EVERYTHING you know about Roman Roads is WRONG

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.

Ok, so apart from the roads, what did they do for us?

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. :)

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...

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 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.

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.

"...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!

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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!

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!