not as many books state, but the general construction was correct - including the paving. I would say the standards of construction would vary with terrain and ground and also whether there were inspectors around. It appears that many jobs were contracted out even back then, so no doubt corners would be cut wherever they could get away with it.
Thank you for not saying, lets get into it !
Thank you for this and many other engaging and informative videos! Regarding the relationship of Roman roads to earlier Celtic construction, see Graham Robb;s book "The Ancient Paths", and "A Brief History of the Celts" by Peter Berresford Ellis.
I always thought those diagrams looked suspiciously modern. In that we do often dig that deep when running utilities under the road instead of beside it, and use multiple layers for strength and stability.
I always expected most Roman roads to be dirt or gravel, even if dug, compressed, and levelled a bit. So many things in history and science are counterintuitive, so it’s nice when one’s intuition is correct for once!
One comment says in highly trafficked areas they built the roads with more layers which I can certainly understand. But the myth as I understand it was that they built all their roads that way, which is clearly untrue.
Travel to Italy and say that again. In the core Roman empire, they most defently build many if not all roads that way. Of course there were other tracks less developed, but those werent roads. Its the same as not all modern roads are highways. Just look at the German autobahn and landstraße, same concept same result
@@drsira7248 please see my final paragraph!
Another interesting and very entertaining video. Thank you.😊
Superbly informative. Well done sir.
That was fascinating. Thank you. I learnt some new things about Romans and it made perfect sense! Missed Rebecca but still enjoyed it immensely.
You need to take Fry and that program with a pinch of salt
I'd known that Roman roads weren't built in that way but hadn't known where the fallacy had arisen - much appreciated 😄
You know what, the only one I'm slightly gutted about is no 4. I loved that theory. Great film, great content as ever 👍
I'd always wondered about Roman road surveying - it would have involved a lot of time-consuming shuffling of the waypoints. Many of the roads were built by the legions in newly conquered territory where the possibility of counter-attacks on the surveyors would be an issue. Another problem is that many of our hill-tops would have been covered in trees where any surveyor wouldn't be able to see a damn thing!
Yup. I'm still trying to get my head around it thoroughly.
Yes, starting at both ends and meeting in the middle does seem more practical. You still need a pretty good idea of the bearing of the target destination from each end, and it is possible the two roads could miss completely!@@pwhitewick
Always thought the standard account involved hugely more work and materials than were necessary. Thanks for mythbusting.
Thanks for the video today. Reloaded out a second time, and it went right through. Again, hello to Rebecca and see you on the next. Cheers Paul! 🇬🇧🙂👍🇺🇸
Oh nooooo. Refresh and go again. Keep me posted!!
I knew that tweet was suspicious about the roads, when the tweet was about rail gauges. Where I live, we have one of the last small-gauge trains, FROM ENGLAND here in America. It is a shorter track but they maintain it all as it was. Fascinating stuff. But there are multiple gauge tracks, even my less than amateur self knew that. So it stuck in my craw and I couldn't figure out why. Thank you for articulating it.