A1-The Great North Road
There were lots of people living in Britain before the Romans came but they did not write much so our knowledge of them is based on what they left in the ground and what the Romans wrote about what they found. Pytheas, a Greek traveller from Massilia (Marseilles) in southern France, gave the first written account of Britain in about 325 BC, long before Julius Caesar came in 55, and again in 54 BC, to have a quick look round and go back to the sun. It wasn't till a century later in 43 A.D. that Claudius invaded in earnest and the Romans were here to stay for almost 400 years, developing a dense road network. But let's start at the beginning.
The first North Road was very old. Assuming that humankind did not first come down from the trees in Scotland but evolved further south, say in Africa, Paleolithic people must have walked north, the length of Britain. And, by and by, they found a land of varied resources, such as rocks suitable for making tools in Kent and Cumbria. And trade and the trodden path were invented. Unfortunately the first North Road was comprehensively demolished by the Ice Age so most of the evidence of Paleolithic people, before the last Ice-Age, comes from southern England and a few caves in north Wales. And that was that until the ice left and people walked north again, over 10 000 years ago. It seems a pity to leave the Paleolithic in just one paragraph considering how much time was represented. The earliest signs of human(ish) life come from Pakefield near Lowestoft where recent dating evidence pushes occupation back to around 700 000 years ago, requiring the revision of all European archaeology. The 250 handaxes and other flint artifacts found at Boxgrove in Sussex are dated between 478 000 and 424 000 years ago. Pakefield and Boxgrove may not be on the Great North Road but Stoke Newington is and here a similar number of flint tools were found. They are thought to be around 200 000 years old. That is an awful lot of time for the Neanderthals to have been trampling paths as they hunted and gathered. And tramp they must have for in Lincolnshire, at Welton-le-Wold, a couple of hand axes may prove to be of a similar age to the Boxgrove find, making them by far the oldest artefacts found north of the Thames. The Cro-Magnons, (Homo sapiens sapiens, our direct ancestors) probably arrived about 40 000 years ago before having to clear out again around 25 000 BP when it got too cold.
Creswell Crags is the one significant Paleolithic site close to the Great North Road and one of the most significant sites of its kind in Britain. There is an area of Permian Magnesian Limestone on the borders of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and South Yorkshire, west of the A1, east of the M1 where the crags are riddled with caves, several of which have yielded archaeological finds from before the last Ice Age. The main site is about three miles south west of Worksop along the A60. They were extensively excavated by Victorian archaeologists, who unfortunately emptied most of the caves without the benefit of modern archaeological methodology but the area continues to be a site of active research. Flint and quartzite tools made between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago have been found. The caves were reoccupied in the Late Upper Paleolithic, around 12,500 years ago, very soon after the ice finally left, by people who hunted and left engraved bone tools. It seems the caves were used over a lengthy period of time, perhaps as a summer shelter rather than a permanent settlement, by hunter-gatherers who walked across the tundra landscape along what was to become the Great North Road. The Creswell Crags Heritage Area is well described in the extensive and informative website run by the Creswell Heritage Trust. The only British cave-paintings (well, scratchings) have been found here recently.
A Mesolithic settlement at Star Carr in the Vale of Pickering, near Scarborough, was occupied for a period of about 350 years, from about 10,700 to 10,350 BP. Folk were pretty quick up the road again when the ice melted. A substantial wooden trackway leading to the lake edge, made of carefully split and worked timbers, shows they knew something of road building. In those days the North Sea was not so wet; Britain separated from Europe about 8000BC, sea-level rising with the melting of the northern ice-sheets. So the Star Carr folk may have come along more of a West Road from Denmark than a North Road from Cresswell. There was a Mesolithic settlement at Ware and analysis of the thigh bone of a woman dated at about 5700 BC found near Newark reveals something of the local meaty fare. She was hunter not gatherer. As climate improved some headed north, even extending the Great North Road beyond Edinburgh, for at Callander, in Perthshire, there is a Neolithic longhouse, thought to date from about 3500-4000 BC, at the transition point between hunting - gathering and settled farming in Britain. A fine flint tool, probably from Yorkshire or further south, was found by the Channel 4 Time Team archaeologists at a bronze age (c.2000BC) cist burial near Leven.
The Phoenicians, from modern Lebanon, had probably known the British Isles for centuries as a source of tin. Herodotus (484–425BC) says that their boats had sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar and north along the coast of Gaul to modern Cornwall. Pytheas was hoping to find the islands and the sources of tin. Taking advantage of a temporary breakdown in Phoenician control of the Straits of Gibralter to investigate their trading links he explored the coasts of western Spain, Gaul, and British Isles and explored a large part of Britain on foot before sailing north-westwards, perhaps to Iceland or even approaching Greenland. Pytheas was shown how tin ore was smelted and ingots produced and exported from Cornwall.
So did Pytheas travel the Great North Road? Well, probably not; he had a boat to catch. But the point is that Britons through the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age were not just a bunch of backward savages but had a culture that produced metal working technologies that were second to none. Shrinking a hot iron hoop onto a wooden cartwheel for a tyre must have been a significant step and it is possible that the barrel, with a similar technique for fixing metal bands, was invented in Britain. Some would argue that this had greater significance for the development of culture than the wheel itself. Goods produced in Britain were worth trading to the far end of the Mediterranean. Though the bulk of this trade may have focused on the southwest, it is likely that there was a well-developed network of roads long before the Romans arrived.
We know very little of movement up and down the country. It is possible that Iron-Age history was punctuated by mass migrations from Europe but when, for example, a distinctive style of earthenware emerges in a particular place, it may not be the result of a lot of people moving with their crockery. Rather it may indicate that there were travelling salesman bringing artefacts and ideas to essentially settled peoples. Indeed from earliest times it is clear that trade in flint arrowheads and other tools was widespread. For thousands of years most people probably never went anywhere but some people travelled a great deal and travel meant roads, or at least long thin bits of country not blocked by trees.
The exact nature of the primordial forest remains in some doubt. There is a common view that Britain was very densely forested and the early farmers first used the uplands where the trees were easier to clear and the first roads were therefore the ridgeways. But pollen analysis shows a lot of oak and hazel. Oak seedlings and hazels both need a good deal of sunshine to thrive, suggesting that the forest may have been quite open, with glades and patches of meadow, maintained by the large herbivores whose bones turn up in the hunters' middens. So, thanks to the great grazers, the lowland forest may not have been so very inhospitable and movement along the proto-Great North Road might have been a pleasant stroll.
The first thing the Romans did to get to know their enemies was to give them names, in Latin of course. So travelling up what would become the Great North Road we have, north of the Thames, the Catavellauni, then, in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire, the Corieltauvi (sometimes called Coritani). Northern Britain was occupied by the Brigantes, who were probably divided into smaller tribes such as the Parisi in the lowland areas of Yorkshire around the rivers draining into the Humber. The Votadini lived in the border country around Berwick.
The Romans found some significant, virtually urban, settlements when they arrived, some of them on the line of the Great North Road. Braughing is in Hertfordshire, about 7 miles north of Ware, at a change in the alignment of Ermine Street where it meets Stane Street. Ausennae, or Ancaster lies further up Ermine Street, 17 miles south of Lincoln. It became an important early Roman military fort and later developed into a Romano-British town but it was built on the site of a Celtic settlement near the source of the River Slea where any ridgeway following the Jurassic Limestone of Lincoln Edge would have to descend into a gap in the hills. Old Sleaford, a major centre for the Corieltauvi, lies a few miles downstream and it too became a Roman town on a branch of Ermine Street that also led to Lincoln. At Lincoln itself, a major Iron-Age settlement lay in low ground on the banks of the Witham while the later Roman fortress was built at the top of the hill to the north. Like Ancaster, Lincoln is at a gap in the Jurassic scarp of Lincoln Edge. The Iron Age sites become more numerous northwards. Dragonby is just off the Roman road as it approaches the Humber ferry-crossing site north of Scunthorpe, while Redcliff lies on the north bank. Barwick-in-Elmet is a couple of miles west of the Roman road at Aberford, between Castleford and Wetherby. Stanwick lies just north east of Scotch Corner near where the Roman route across the Pennines to Brough and Carlisle leaves Dere Street.
Of course we don't know how coherently these sites were linked. That traces of pre-Roman ridge routes, such as the trackway along Lincoln edge, survive does not mean that these were the only paths. It may just be that tracks across the lowlands were less likely to be preserved. There is little evidence of substantial Celtic settlement at London before the Roman established the river crossing. If there were regularly used trade routes connecting the North with channel crossings they may have led to Camulodunum on the Essex coast at Colchester. The size of this Iron-Age settlement suggests it may have been Britain's original Europort. The Roman road known as Stane Street runs from Braughing, on Ermine Street, to Colchester and probably existed as a pre-Roman trackway. Perhaps the first Great North Road should be thought of as starting at Colchester rather than London.
Money may have helped oil the wheels of trade but coins seem to have been first minted in Britain only in the first century BC. Iron ingots, of regular sizes, formed the currency before the Belgae introduced coins from Gaul in around 75BC. Moulds for coin blanks, suggesting a mint, have been found at Old Sleaford and at Scotton, south of Scunthorpe, at the foot of the scarp upon which the ancient trackway and later Ermine Street ran. These mints were in the territory of the Corieltauvi and their coins have been found from Camulodunum to Teesside.
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©Biff Vernon 2002, 2003, 2006