The Road: A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past

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There is equal pleasure in following him through the countryside in all seasons, sharing his reflections on how echoes of past millennia continue to be part of our present experience.

It’s a meandering journey, journal, essay, something, written with that very specific British wanky-ness that some people just love.

I read through the references, I've bought more books on the subject and I went back and forth between the book and Google Earth at several points.

This is no dry and prosaic history, but a work of imagination and a deeply literary book… wonderful prose . The joy of this book though is not simply to be found in how Hadley attempts to reconstruct the Roman past from trenches and ceramic shards buried in the landscape. As the Britons fell back to the Thames, the road pursued them to the river’s edge, carrying troops, supplies and military despatches.Gathering traces of archaeology, history and landscape, poems, church walls, hag stones and cropmarks; oxlips, killing places, hauntings, immortals and things buried too deep for archaeology, The Road is a mesmerising journey into two thousand years of history only now giving up its secrets.