Arcane Chicanes

[steepholm]

I've always known that G. K.* Chesterton was indulging in a little harmless anachronism when he wrote about the "the rolling English drunkard" who made the "rolling English road" long before the Romans arrived - the English being at that time engaged in farming their own bit of the Schleswig-Holstein littoral. But I now read that he made another false assumption, and that English roads got to rolling only in relatively recent times. Ancient tracks such as the Ridgeway are, after all, pretty darn straight, so far as topography allows, and there's no reason to suppose that Bronze Age subsistence hunters and farmers had any interest in taking the scenic route. The Romans may have introduced cambers and drainage and what not, but the straightness of their roads was really nothing new.

So, why do English roads roll? Enclosures seem to be one answer - with the highway going out of its way to steer clear of individuals' private property. Then there were the hills that were too steep for stagecoaches, meaning that the road had to wriggle uphill at greater length, but a gentler gradient - something that became an issue only once horse-drawn traffic was the norm. I also like the idea that some road-kinks represent an attempt to sidestep a one-time obstacle (say, a Mighty Oak) that no longer exists, leaving the jink as a fossilized tribute.

Better than these British examples, though (and I take this from M.G. Lay's Ways of the World), is the news that "in China, kinks were sometimes deliberately introduced to prevent the roads and bridges from being used by fast-flying evil spirits." Traffic-calming measures for evil spirits - isn't that wonderful? The Chinese invent everything first.


* Does anyone else find it hard to think of Chesterton as Keith?

Comments

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

What is 'recent'?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

For these purposes, round about 1700, I guess.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

Enclosure makes sense, then. I wonder whether it might have had anything to do with the Civil War, too? Rolling roads are presumably not quite as efficient for moving armies quickly.

[hafren.livejournal.com]

The only thing I can ever recall about GKC is the lovely tale of his absentmindedness (which actually sounds like something a bit worse) when he sent his wife a telegram saying something like "Am in Basingstoke. Where should I be?"

I think the reason Romans in particular are associated with this is their sheer obduracy and lack of imagination on the matter - not just on roads; on Hadrian's Wall you can see so many bits where they could have saved themselves a heap of trouble by deviating slightly from a straight line but they don't, presumably because when you have a huge labour force of squaddies, who cares how much trouble it gives them?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of something else I read recently, in slight contradiction to my post. This is the theory that, because the Romans built in defiance of the landscape - through marshes, and so on - their roads needed a lot more maintenance, and hence (once the legions had been withdrawn, and maybe earlier) were quicker to deteriorate than the humbler native tracks. But I'm not sure that the Romans' keeping to the plan was a lack of imagination, so much as the result of a long chain of command, where someone in a toga in Eboracum draws a straight line across a map, and the poor sappers on the ground daren't deviate from it however much they'd like to.

[mraltariel.livejournal.com]

The dissolution had a lot of impact on apparently unnecessary bendiness, too. You very often find roads bending round what turn out to be old monastic lands. Norman castles are the other thing. The motte has often been ploughed flat, but the local road still respects the bailey.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I noticed once when trying to pick up a FedEx package in the hinterland around Swansea that even modern trading estates and so on are built with rolling roads, as if a grid system is painful to contemplate. Or maybe the planners are afraid someone would bash their bagonets if they suggested straight roads...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That makes me wonder whether there isn't an aesthetic element to it as well, as in the fashion for 'sinuous walks' in eighteenth-century garden design.