Icarefully unfurled the fraying paper, teasing the folded sheets open to reveal the full extent of the map. It was so battered and bruised that the lines of fold had split, leaving a flapping collective of lightly connected rectangles. For seventeen years, the map had lived in various bags; been opened in windblown wheat fields and hastily folded up in rain showers. The map had come to wear its own history of local exploration – the brown stains of earth and tea; the circles indicating sites of personal interest that pock-marked the sheet. The map became not only a general guide to the villages and surrounds of this square of north Essex, but an ever reworked palimpsest that altered with the ages, evolving with each new obsessive search of the local lands.
I set about sellotaping the sheets of paper back together. Earlier, a gust of wind had finally torn the tattered map in two. On the kitchen table it now lay like a patient in theatre. I worked with the care of the surgeon, stitching together the ripped edges until the map lay whole once more – a little field-worn in places yet fully functional again and ready to finally face the challenge of finding that missing Roman road.
The Roman road is perfectly straight as all good Roman roads are: a golden line from the white edge of the map through the grey splurge of Braintree town, hiccoughing as it crosses the pale blue, serpentine squiggle of the River Blackwater heading unflinchingly on a north-east bearing with reassuring uniformity as the B1053, before then abruptly changing colour to a dark red shade as it becomes the A1017. A label in black capitals reads ROMAN ROAD. That dead straight red line runs on another couple of miles to the village of Gosfield where it suddenly breaks off at the powder blue wavy line of Bourne Brook, the modern B-road now venturing north in a squiggly, irregular meander. A dark blue biro circle on the map that I had drawn many years back serves to highlight that schism. From that bridging point, the Roman road takes a course unknown for eight miles.
On a line of dead alignment, the Roman road rolls on through the fields of north Essex, a few hundred yards below the pre-Roman settlement at Hill Farm, Gestingthorpe, crossing the Belchamp Brook before stepping across the River Stour and over the county border into Suffolk. Then, just before the antique-shop littered high street of Long Melford, the Roman road appears again – heading straight and true on that same north-easterly orientation as when the road vanishes eight miles earlier at Gosfield.
I had done some initial investigation. The standard work on Britain’s Roman roads remained that of Ivan D. Margary, an Oxford don from the 1950s who was a contemporary of J. R. R. Tolkien at Exeter College and whose magisterial two-volumed Roman Roads in Britain I had managed to secure from the local library. Margary’s textbook offered a comprehensive survey of the entire network of Roman roadways across Britain. He had devised the numbering system that was still employed today to delineate separate Roman roads. The missing Roman road I was after was a section of 33a. It was only when I read Margary’s account that I realised the road was no branch line but rather a mainline of the Roman road network. Road 33a ran for some forty-two miles from Chelmsford to Ixworth. It was the southern section of the Peddars Way:
This is the southern portion of the main northern Roman road in east Anglia, known further on as Peddars Way, and it may well have been of equal or even greater importance than the London–Colchester road (3) for it appears to have been planned to give direct access to the coast at the Wash …1
A mile or so from my little cottage there lay not an insignificant Roman road as I had first thought, but one that tore straight through the prehistoric lands of England; an arterial route that ran to the heart of East Anglia where it met an even more ancient roadway that offered a direct route to the Norfolk coast. I thought of the seahenges that had been discovered on the beach at Holme-next-the-Sea – the final destination for the Peddars Way. I thought too of Branodunum – the Roman fort that sat off the salt marshes at Brancaster only a few miles down that North Norfolk coastline. Things were coming together. The Roman road that ran so close beside me – through Lucking Street and Great Maplestead – was only part of the story. It was a link into a far wider appreciation of the prehistoric road network that existed across southern Britain.
The Romans had not simply arrived to find a barren isle; there had already existed a maze of roads and pathways, the ancient trackways of the people of Britain. The Romans had built their own road network on top of the infrastructure which already existed. I turned back to Margary and to his ‘General Map of Roman Roads in S.E. Britain’. At a glance it could have been a modern road atlas – the hub of London with a spider’s web of threads leading away. I followed the solid black line of the 3a from London to Chelmsford, then on to the 33a north until it broke into a series of separated N-dashes: a section labelled as ‘course inferred’ according to the key (or ‘legend’ as Margary called it). I turned back to Margary:
… at Gosfield, the modern road leaves the alignment, which is at first unmarked by any traces beyond the stream crossing, but beyond the grounds of Gosfield Place a straight line of hedgerows and a footmark mark it again for ½ mile to near Whiteash Green, 1 mile to the west of Halstead, and it is possible that the lane direct to the crossing of the River Colne at Doe’s Corner may be part of it.
There is now a gap of 8 miles where the course is unknown …2
Those were the eight miles of missing Roman road I was after.
Then there was that Roman coin. I had found it in the excitement of those first few weeks of moving into the village of Little Maplestead in 2000. A patch of land had been for sale at the same time as the cottage, merely a few muddy yards away over an ancient green lane. The wild open space was too much to resist. We bought it and called it ‘The Field’. It was in the days before children. I had bought a metal detector and worked my way from the furthest reaches of the fences until a tiny fragment of Roman Britain had risen from the soil only yards from the edge of the field. The circle of metal was a couple of centimetres across. When it rose from the muddy earth I had shown little initial enthusiasm. A wash and brush revealed a distinct coin. On one side was a profile of a figurehead. The other showed a depiction of a standing stick-like statue with an ornate staff stuck into the ground alongside and what I first took to be a dagger in its scabbard.
When I had next gone to London I had headed for the British Museum and the small hatch in the wall in the coin room where I had handed over my small finding and returned later to receive a two-inch square, white envelope containing my coin. On the cover was written: ‘Radiate of the Roman emperor Gallienus (AD 253–68)’.
Now I opened that square white envelope once more. The coin had recently ventured into my daughter Eva’s primary school as their project focus had turned to Roman Britain. The crisp whiteness of the British Museum envelope had vanished. It was fifteen years on. All things fade. Three lime-green crayon lines had appeared. I smiled, heartwarmed. Eva had made a fittingly small protective square out of bubble-wrap to hold the coin. I had sent the treasure into school in another layer, a larger white envelope on which I had written: ‘Eva Canton’s Dad’s Roman Coin’. In pencil, Eva had added: ‘Now Eva’s’.
I extracted the coin from its various layers and turned its delicate form in my clumsy fingers. The standing stick-like statue on the reverse was actually a genius figure and the dagger in its scabbard was in fact a cornucopia or horn of plenty symbolising abundance and health, an overflowing natural harvest. It surely boded well. I loved how the history of this fragment of Roman life on British soils had evolved a secondary existence since re-emerging from the clay of the field; even if no longer as an object of daily monetary worth, as an object of wonder, a mysterious window into the world that existed on this very ground so long ago. In those fifteen years since it had come to light again, it was as though it had somehow gained renewed life in the air of the modern world some 1,800 years after it had first been born, struck in a distant forge somewhere in Italy.
The idea of seeking the Roman road had been born on a dull day in December. A local amateur archaeologist with a penchant for geophysics had agreed to come out to the field to give it the once over. Tim was a lecturer in electronics. My friend Ellie Mead had put me in contact with him. He arrived one Sunday morning with a car boot full of wooden stakes and measuring lengths. Then there was Aldous. He was from the village. His father was an apiarist – a bee-keeper who placed his hives in borage fields across East Anglia and harvested the sweetest honey. In our tiny hamlet, people rarely met on the street. It was the first I had heard of Aldous, whose enthusiasm for all things archaeological had brought him the mile or so across the fields that Sunday morning.
We made our introductions and I made tea while Tim and Aldous began plotting out the stakes, measuring the rope-edged rectangles which would form the grid for the geophysical survey of the field. I hacked at clumps of brambles that were in the way of the survey while chatting to Aldous of his adventures with Colchester Archaeological Group (CAG).
‘Are you going to Wormingford tomorrow? I asked.
He was.
Tim called us back from our chatter. In time the stakes were correctly placed and Tim walked the delineated acre or so of the field with careful deliberation, his delicate electronic equipment peering deep into the earth. The procedure had something of an ancient ceremonial air, as though a practice of sacred divination or a fertility rite: Tim was a wise tribal elder.
The next day was the shortest day. To mark the winter equinox, Ellie had organised a pre-dawn meet in The Crown pub at Wormingford. Those gathered were then to wander down into the wide embrace of the Stour Valley and from there watch the sun rise over the hillside. The river valley site was littered with ancient markings – Neolithic cursuses that now appeared as long lines of gently raised banks in the landscape. A team from CAG had been working on these five-thousand-year-old features for years. Their findings had finally been collected together and now published for the first time. So the Wormingford equinox meet was also a sunrise book launch.
So at dawn the following day I walked the borderlands of Essex–Suffolk with Aldous. We chatted about having an archaeological dig in the village, about seeking out the Roman road. He, too, had spent endless hours plotting the possible course of the road across the local lands; his OS maps also splayed across a desk or kitchen table. The magnetic survey of the field had indicated nothing significant in the area covered. My Roman coin had been found tight to the blackthorn hedge edging the green lane – terrain too tricky for Tim’s magnetometer. So there was still hope for finding more Roman material in the field beyond the extent of the geophysical survey.
Though the sun rose through grey cloud, by the time fried breakfasts were being served in the pub, our enthusiasm for the Maplestead Archaeological Dig had been stoked by the walk.
‘Lucking Street is the key,’ declared Aldous. ‘That’s where we’ll find the Roman road.’
The weeks had passed. There were other things on my mind. In January, baby Joe was born. It was April before I turned back to thoughts of Road 33a. I sent a collective email round to a select band of archaeology friends who might help fashion a more serious search for the Roman road. They were Aldous, Ellie Mead and my old friend Ant who taught archaeology at a local sixth form college. Ant had already said he could get a mini-bus load of students together for a dig. I put a notice in the local Parish Newsletter:
The Maplestead Dig
Join us in the hunt for the Roman Road.
With the help of experienced archaeologists we will be digging one-metre wide test pits in various gardens of the Maplesteads. We’re especially looking for gardens in Lucking Street as there are signs of Roman activity and maybe that’s where the Roman road to Gestingthorpe villa ran …
The newsletter editor had added that line about the Gestingthorpe villa. The road actually ran a couple of hundred yards south of the villa but I guessed it wouldn’t matter. I didn’t want to start getting pedantic.
Within a few days, messages started to mount up on my landline answer phone: a host of local voices offering up their garden to be dug in the fast expanding quest to find the Roman road. One of those that rang had a very local-sounding voice. He was called Jim Lock. He lived over by the ancient woodland of Broaks Wood at Southey Green and he too had been on the trail of the missing Roman road for a number of years. I arranged to pay Jim a visit.
I drove into a sweeping driveway and up to a sprawling bungalow. To the side were a number of cars in various states of roadworthiness. Jim appeared at the doorway along with two small dogs whose yaps extinguished on Jim’s command as we reached the vast front room. He directed me to a table where an oh-so-familiar OS map was spread.
‘I been looking for that road for years,’ said Jim.
His voice held the increasingly rare accent of rural Essex with its extended diphthongs and yod-droppings like its East Anglian country cousins in Suffolk and Norfolk. Rather than the estuary Essex accent, which had spread from London and now ran wild across the county, Jim’s accent was the indigenous one. It reminded me of the old-boy Don who had been my neighbour when I had first begun this quest for the Roman road some seventeen years before. It was the old voice of the countryside round here.
‘Were you born near here then, Jim? I asked, even though I already knew the answer.
His long arm unfurled as he pointed through the patio doors to the south.
‘Just over the other side of the wood,’ he said.
Jim was eighty-three years old. As we turned to the maps, he talked through his own trail after pieces of the past. I smiled as I saw the same pencil line drawn on his map as on mine – from the schism in the straight road from Braintree at Gosfield, marking out the probable path of the road. Jim spoke of the various places he had found Roman pottery fragments in the fields. He rented a medieval barn over by Broaks Wood that he used to store stuff in. We could take a look over there later, if I wanted. I did. Jim said he’d found loads of potsherds simply sticking out of the ditches.
‘Later stuff, though,’ he said. ‘Medieval.’
I lifted a book which was sitting on the table. The cover was faded and worn. I read the title: The Discovery of Britain: A Guide to Archaeology. It was by Jack Lindsay. The name rang a vague bell. The front cover was illustrated with a broken two-handed drinking vessel that had been patched together.
‘You know this book, do you?’ asked Jim.
Some distant memory flickered but I couldn’t trace it.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Well, you need to – it’s all about the archaeology of this area.’
I flicked through the pages. Jim wasn’t wrong. On the opening page opposite the Contents was a hand-drawn map illustrating the section of landscape from Gosfield to Long Melford with the eight miles of the missing Roman road marked by a string of dashed lines.
‘See what you mean,’ I said.
Jim smiled.
Rather surprisingly, a young woman suddenly appeared in the front room. She looked like she’d just woken up, even though it was late afternoon. Jim stood up and headed out of the room with the girl, leaving me to Jack Lindsay’s The Discovery of Britain. I turned back to the hand-drawn map, then to the Note on the page before:
This is a book on Local History – with, I hope, a difference. The stress is throughout on quest and discovery, on the ways in which one gets to grips with the history lying obvious and hidden all round one. The method is often discursive. In such a journey one must keep one’s wits about one and be interested in everything. One never knows when some odd detail is going to connect up with another and illuminate a whole sequence.3
Jim returned to the front room, alone but for the two dogs that pitter-pattered among his footsteps.
‘Everything all right?’ I asked.
‘Kids, eh?’ Jim smiled.
It turned out that Jim had four children all in their early twenties, all still living at home. The girl was a girlfriend of a son.
‘I married late,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘My wife’s twenty years younger ’un me.’
He smiled.
‘Oh right,’ I said.
I looked at Jim with a new-found admiration. He’d become a dad for the first time in his sixties, and then had four children. I thought of my baby son Joe who was just four months old. I no longer felt an aged dad. I seemed like a fresh-faced, young father in comparison to Jim who sat before me in his eighties with his brood only just leaving childhood and showing no signs of flying the nest.
‘Starts with Hill Farm,’ Jim said.
He’d turned back to Jack Lindsay’s book, to the opening chapter on the excavations at Gestingthorpe.
‘Harold Cooper. That’s Ashley Cooper’s father,’ he explained. ‘You know Ashley Cooper?’
It wouldn’t be the last time someone asked me that question.
‘I don’t, no. I know of the Roman villa at Gestingthorpe.’
Gestingthorpe was a village close to the dead reckoning alignment of the Roman road. Excavations from the 1950s had revealed a wealth of Roman tiles but evidence too of earlier settlement. I’d walked over the site years back. At some point, I’d head over again. But it was the Roman road I was after.
A week on I walked into Halstead library. A copy of Jack Lindsay’s The Discovery of Britain was awaiting my arrival. I’d had the robotic woman’s electronic message on my answer machine informing me the book was ready for collection but there was no sign of Lindsay’s book. It wasn’t there. It hadn’t arrived due to some computer glitch. Fortunately, my friend Jane Winch was one of the librarians.
‘Jack Lindsay?’ she said. ‘I lent you that ten years ago.’
‘Did you?’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
Jane smiled. I believed her though the remembrance was faint. Now I really needed it again.
‘I’m heading home for lunch at one,’ she said. ‘I can drop it over at yours later today.’
This was library service de luxe.
‘If I can find it …’ she added and laughed.
I looked at the clock. It was quarter to one.
Jane did. That afternoon I lay in the field amid the wild grasses and read Jack Lindsay’s book. It really was a remarkable work to find, for the focus was entirely on the archaeology of my patch of Essex. As I started to read, a treasure of local place names fell from the pages. Lindsay began with the work at Hill Farm, Gestingthorpe before turning to Halstead. The book was a fascinating account of Lindsay’s work and written in a peculiarly endearing style which incorporated both formal, archaeological jargon and anecdotes on local people and places. Lindsay declared himself ‘unofficial prospector and summariser of archaeology for the Halstead district’:
You can hope for the pleasure and excitement of new lines of inquiry; but you cannot hope to exploit your finds to any extent. Otherwise you are liable to become a confusing vandal, not a helpful explorer of the past.
It seemed a sensible approach. There were duties to this self-appointed role: ‘Your duty is to keep in touch with the nearest responsible centre – here the Castle Museum at Colchester – report finds and discuss procedures.’
I rolled over on to my back and looked out through the tall meadow grasses to the puffy white clouds that drifted across the sky. A hover fly appeared and droned momentarily over my face. I turned back to Lindsay’s words of advice. Suddenly, they read as though written specifically for me.
So you must enlist as many aids and accomplices as possible … the prospector must make all use he can of previously recorded work, old newspapers, local histories, churchwardens’ accounts, parish registers, and what not; but he must also draw other people in and give them an intelligent interest in what the whole thing is about.
I smiled as I imagined some baton being passed over. I was now unofficial prospector. The Maplestead Archaeological Dig was underway. I felt the hand of history on my shoulder – Jack Lindsay keeping an overseeing eye on my efforts to find that elusive Roman road.
Later that afternoon, after I had read the rest of The Discovery of Britain, I headed over towards Lucking Street, walking the green lane at the back of the cottage, thinking about Jack Lindsay and the last sighting in these lands of Margary’s Roman road 33a. It was sometime in 1957 as Lindsay was writing The Discovery of Britain:
More or less exactly in the dead alignment a flint roadway has been found a few months ago when the front room of the farmhouse on Lucking Street at that point was being refloored.
Lindsay hadn’t managed a look at the road before it was covered over once more. He writes how he ‘did not hear in time’, the frustration obvious. However, he did manage to see a pile of the flints from the metalling, thrown out by the workmen. It was a rare verification of the route, pinning the road to a point on the land, on the map.
By the time that I reached a view of Lucking Street farmhouse, the June sun had warmed. I stood by a stile and halted. I looked down over the stream, the gentle valley beyond and traced the road line that ran without deviation north-east from that front room of the farmhouse, through the newly constructed chicken sheds and the two bare spoil heaps into the open fields beyond. I was due to see the Newtons later – owners of the farmhouse, farmers of the lands all around.
I headed down the slope until I was following the rough line of the Roman road, from a few contour lines lower, along an unkempt footpath, crashing through thigh-high grasses, nettles, sprays of cow parsley. The plaited heads of the corn were just peaking from their green sheaths. The deer came from nowhere. It had been resting and bolted a few yards from my footfall, leaping over the path to the field in one go – all horns and haunch, then powerfully bounding on through the corn to the line of the Roman road where another appeared and the two young fallow males turned back to me and stared before vanishing.
The shock of the deer faded. I gazed up to a roughly drawn line of shrubs that ran parallel, mimicking and perhaps even overgrowing our Roman road. The cornfield met a hedge and became a field of grass – a strip of exposed brown soil prepared for game cover ran up the slope across the line of the road. Halfway up, the land seemed to level out. That was where to seek the Roman road.
I walked on towards the spinney. As I passed the pond, brilliant-blue damselflies flitted by. Two duck-blue billed ruddy ducks sat serene upon the surface of the shallow water. In the still peace of the copse, I sat on the long-fallen trunk of an oak, pulled out the Thermos and settled to stare again at the battered OS map with its green line marking the supposed route of the Roman road. On that dead alignment, the road ran through the centre of the copse, indeed pretty much beneath me. I looked to the floor, the leaf litter. Under these hornbeams, these oaks, these sweet chestnuts and away through this canopy, somewhere very near, the road runs. I poured a cup of tea and turned to Hugh Davies’ Roads in Roman Britain.4 Time passed. I read of the techniques used by Roman road designers to map and plot the path; of the agger, that raised mound that marks the road; the metalling, the materials layer laid to form the solid base; the four layers of Vitruvius from his De Architectura – first the statumen of stones and flints, then the layers of rudus, nucleus and finally the pavimentum, the paving – supposedly a model for Roman road-building though such layering was way too expensive to find form in reality. That practice wouldn’t have applied here, not to a military road through the country, even if it was given the highest importance in Ivan Margary’s biblical gazetteer Roman Roads in Britain – an ‘a’: Margary’s road 33a. It ran from Chelmsford to Ixworth: forty-two miles long and missing an eight-mile section which ran somewhere beneath my feet.
The average width of the metalling of a Roman road in Britain – the hard layering – was twenty-two pedes or Roman feet: some 6.5 metres. The average depth of the metalling came in at twenty inches. I placed my hands twenty inches or so apart and leaned my head to the side as though glancing at the cross section of a Roman road. An oak creaked ominously behind me. I dropped my hands and started to pack up. Surely those figures were a little misleading? Weren’t they based on the major roads such as Watling Street or Stane Street, the most important roads, the ones that were still about today? Watling Street had an average depth of metalling, of stone layering, of thirty-two inches. But there was a hoard of smaller roads all across Britain that lay beneath the surface, unseen for hundreds of years. They were nowhere near that width or depth. A horse-drawn carriage had an average wheel base of some five pedes, around 1.5 metres, so to allow for two carts to go in opposite directions, the road would need to be some twelve pedes wide – a little under twelve feet.
Another week on, the June sun still shone. It was the Maplestead Archaeological Dig week. A dozen students and their teachers arrived at the cottage on Monday morning in a flurry of chatter, mattocks and trowels. I made teas and coffees and we clustered about the kitchen table, which I had laid out in preparation. The battered OS map acted as a tablecloth on top of which I had placed a variety of potsherds from local fields, alongside various articles and books. I gave a short brief as to the focus of the week: to provide some useful digging practice for the archaeology students, and to find that long-lost Roman road.
‘The last probable sighting of the road was in 1957,’ I stated and sought out Lucking Street farmhouse on the map.
‘Here.’
My finger prodded the paper.
Teas downed, we headed out to the field where two first test pits were to be dug, hopefully turning up the hoard from which my radiate of the Roman emperor Gallienus had escaped.
The following day I rescued my bicycle from the shed and cycled over towards Lucking Street. I abandoned the bike by a hawthorn hedge and walked the now familiar footpath. The evening sky offered the hope of rain. The poplars were rustling. Hedgerow birds chattered nervously. A deer came bounding madly towards me through the thick cover of corn. For a moment, I thought it was a wild dog. I froze and stared. It took another bound and then halted and held my stare before turning and leaping back away over the green heads of the corn. There was a strange tension to the evening.
I stepped across the ditch towards the strip of brown soil running up the incline. In lines, young sweetcorn plants were steadily rising towards the sun, the leaves unfurling into their distinctive form. Three hares bolted from their seats, scattering as I stepped on to the soil of the bare field and started to stroll uphill towards that halt in the incline, that levelling that I swore must mark the path of the Roman road. From twenty yards, I could see the three mounds of earth; spoil from the test pits dug earlier that day by the archaeology students.
A lone hare sat further up the field, glancing suspiciously back to me over hunched shoulders. The evening had fallen still. A whitethroat launched its scratchy call from the bush beside the pond. I stood by a hole: Test Pit 1. I leant over and stared at the bottom of the hole. There was a layer of flint all right. But was this really the Roman road? I looked about me. Five hundred yards or so to the south I could make out a single Tudor chimney peering from the tree-line signalling Lucking Street farm, marking that 1957 sighting of the road. I traced the path across the land to here, to this hole beside me. There were a couple of immediate issues that arose. The deep pond at the edge of the field, lined with head-high nettles, was directly in the line of the road. I had assumed the pond marked a spring, that the Roman road might run beside it but perhaps the pond had been built after the road. The second problem was the road itself. I looked down to the exposed layer of flint. It was only a foot or so from the surface, a good twelve inches down but not much more. I wasn’t entirely convinced. My eyes lifted. I traced the imagined path of the road, away north through the waves of barley beyond this bare strip of earth and on to the emerald woodland isle of Monks Spinney.
I needed coffee. I walked back down the bare brown soil. I was half convinced, half sure we had found the Roman road. I walked on head down – field walking, stepping over the shrunken sweetcorn plants, seeking signs. Halfway down, in the dry surface soil was an arm of metal, instantly identifiable as half a horseshoe. I scrambled over the ditch on to the footpath back towards Lucking Street where I passed a piebald stallion stood in a field that lifted its head and held my stare, perfectly static as I walked on, and then turned away and returned to grazing.
The culmination of the Maplestead Archaeological Dig was an exhibition of our findings that weekend as part of the village flower show. We had two trestle tables in Great Maplestead village hall that needed arranging so I drove down on the Friday evening with Eva and Molly and a car full of various boxes of finds. Howard Davis, who I had only met thanks to the Parish newsletter piece, had already been invaluable in coordinating the archaeology students as they dug up Joe Newton’s game cover field. On the trestle tables were a selection of A4 colour photos of the dig, and a label stating: Maplestead Dig 2015. Howard had printed them off. Eva had created her own Maplestead Archaeological Dig posters. She took charge.
‘I think we should put one up here,’ she pointed to a spare section of wall.
‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘We can stick the map on the table.’
The following morning we returned to the village hall. As Eva and I fiddled with balls of Blu-tack, Molly played on a set of stage steps. I stuck the OS map to the table. The green line of Margary 33a stood out well. With Eva’s posters and Howard’s photos there was a good bit of colour to the exhibition. There were also the various collections of findings which Eva carefully arranged. She had created labels for them too. One read: ‘My Treasure by Eva Canton’, with a red arrow pointing to the various items she had found from one of the test pits in the field. Another read: ‘Pond Treasure’, and was placed beside a tray containing pieces of clay pipe, small flints and potsherds, bits of chalk and glass that had emerged as we dug the pond last summer. With another blob of Blu-tack, I stuck down the small dark circle of the radiate of the Roman emperor Gallienus that tied the Romans to my field.
We stopped for tea and juice and cake at the newly built marquee in the car park. A battered 4x4 skidded into the driveway. It was Joe Newton, the Lucking Street farmer. I had seen him earlier and he had offered to show me the quern stone he had found years ago when ploughing a field close to Lucking Street. He reached over the rim on the truck and lifted out a circle of grey stone a good foot across. It had a hole in the middle a couple of inches wide.
‘There you go,’ he said.
It would make a perfect centrepiece for our exhibition.
I arranged with Joe that we would head over to the holes dug by the archaeology students in his game cover field once Ellie Mead got here. She was due around two o’clock with her archaeology friend Jane. I was hoping they would declare the layer of flint a definitive sighting of the missing Roman road.
There was no mobile coverage at all so I pinned a note to the door of the village hall that read:
Attn: Ellie Mead
Meet you here at 2.30!
It worked.
I returned to the village hall with Eva and Molly to find Ellie and Jane quietly working their way around our exhibition. Eva was delighted to have customers and told them tales of her treasures. With Howard and Joe Newton, we headed across the fields in a convoy, parking up by the stench of the vast heap of chicken shed compost, then heading down the lines of young corn as a summer drizzle started to fall.
‘Mmm,’ said Ellie as we stood over Test Pit 1. ‘That does look like something.’
The flint layer, as we had called it, now seemed rather more convincing than it was earlier in the week.
‘So the last sighting of the road was at Lucking Street farmhouse in 1957,’ I said to Ellie and gestured back to the buildings four hundred yards or so away beyond the chicken sheds.
‘If the road runs straight, then this pond here is a problem.’
The steep, nettled banks fell sharply.
‘Ah, now I think this is probably a marl pit,’ stated Joe. ‘Eighteenth century. Perhaps later. But certainly not in the way of the Roman road.’
It was a good shout. Neither Ellie nor Jane could give a definitive word on the road but as evidence we now had a growing collection of Roman-looking potsherds; a possible flint layer of metalling; and, Howard’s patterned brass item. It was circular, an inch across and looked like it could have come from a belt or a tunic – a Roman one, perhaps. He had found it with his metal detector right here as the students dug away at the test pits. It was another tantalising piece of the puzzle.
Later that night, when the girls were asleep in bed, I turned back to the Roman road, searching online for information on flint layers in metalling, on aggers, on anything that might persuade me further. I was still only half convinced. A dim remembrance of Jack Lindsay’s words returned to me:
You can hope for the pleasure and excitement of new lines of inquiry … Your duty is to keep in touch with the nearest responsible centre – here the Castle Museum at Colchester – report finds and discuss procedures.
I smiled sleepily as I found the quote again. I knew what to do. I hurriedly emailed the Castle Museum:
Dear Sir/Madam,
We have run a local village dig in the Maplesteads nr Halstead (June 2015) in order to seek the Roman road (Margary’s 33). We now have a possible flint layer of the metalling exposed and wonder if someone might be able to come out and take a look …
Then I went to bed too.
The next day there was a reply from Phillip Crummy of Colchester Archaeological Trust asking for photos. I sent them over and soon received a response:
I’ve never seen metalling like that. Seems far too coarse and not well enough packed I would have thought but could be wrong. There is an edge in the bottom of your pit of course. It looks like the flints are in a cut feature which is filled with flint fragments. It looks more like a foundation rather than a road …
I had one further battle plan to unfurl. Jim Lock had passed me on to a good friend of his who lived over at Castle Hedingham and who had also spent a good deal of time investigating the Roman road. He was called Colin Peel and was in his eighties, too. He was a dowser.
When I had rung Colin, he was expecting my call.
‘Jim told me you’d call,’ Colin said.
We talked Roman roads and more specifically of Margary’s 33a. We spoke on archaeo-astronomy and then on divination and dowsing. I’d always seen dowsing as a practice of druids and pagans. I was right. It was. Only I was wrong as to what pagans were. The word ‘pagan’ was derived from the Latin so had in fact been brought to us by none other than the Romans. The Latin root paganus merely meant a villager, a rustic or a civilian; someone who was non-militant. A paganus was the opposite to a miles – a soldier, or one of the army. The word had come from pagus meaning a rural district; of the country. So it was a country versus town thing. And it was the Romans who had actually brought the very concept of the town to Britain. So the pagans were actually merely the local British folk of the countryside – as opposed to the townspeople, who were those Britons most willing to adapt to Roman ways. It was not perhaps surprising then that through the centuries the definition of a pagan had gained a rather negative slant, such that a pagan came to mean a heathen as opposed to a Christian or Jewish person; an uncivilised as opposed to a civilised person. By the sixteenth century, the term had morphed even further to mean an illicit or clandestine lover or a prostitute. Yet the term pagan originally just meant someone of the countryside.
Colin told me more of the history of dowsing as a rural practice.
‘It was the witchcraft acts of Elizabeth I that really stopped it,’ he said.
The terms dowsing and divining were apparently interchangeable though I rather preferred the term divination – it seemed to evoke a magical element to the practice.
We arranged for Colin to visit for a coffee and a chat the following week. He promised to bring his dowsing rods, or divining rods, as you could also call them.
So the following week, Colin sat at my kitchen table. Once we were settled with a coffee and a biscuit I asked him again about dowsing/divining.
‘Well you see there’s a natural sensitivity that we all have,’ he explained.
Colin spoke softly of the process by which he was able to access that natural sensitivity. He had beautiful watery-blue eyes made bluer against the blue collar of his shirt. He wore aviator glasses that hung on a thread around his neck. His grey hair was swept neatly across his head. He spoke of a ‘blast of energy’ which he could feel when practising natural healing by a laying-on of hands.
‘And with dowsing?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ Colin said and stared with those clear blue eyes into mine.
I had never witnessed the practice of dowsing so we headed out to the field while Colin spoke of Michael and Mary Lines and Dragon and Serpent Lines that criss-crossed the landscape.
‘There’s so much lost knowledge,’ I said. ‘I was writing earlier about how there are ways of living and mindsets from prehistoric times that we have completely lost.’
‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Colin. ‘We now live lifestyles that are so much less connected with the land.’
In the field, Colin produced a pair of dowsing or divining rods. They looked like two pieces of wire merely bent a third along their length to form a handle. In fact, that’s exactly what they were.
‘Fencing wire,’ said Colin.
He held one in each hand and we fell into a silence broken only by birdsong. Then he walked forward into the long grass taking pigeon steps while I stood and watched him dowsing. After a few moments, he stopped. The rods were moving. I walked over to join him. As Colin stepped forward over an innocuous patch of the ubiquitous meadow grass, the rods swung in his hands such that the two tips crossed. He stepped back and the rods swung dramatically once more.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘They’re really moving. Is that a normal movement for the rods?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Colin.
He looked down to the patch of ground before us.
‘I’m never surprised now at the action of the rods.’
He concentrated again.
‘Now let me just try to get a fix on the depth,’ said Colin.
‘Depth?’ I said.
The rods seemed to have all the capacity of a metal detector.
‘Is it more than three feet deep?’ he said.
The rods swung in answer.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Is it four foot deep?’
The rods swung again.
‘Yes.’
‘Is it five foot deep?’
The rods remained still.
‘So it’s round about a metre deep,’ stated Colin. ‘Or something like that.’
It was a remarkable introduction to dowsing. I marked the spot in the field with two logs of firewood, leaving them as a cross for digging later.
‘That’s pretty amazing, Colin,’ I said.
He then presented me with the divining rods. I turned them in my hands. They really were just two bent sections of wire.
‘I love the fact they are nothing grandly manufactured,’ I said. ‘In a way, the material is immaterial …’
‘Indeed,’ said Colin. ‘It comes from you.’
We headed over to Judy and Chris Gosling who lived in Byham Hall, a mile or so away on the northern edge of the village and who farmed a wide tract of land. The predicted route of the Roman road ran right through a section of their land. Colin had visited the Goslings before – on a dowsing trip.
‘They’re both sensitive to dowsing,’ he said. ‘You see, it often runs in the family.’
My plan had been for Colin to sweep over those lands with his divining rods and then to whisk him over to Joe Newton’s to have a dowse over his lands, too. It was rather ambitious I soon realised. In any case, I discovered Colin had already undertaken his own investigation of the Roman road some years back.
A few days later, I received a copy of Colin’s report on seeking the Roman road which had been published in the journal Archaeology and Dowsing under the title of ‘Minding the Gap: Looking for the ‘Missing’ Section of Margary’s Road number 33 in East Anglia’. It made for fascinating reading. Colin had been guided to hunt for the Roman road by Ashley Cooper of Hill Farm, Gestingthorpe, and had traced the references in Ivan Margary before uncovering further details on the road. A trial dig carried out in 1995 on the Roman road north of Chelmsford found the agger merely 3.5 metres wide. Colin had then dowsed along the line of the road to Braintree and on, finding that ‘the structural features and dimensions were broadly maintained’. He had followed the road all the way to the River Colne. There the Roman road had vanished. Instead, Colin had divined the road as heading east along the line of the river to Halstead. I read his conclusion:
My dowsed findings are in line with all the archaeological evidence that has emerged so far, which suggests that Margary was mistaken in his belief that Road 33 followed a continuous unbroken line from Little Waltham, north of Chelmsford, to Brancaster, on the Norfolk coast.5
A month on, I was still strolling the fields of the Goslings where I felt that the Roman road ran. I plucked pieces of stone from the surface and in my head saw them as evidence of the foundations of the road. Yet the simple and obvious truth was one I had known for a while. Even if Margary’s Roman road 33a did run a few feet beneath mine, it would not be revealed as a neat, stone agger were I to dig down. All the stone would have been taken centuries ago. It would have been recycled as the walls or rough foundations to the farmhouses and cottages that had once stood, and in a few cases that still stood, all around me. Stone was a precious item in these stone-free Essex landscapes. There had been the best part of two thousand years for locals to pick away at those field findings. Even if the Roman road had ever crossed these lands, its stone foundations would by now be found scattered across a mile-wide ribbon, the length of its existence.
One late summer evening, I met up with Judy and Chris Gosling and we strolled together down the contours, away from Byham Hall. Judy wanted to point out a line of exposed stone in the side of a lake.
‘You see we built the lake a few years back,’ she explained.
Her young black Labrador puppy bounded beside her.
‘Well, the road would have run somewhere close to here,’ I said.
I had the battered map in my bag but hardly needed to look at it. By now I knew perfectly well the line of dead reckoning across the landscape. It ran close to the pond in the next field, then ran under our feet and away up the slope towards to the section of wood beyond. Or at least it might do.
Chris pointed towards the western fringe of the wood in the distance.
‘See that tree,’ he said. ‘The one lit up.’
I looked. At an opening in the wood a few yards from its edge was an oak tree whose bark had come away at the base and against which the late afternoon sunlight now struck, lighting up the tree.
‘I was once told by the people who owned the hall before us, that there was a Saxon village there,’ Chris said. ‘Right there by that tree, was where he told me it was.’
I looked again. The tree was glowing in the September sun.
‘A Saxon village?’ I said.
‘Yah,’ said Chris.
Saxon was way beyond prehistoric – far too modern to be considered. But it made sense. ‘Byham Hall’ meant ‘the hall beside the village’. Yet there was no village there today. It had simply vanished.
When I turned back towards the hall I saw a man was heading towards us, taking a short cut through the fields. It was Chris’s brother Martin. I knew him only from the aeroplane I knew he flew in the local skies above.
‘It’s a Robin Reliant,’ said Chris and laughed.
I didn’t get the joke immediately until I realised that Martin’s aeroplane wasn’t a Cessna but one called a Robin; and as it had three-wheels, his brother called it a Robin Reliant.
Chris introduced me to his brother who had clearly heard the joke before. He shook my hand. I asked Martin if he had ever taken aerial photos of the local lands. He hadn’t. Instead, we talked cropmarks – those shadows of sub-surface archaeological features that showed up from the air in freshly sowed fields.
‘The best time is when the crops are just starting to grow,’ said Martin. ‘May or June.’
‘And it’s the variation in the colour of the crop that you see?’ I asked.
‘That’s it,’ said Martin. ‘That’s what makes them show up. In some fields you can see settlements, roadways, ditches. You can often see them clearly. I’ll happily take you up if you want to have a look.’
Some months before, I had vaguely considered trying to use aerial photography to help trace the Roman road but not ever imagined having a local pilot and plane to hand.
‘Really?’ I said, a little bemused.
‘Sure,’ Martin said.
He gave me his number.
‘Let’s leave it until the spring.’
That was fine by me. Perhaps I would get a sighting of that Roman road after all – if not from the land then from the air.