EVERYTHING you know about Roman Roads is WRONG

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  • เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 ธ.ค. 2024

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  • @pwhitewick
    @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว +72

    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.

    • @BobSaint
      @BobSaint 11 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      "Brought peace?"

    • @MrMelcu79
      @MrMelcu79 10 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      Schools, alphabet, laws...Monty Python anyone?!

    • @christopher9727
      @christopher9727 10 หลายเดือนก่อน

      ...
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      Come to Jesus Christ today
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      Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void
      Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today
      Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today
      Romans 6.23
      For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
      John 3:16-21
      16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
      Mark 1.15
      15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
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      The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
      Hebrews 11:6
      6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
      Jesus

    • @KasumiRINA
      @KasumiRINA 10 หลายเดือนก่อน

      Hey, don't diss Roman Rhodes match... Cody Rhodes had his first chance to beat Roman Reigns a year ago after he won Royal Rumble, but he definitely will do it at some... future... Wrestlemania.

    • @richymoto
      @richymoto 8 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      Romans have built different roads, with different technology on different terrain for different reasons. The roads, that you call a myth do exist and are quite well documented. Which does not mean, that the bigger part of the roads were made to that standard. This would probably have been too expensive. I have to drive a gravel road to my friends house ... which is not exactly proof, that highways don't exist.

  • @unperdants
    @unperdants ปีที่แล้ว +1181

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

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว +99

      More on that soon!!!

    • @wednesday8939
      @wednesday8939 ปีที่แล้ว +233

      The aqueduct...

    • @LeoStarrenburg
      @LeoStarrenburg ปีที่แล้ว

      th-cam.com/video/Qc7HmhrgTuQ/w-d-xo.html

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว +123

      @@wednesday8939 and a gazillion other stuff

    • @unperdants
      @unperdants ปีที่แล้ว +211

      @@wednesday8939 Well, apart from the roads and the aqueduct :)

  • @irminschembri8263
    @irminschembri8263 ปีที่แล้ว +495

    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. :)

    • @warden330
      @warden330 ปีที่แล้ว +55

      Ground conditions, the availability of materials and the purpose of the road would determine what solutions were adopted. Sometimes, and moors are a good example, a good well drained foundation and hard paved surface using local stone would be more or less essential. But not always. It is like the question of whether roads were (roughly) straight or not. Many Roman routes were anything but, because of topography.

    • @stuartbailey9287
      @stuartbailey9287 ปีที่แล้ว +14

      The video was talking about various different types of roads including various types of "Viae Publicae" used for trade purposes and open to the public which were probably built and maintained in different styles and standards by local/city authorities throughout the Empire depending on resources (when Emperor decided to visit an area or game from that area did it suddenly get nice new or re-surfaced roads?). But the Video did not mention the military roads known as "Viae Militares" built by the Legions in places like Germanica Superior. Take view that if you are a Roman Legate and have tens of thousands of highly trained combat engineers under your command who are not doing a lot you might as well use them for something and armies throughout history seem to love going in for a standard approach and the highest spec going. Which would explain why the Roman military frontier in Germany has some of the best Roman Roads going. Can confirm that the Roman military frontier in Britain also has a paved military road linking forts and going from one side of the country to the other plus its stuck on the top of a bloody big wall. Can anyone confirm if you find the same type of thing in the Danube frontier area and on the Eastern frontier of the Roman Empire? As for Roman Army prefering to move supplies and small troop formations by water rather than road if possible. I assume that movement via Rhine Boats probably cheaper and quicker than by using mules and the like. Plus harder for locals to hide behind trees to ambush and "re-purpose" the stuff being carried if you are in middle of the Rhine. Assume Germans no longer do that type of thing but I note Germans still prefer to move stuff via the Rhine barges rather than road if possible.

    • @robfoulds9930
      @robfoulds9930 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      Would you not consider that say the Romans wished to generally travel from Axminster in a direction toward the north east, then using a combination of celestial navigation and their various surveying tools, they set off until they came across a navigable/tidal river and when they found such an.important location, nearby Gloucester, they actually created a town or fort at that spot e.g. Cirencester. Did a sizeable town exist before the Romans built the Fosse Way ? Don't know, or perhaps it did, but only as a market town.
      And then so on as they pleased.

    • @robfoulds9930
      @robfoulds9930 ปีที่แล้ว +18

      As for a six foot depth, bloody hell, motorways aren't even constructed to that depth

    • @wolf310ii
      @wolf310ii ปีที่แล้ว +14

      @@stuartbailey9287 The Rhine wasnt that nice water road it is today, it had lots of waterfalls, white waters and wetlands 2000 years ago, so the Rhine wasnt really an alternative to move legions (wich would also need a lot of boats to transport them).
      The roman roads in germany wasnt only a fundament and pavement (wich was outside of citys mostly only compacted gravel), straight through a forrest. Left and right of the road was also a ditch (for drainage and to make it more difficult for traders to go around "toll stations") and then a few dozend meters of cleared land, to prevent ambushes.

  • @petersketch9467
    @petersketch9467 ปีที่แล้ว +449

    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...

    • @SciFiFemale
      @SciFiFemale ปีที่แล้ว +46

      Just slightly older!

    • @xr6lad
      @xr6lad ปีที่แล้ว +37

      Yet you can go many places across Britain and see former Roman roads on routes no longer used, usually on moor lands and guess what, they still have their paving on them. You don’t think centuries of use, robbing, and rebuilding might have removed much?

    • @hansvonmannschaft9062
      @hansvonmannschaft9062 ปีที่แล้ว +9

      @@SciFiFemaleThat's something I love about the Brits using their language. It's impossible not to - at least - chuckle with their mild teasing/mocking when they come down to subtleties like those.

    • @hansvonmannschaft9062
      @hansvonmannschaft9062 ปีที่แล้ว +8

      @@xr6ladThey could've "picked up some useful materials" (using British subtlety here - haha!), however, they would go as far as they could on foot, at most dragged by oxen or horse, and back home without breaking their backs or spending the night on the countryside. Thus, if they did, which must've happened, it certainly didn't imply the "recycling" of the entire Roman network. 😀

    • @reverseuniverse2559
      @reverseuniverse2559 ปีที่แล้ว

      I actually doubt a doco regarding this just as humans cause climate change 😑

  • @cerealport2726
    @cerealport2726 ปีที่แล้ว +109

    "...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!

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว +7

      This time next week.... you're going to enjoy another video....

    • @larryspiller6633
      @larryspiller6633 ปีที่แล้ว +3

      @@pwhitewick Love your work. Always worth watching.

    • @rogeratygc7895
      @rogeratygc7895 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      At 75 I do much the same, though at my age the reason is somewhat more practical!...

  • @TheZapan99
    @TheZapan99 ปีที่แล้ว +100

    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.

    • @DonnaGisellaTranchel
      @DonnaGisellaTranchel ปีที่แล้ว

      I LOVE that place!!! Having a glass of Rosé - and just contemplate the history of the south of France...❤️❤️❤️

  • @jonpick5045
    @jonpick5045 ปีที่แล้ว +125

    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.

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว +15

      Definitely adds up from my minimal research onto various local digs.

    • @swissarmyknife7670
      @swissarmyknife7670 ปีที่แล้ว +9

      from where are you talking? is this just in britain or whole roman empire?

    • @jonpick5045
      @jonpick5045 ปีที่แล้ว +17

      @swissarmyknife7670 these were all in England and all likely to be minor roads.

    • @basillah7650
      @basillah7650 ปีที่แล้ว +10

      People do not understand that others put stuff on top of the roman roads as well so hard to find original roman roads as well

    • @caelestigladii
      @caelestigladii ปีที่แล้ว +7

      @@pwhitewickWelp, this explains why this video dispels facts and promotes myth.

  • @thorild69
    @thorild69 ปีที่แล้ว +73

    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.

    • @philipharris5201
      @philipharris5201 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      I visited Silver city in California in the 70s...The first stones used to grind the Comstock lode were just left lying at the side of the road with a plywood sign saying what they were..Thats history too...

    • @NihilisticHatred
      @NihilisticHatred ปีที่แล้ว

      You're 17 and was in England in 1987?

    • @jonathanphillips5514
      @jonathanphillips5514 ปีที่แล้ว +4

      He said as a 17 year old not he is 17 now

    • @pobsdad
      @pobsdad ปีที่แล้ว

      You DO have history going back thousands of years, it's just not white history, so gets ignored and built over.

    • @corypiatt8081
      @corypiatt8081 ปีที่แล้ว

      ​@philipharris5201 by the 1870s it was one of the lead funding for the union Civil War.
      The American schools system has failed us in more ways than we could ever have imagined.

  • @Urbexy
    @Urbexy ปีที่แล้ว +97

    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.

    • @thearmchairspacemanOG
      @thearmchairspacemanOG ปีที่แล้ว +1

      there are only a half dozen roman roads here and they're all under modern roads.

    • @keiyakins
      @keiyakins ปีที่แล้ว +8

      I mean, I'm from North America so they're not relevant to my day to day, but I always figured the Romans built roads basically the same way everyone else has since the dawn of civilization: find the existing routes where they exist, blaze new ones when you have to, and improve them enough for slightly heavier than the expected traffic to allow some headroom. Save the overbuilding for temples and monuments, roads are built to purpose.

    • @purplelibraryguy8729
      @purplelibraryguy8729 ปีที่แล้ว +3

      Why would there be Roman roads in Scotland? I thought the Romans never conquered Scotland. What was Hadrian's wall all about if the Romans were going around building roads in Scotland?

    • @thearmchairspacemanOG
      @thearmchairspacemanOG ปีที่แล้ว +6

      @@purplelibraryguy8729 Antony temporarily held the south of Scotland as far as roughly the Forth/Clyde line, there's an ''Antonine'' Wall too..

    • @purplelibraryguy8729
      @purplelibraryguy8729 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      @@thearmchairspacemanOG Oh, thanks.

  • @luciadegroseille-noire8073
    @luciadegroseille-noire8073 ปีที่แล้ว +148

    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.

    • @johnjephcote7636
      @johnjephcote7636 ปีที่แล้ว +4

      I seem to recall that the Nantlle (?) Railway had outside flanges.

    • @redf7209
      @redf7209 ปีที่แล้ว +4

      @@creamwobbly Is this really talking about different gauges or different ways of measuring the guage?

    • @robertheinrich2994
      @robertheinrich2994 ปีที่แล้ว +5

      @@creamwobbly I wonder why we have invented a 750mm, a 760mm and a 762mm gauge.
      I recently rode a 760mm train, was quite a lot of fun (longest narrow gauge here where I live, and surprisingly modern). but I cannot understand what would make such a difference that somebody needs specifically a 762mm gauge.

    • @RAFMnBgaming
      @RAFMnBgaming ปีที่แล้ว +4

      @@robertheinrich2994 In all likelihood a bunch of people just came up with different gauges in isolation and only noticed they were almost but not quite the same when the standards got collected together for records purposes.
      as for the 2mm, that's probably just a conversion from another measuring system thing.

    • @stuartbailey9287
      @stuartbailey9287 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      You have got one classical paved Roman road in Northumbria - its on the top of Hardrians wall and was for Roman Army use only. The rest of you 2000 years ago probably had to make do with the usual tracks. Bit like these days how many six or eight lane motorways has Northumbria got?

  • @gadaxara3593
    @gadaxara3593 ปีที่แล้ว +26

    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.

    • @stuartbailey9287
      @stuartbailey9287 ปีที่แล้ว +5

      So road from the capital to the favoured holiday locations of the Roman Senatorial elite has some of the best and most expensive construction of any road in the Empire. So nothing much seems to have changed in 2000 years when it comes to handing out road construction contracts.

    • @huskytail
      @huskytail ปีที่แล้ว +7

      @@stuartbailey9287 well, you can also add the big cities of the time. You can see today the Roman roads leading to the Agora in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, which was a very big city at the time. You can walk on the well preserved big slabs of syenite paving of the very large road, you can see also the pipes and sewers, the buildings around... Overall, cities of that size had the fancy roads, viaducts, circuses and so on. The rest, it was more function than anything else 😉

  • @anthony4reale
    @anthony4reale ปีที่แล้ว +34

    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.

  • @binarydinosaurs
    @binarydinosaurs ปีที่แล้ว +96

    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.

    • @DrewLSsix
      @DrewLSsix ปีที่แล้ว +8

      My take on this claim was that A: Roman's maintained their roads while in use, B: the roads that lasted centuries after the fall were either locally maintained or were abandoned then dug up later.

    • @perolden
      @perolden ปีที่แล้ว +13

      In Norway we never had any Romans except for the drunken sailor, so we built our own roads, heaven knows why. And some roads is 3000 years old.
      I was driving on a road with my nephew some 20 years ago, and on the side of the road there was the old road where we had driven when I was a kid. I told my nephew that that was the road his father and his siblings had traveled on when we were kids, and already then the road was 2000 years old. When our viking forefathers traveled here, it was already a thousand years old.
      The 8-year old thought about it for a very short moment and said: -Why? Didn't they have boats?
      He spent a lot of time on the sea, so I could see this.
      -Oh yes, they had boats and ships, som places you could reach by going up a river, but not here.
      -OK, he said, why is it so big, they had so small carts.
      HE had seen the viking carts from the yaer 800 in the viking ships museum.
      And that is correct, the road vas 4-5 feet across, enough for a horse, but hardly for a horse and a cart. They used handcarts, or horseback, never horse and cart in one, atleat not before the year 1000. Reason? The roads weren't really wide enough, they were paths.
      How do we know that these roads are up to 3000 years old? Because of the richness of discarded shoes, lost coins and other things, so much material means it was heavily trafficked.
      However, sometimes the really built large wagons, but since they hardly could go any distance because lack of wide roads, they were for showoff.
      And the roman iter was just a path, nothing uniquely Roman about it

    • @xr6lad
      @xr6lad ปีที่แล้ว +1

      Yet there’s plenty left on the moors and still paved.

    • @redf7209
      @redf7209 ปีที่แล้ว +4

      @@xr6lad yes they look well cobbled, I suspect the theory has always been modelled on this sort of road. They may well have needed to go the extra mile ( excuse the pun) for some roads. The moors would have been extremely boggy. The other theory propounded for boggy terrain is that they were built on a raft of logs to stop the road material sinking.

    • @redf7209
      @redf7209 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      @@DrewLSsix I think Vindolanda roman writing tablets refer to the state of the roads, there are also records elsewhere of roads being repaired or not repaired by parishes or the church or monastries.

  • @andrewreynolds4949
    @andrewreynolds4949 ปีที่แล้ว +45

    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)

    • @christopherjames5895
      @christopherjames5895 ปีที่แล้ว +4

      The GWR won in all ways over the normal gauge , speed comfort, and loading capacity . But this being Britain we used the normal gauge as it was cheaper !

    • @perolden
      @perolden ปีที่แล้ว +3

      No, the first railway here in Norway was standard gauge 1435 mm, it was 50% british owned, and thereafter all railways that connected to Sweden was also standard gauge, but most of other railways was 1000 mm, from 1858 onwards, they changed between 1900 and 1928, a few closed down, but we have a few that survived on other gauges until the 1960s.
      Raiway gauges had nothing to do with Roman 'wheel dimension'. Since so much equipment was made for railways with standard gauge, it eventually became cheaper to adjust to that, but before year 1900, there was no real reason, all manufacturing was bespoke in some way, so the cost was the same if you made locomotives and coaches in any gauge, there was no savings.

    • @scottfw7169
      @scottfw7169 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      My little midwestern farm burg has someone 2.2 miles down the road who breeds paint horses and has a therapeutic riding center, from what I've seen of horses' hips there after both riding and volunteering you are going to need more than 5 feet width to get in 2 horses plus the drawbar/ draft gear/whatever it is called to hook them up to a wagon; 1 you can get within that width, 2, no.

    • @andrewreynolds4949
      @andrewreynolds4949 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      @@perolden I said the Romans had nothing to do with modern track width, only that they were working with the same sort of requirements the early tramways did. That's why the width is vaguely similar enough to fool poorly researched article writers.
      It does cost a little more to build larger equipment, and terrain also does have some say in what gauge is practical to build. That's why the Welsh and Colorado narrow gauge lines exist

    • @andrewreynolds4949
      @andrewreynolds4949 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      @@christopherjames5895 The GWR did have the superior gauge, but the 4' 8.5" had pretty much won already by being everywhere first. Kind of a shame we didn't get wider gauges

  • @stephenreardon2698
    @stephenreardon2698 ปีที่แล้ว +47

    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

    • @petermostyneccleston2884
      @petermostyneccleston2884 ปีที่แล้ว +5

      The problem with that theory is that in Britain we had two main gauges, but in America they had many different gauges, maybe as many as were railway companies in America.
      The American railways did not chose to have a "Standard gauge" until much later than we did.
      When it comes to the container trains, the Americans can place one container on the wagon, and another container on top of the container which is already on the train, so their tunnels can take a deeper train, than us.

    • @stephenreardon2698
      @stephenreardon2698 ปีที่แล้ว +4

      @@petermostyneccleston2884 Of all the weaknesses the gauge issue is relevant, but as the dimensions of the shuttle were only determined in the 1960's & 1970's, by which time most of the US was on standard gauge. As for the size of containers, that is irrelevant as the boasters were never placed inside container's, thus it was the shape of the tunnels, not the dimensions of shipping containers, that were relevant. Though, I should state that this was described to me by a number of Americans speaking a business conventions in the 1990's.

    • @jimjolly4560
      @jimjolly4560 ปีที่แล้ว +12

      The punchline sometimes added is, the next time you look at the specification for something and think whoever drew that spec was a complete horse's arse, you may be right!

    • @andreww2098
      @andreww2098 ปีที่แล้ว +7

      @@petermostyneccleston2884 you are talking about loading gauge which is different to rail gauge, the UK has one of the smallest loading gauges but runs on standard gauge track, a result of being the earliest adopter of steam powered railways is that we built our tunnels and cuttings to fit the earliest trains, the US had a slightly later start and adopted a larger loading gauge to allow for later much larger locomotives and train consists to be designed and built

    • @samuell.foxton4177
      @samuell.foxton4177 ปีที่แล้ว +4

      @@andreww2098 that's the main issue, loading gauge is only loosely related to track gauge: some lines in Japan on 1067mm gauge have a similar loading gauge to the UK on 1435mm, and US trains totally dwarf ours (they double stack containers on standard height wagons on some lines, but on the flip side have parts of the network that can't allow double deck passenger trains)

  • @hamishwsmacdonald
    @hamishwsmacdonald ปีที่แล้ว +100

    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

    • @bmc7434
      @bmc7434 ปีที่แล้ว +3

      Actually straight roads are more vulnerable to ambush since the surrounding terrain may or may be passable. For example if the terrain is not passable in a section a enemy would more likely attack the points it is and pin down entire Roman troop formations. It also would force more refugees to flood down the roads in case of war which can bog down troops.

    • @hamishwsmacdonald
      @hamishwsmacdonald ปีที่แล้ว +18

      @@bmc7434 You may have something there. But if I were travelling in a hostile wooded area I would prefer to see as much of the road ahead as I could. I believe foliage was cut back 50m each side of the road to prevent attacks

    • @redf7209
      @redf7209 ปีที่แล้ว +7

      There was a dig in the north of England a few years ago where the road met a river bridge at an angle. The dig found a large levelled area at the bridge approach and they said it it was so that the wagons could be turned and re-aligned with the bridge direction. If wagons were that unwieldy I can imaging a straight road was very useful, and also to deal with oncoming transport.

    • @TEverettReynolds
      @TEverettReynolds ปีที่แล้ว +10

      @@bmc7434 Most Roman military convoys had scouts, lots of them, to help eliminate such surprises. For a long time, the Roman military machine was literally two steps ahead of everyone else.

    • @hamishwsmacdonald
      @hamishwsmacdonald ปีที่แล้ว +12

      @@TEverettReynolds "Literally"? I imagine it was more than two!

  • @eopoep
    @eopoep ปีที่แล้ว +135

    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.

    • @stephenarbon2227
      @stephenarbon2227 ปีที่แล้ว +21

      Not just what was local.
      Ever tried riding a bicycle down a cobbled road, and I don't think stone paving was much good on the horses hooves nor the life of wooden wheels. As you say, hard packed gravel surface, probably bordered with stones to keep them from being washed away.

    • @SiqueScarface
      @SiqueScarface ปีที่แล้ว +11

      @@stephenarbon2227 This was what got me wondering too. Cobbled roads, especially of the kind found in Pompeii and similar sites, are hard for wheels, and your horses need to have horseshoes for them. The main reason to have cobbled roads in towns was that they are easy to clean, and thus better for pedestrians with sandals or expensive shoes. That's why you find them mainly in towns: Only there you find many pedestrians with inadequate footwork for long walks.

    • @pd4165
      @pd4165 ปีที่แล้ว +9

      @@SiqueScarface Why would they care about the roads being hard on wheels? That would be a 'you problem' - if you want to drive your waggon on our publicly funded streets then suck it up, sunshine. In town, where the streets are narrow, then obviously the surface will become rutted AF (see Pompeii). And in town you walk on the footpath anyway - you dont want your expensive sandals getting mule shit on them, and between your toes.
      But if you travel the major highways then there is less need to follow the exact footprint of the proceeding vehicle - if you weren't taking your waggon/chariot into a major town then wheel spacing could be whatever you wanted. Going into town has always been a faff, you don't take your lorry in unless you have to.
      Rome still has some examples you can drive on eg the Via Appia going south from the walls to the ring road. It's a bit lumpy by modern standards but the big paving stones are still there (would they have had a gravel topping?) and it probably hasn't been maintained properly and people like me have driven heavy, modern, cars over it as we like. It isn't noticeably rutted so I suspect the surface was gravelled and they possibly had teams of slaves, in high viz (slaves cost money), putting cones out and repairing the surface and shutting lanes down on bank holiday weekends, because nothing changes.

    • @SiqueScarface
      @SiqueScarface ปีที่แล้ว +9

      @@pd4165 Cobblestone roads are loud. When a wheel or a horseshoe collides with a cobble stone, it's much louder than with a sand or a gravel path. This is an "us problem", to stay within your terminology. Before the invention of rubber tyres, a softer ground meant a smoother ride. And the Romans didn't have rubber tyres. But they had loud and noisy towns. Read an ancient author! That's one reason why every wealthy Roman citizen had a second home somewhere in the countryside, the villa (ever wondered where the word 'village' comes from?).
      And a loud ride means a stressful ride - not only on the nerves of the travellers and the bystanders and on the goods, but on the mechanics of your cart. A cart, that can easily go hundreds of miles on gravel roads will break easily on cobblestone. And you need more pulling power. While on country roads, a horse might be sufficient, in the town, you need an ox. Or two of them for heavy loads. (Horses in ancient times were not used for heavy pulling tasks, as the horse harnesses of the time were not suited for it. The horse collar is an invention of the Middle Ages.)

    • @theoztreecrasher2647
      @theoztreecrasher2647 ปีที่แล้ว +6

      @@pd4165 And a John Cleese-style Centurion handing out traffic tickets! 😉😁

  • @chadoftoons
    @chadoftoons ปีที่แล้ว +4

    I feel like if you are gonna walk right next to a roman road saying that our understanding is wrong it would have not been so weird to have a tiny spade and showcase this on the side of the road. Instead you just walk around and missed on a chance of recording it directly. Even if that isnt possible it would have been great to just have some photos of roman road excavations

  • @catsupchutney
    @catsupchutney ปีที่แล้ว +48

    Depending on terrain, a straight line would probably not be the least expensive route anyhow, so it stands to reason there would be deviation.

  • @Garwfechan-ry5lk
    @Garwfechan-ry5lk ปีที่แล้ว +19

    About 80 Years ago in the area of Bontfaen ( Cowbridge ) Roman Bonium, there was work carried out on the A48 Road which follows the old Roman Road from what was Glwyr (Brythonic) Gloucester ( Glevum ) to Caerfyrddin ( Carmarthen) it was Wartime and there had been Americans stationed all over South Wales, they run their Tanks on the Road and in one place ripped up the surface of the Road to a depth of 6ft, where they actually came in to Contact with the Roman Road, I was told this story by a Farmer who lived at Pentre Meurig which is on a crossroads of which another Roman Road cuts across it, from Llantwit Major to Pencoed and beyond to join the Sarn Helen to North Wales ,he said that the Roman road was built of Local stone and was really solid, so solid that the Tanks did not break that surface. But they made a mess of what was the A48 . So Romans made excellent Roads. But 1940's Britain was no match in their surface, the Sherman Tanks ran about 300 to 400 Yards on the Roman road I was told found it had Two Lanes and was wider than the actual A48 . they did not destroy any part of it.

    • @robertheinrich2994
      @robertheinrich2994 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      but the title says, that everything we know about roman roads is wrong. guess, somebody else built that road.

    • @Garwfechan-ry5lk
      @Garwfechan-ry5lk ปีที่แล้ว

      Marcus Agrippa@@robertheinrich2994

    • @RyTrapp0
      @RyTrapp0 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      @@robertheinrich2994 He's telling a story that was told to him by a farmer. All due respect to the farmer, but word of mouth stories of stories don't tend to be the most accurate representations of history.

    • @robertheinrich2994
      @robertheinrich2994 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      @@RyTrapp0 I'm more complaining about the clickbait-titles of such videos. not "new interesting discoveries about something" but "forget everything you already knew about -topic-"

    • @RyTrapp0
      @RyTrapp0 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      @@robertheinrich2994 Except it isn't even an inaccurate title - the vast majority of people think of Roman roads as that classic illustration of this absurdly extensive road construction. And the vast majority of people don't realize that there isn't actually a Roman road constructed like that.
      There are WAY worse examples than this one

  • @stegotron
    @stegotron ปีที่แล้ว +32

    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!

    • @Mike_Anton
      @Mike_Anton ปีที่แล้ว

      Researching 18th C transport in my area, a lot of the straight roads are (were) turnpikes, often constructed between two competing Turnpike Trusts. A nice example local to me is 'New Road' between Ditchling and Clayton north of Brighton in Sussex - maps.app.goo.gl/dA8DftPKAqg32koe8.
      The turnpike road over Ditchling beacon is very steep and expensive,so that trust eventually gave in and built a road across to the competing trusts's road through the Clayton gap

  • @LeoStarrenburg
    @LeoStarrenburg ปีที่แล้ว +20

    Brilliant story Paul👍👍👍 ! As a measure how this got me: I didn't miss Rebecca. But please don't take this as a hint for the future.

    • @hairyairey
      @hairyairey ปีที่แล้ว +3

      I miss Rebecca's cheekiness!

    • @WillKemp
      @WillKemp ปีที่แล้ว +1

      I miss Rebecca! It's just not as good without her 🙁

  • @johnhopkins6658
    @johnhopkins6658 ปีที่แล้ว +4

    First time visitor at 72 yrs old. Got interested in the Romans quite early as living in the South Wales valleys I visited Caerleon and Sarn Helen. There's actually a Roman camp just up the valley from me. Now live in Canada, so interested in new ideas and developments.

  • @Shmerpy
    @Shmerpy ปีที่แล้ว +101

    I've often looked at diagrams of roman roads and thought "Where the heck did they find all the material for so comprehensive a road?" Thanks for debunking that myth.

    • @redf7209
      @redf7209 ปีที่แล้ว +10

      I suspect that they used the materials they had when they had reason to do so.

    • @thatsawesome2060
      @thatsawesome2060 ปีที่แล้ว +13

      How hard to find the material when your empire can just exploit convict criminal and war prisoner as slave to work in quarry and build the road.

    • @redf7209
      @redf7209 ปีที่แล้ว +28

      @@thatsawesome2060 All evidence suggests it was built using military labour. There are roman quarry remains along a lot of the length where they have left carvings.

    • @alexisbudzisz
      @alexisbudzisz ปีที่แล้ว +20

      ​@@thatsawesome2060zero knowledge was put into this sentence 😂

    • @theotherohlourdespadua1131
      @theotherohlourdespadua1131 ปีที่แล้ว +15

      ​@@thatsawesome2060Uhhh... most Roman roads were built by the Roman legions during their service...

  • @radiosnail
    @radiosnail ปีที่แล้ว +24

    Extremely interesting. I grew up with those drawings in history books about Roman roads too. Still have O/S maps dating back to my teens as well. I hope they never privatise O/S because that would be the end of it.

    • @samuell.foxton4177
      @samuell.foxton4177 ปีที่แล้ว +7

      it was given a commercial remit to maximise revenue, but I'm also glad that more recently the Government's Open Data people have made them open up more of their mapping for free, including OpenRoads, which is a full road map of the UK that's so big (in data terms) that you can only get it one lettered grid square (eg SE, a 100x100km area) at a time

    • @NarnianRailway
      @NarnianRailway ปีที่แล้ว +2

      To explore Britain, often check for public domain OS maps online posted by National Library of Scotland. Can pin a current location on the map and it lists the OS maps and aerial photos available, most being 1800s to 1970 and great quality. Sometimes find names of mills, collieries, steel works and farms whose names are lost on modern maps to explore further in other text resources. Pleased how Bits keep history readily available and the OS maps.

    • @AverageAlien
      @AverageAlien 6 วันที่ผ่านมา

      everything should be privatised

  • @chasbodaniels1744
    @chasbodaniels1744 ปีที่แล้ว +30

    Paul, the section about 2:23 is terrific for getting across your point graphically. You discuss how the groma was used, but the big win is those “signal fire” graphics.
    How better to explain the straight road line problem in real life terms?!
    I know adding graphics and visuals is time-consuming, but whenever possible, PLEASE consider how helpful they are to the finished product.
    Many thanks mate!

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว +3

      Cheers, yup completely agree, this has got legs for a video in its own right!

    • @ioann235
      @ioann235 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      Dude beside google search no digging to show something?

  • @WawaDvd
    @WawaDvd ปีที่แล้ว +11

    A major difference between roman and current roads is distance driven on them. They were durable for sure, but didn't have thousands of cars driving on them each day... and even more at such speeds (causing vibration on its structure) as we drive currently. I'm sure they wouldn't last long with current traffic constraints.

    • @aribantala
      @aribantala 11 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

      Nobody would like to drive on a Roman road either with modern Vehicles speed. Most of them are lined with flagstones or cobbles. I imagine driving 60-80 km/h on a Flagstone lined Roman Highway is not pleasant for both you and your car's suspension
      Pretty sure we used Tarmac, and later Asphalt, for that reason.

    • @Hellybelle505
      @Hellybelle505 10 หลายเดือนก่อน

      The school I went to was on Roman Road, and in my lifetime, it hasn't needed to be resurfaced, and is still absolutely solid. It has massive lorries going down it all the time, and is a busy road. We have roads now that can't last a couple of years.

    • @WawaDvd
      @WawaDvd 10 หลายเดือนก่อน +3

      @@Hellybelle505 - Yes but as said : how much weight, how busy and how fast were people driving on it ?
      That's why trains roll on steel bars and not cardboard. Load, traffic and speed are the most restrictive... and it's not mentionning price, grip needed, weather or geologic events.

    • @aribantala
      @aribantala 10 หลายเดือนก่อน

      @@Hellybelle505 Your school being in front of the road explains enough.
      Since it's near a school zone, the vehicles that passes through wouldn't be moving past 40km, probably even less.
      Also, Since it's near and/or inside an urban residential area, the lorries would be no more than 3-5 tons... Whereas an average highway can get big Freight trucks that carries Containers and such... those can surpass 18 tons.

    • @Hellybelle505
      @Hellybelle505 10 หลายเดือนก่อน

      @@aribantala yes, and I totally get that. I don't mean to sound sarcastic/rude at all, so I hope that doesn't come across in my responses; I just got called a smart alec (in response to another comment) when I didn't mean that at all 😳 I mean the fact that it has been load bearing far, far more than it was designed to do, and doing it for about two thousand years, whilst modern roads are supposed to have it all factored in, and can't hold up for a fraction of the time. You are right about the vehicles not going as fast, but it was designed for chariots, and it has double decker buses, lorries, cars, work vehicles, and all sorts of other things going up and down it all day long, and it still has the same surface it had before I was born! I'm going to be fifty this year. I don't know of any many roads, even much slower ones outside of schools that have stood up like that 💞

  • @johnDukemaster
    @johnDukemaster ปีที่แล้ว +20

    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!

  • @hansvonmannschaft9062
    @hansvonmannschaft9062 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    It was an entertaining video. One thing that surprises me about *every single* documentary vid, is that each time they say: "And here we can see...", we, the viewers, can't actually see anything. Not sure if its the camera, or lack of care, but its an universal feature regarding documentaries, unless they're showing, I don't know, a major fortress, or the pyramids or something.

  • @hoppinonabronzeleg9477
    @hoppinonabronzeleg9477 ปีที่แล้ว +8

    At school we were taught that Romans built their roads, in this amazing cross section too. It was in the history books, so why would we argue?
    A week or so later we visited the remains of a Roman road somewhere on the outskirts of York, needless to say there was no stone (metalling) anywhere to be seen.
    The teacher suggested that the stone had been robbed out over the centuries to build housing. (That old chestnut). Yet there were no houses, and those that had been known to exist we were told had been made of wood, etc.
    Surely there would have been some remnants of these amazing structures?
    It seemed a bit of a lie even back then, but it was in the books, maybe we thought it was back home in ancient Rome.
    Hey ho! an ancient scholar mistook a description of the footings of a house for a road. - All is clear!
    HOABL

    • @lindyhoppingfool
      @lindyhoppingfool ปีที่แล้ว

      If you are saying German history texts are works of great accuracy, lol. If you are saying photographs in the books show detailed cross sections of Roman roads in situ, great. Please upload to the site and let's see them.
      Thanks.

  • @uselessDM
    @uselessDM ปีที่แล้ว +7

    The itinerary part is interesting because in the early days of computer aided navigation (late 90s, early 2000s) it was common (or at least some people did it) for a while to plan out a route and print it out, but not the map, just the steps you needed to take so in a sense that was quite a roman way to travel.

    • @MerkhVision
      @MerkhVision ปีที่แล้ว

      Oh yeah, I remember! Like printing out directions from Mapquest or Old Google Maps!

    • @JohnFlower-NZ
      @JohnFlower-NZ 10 หลายเดือนก่อน

      This method was also taught to me whilst on basic training in the NZ Army in 1999. Study a map and then make written notes about the route.

  • @valentinomanontroppo4675
    @valentinomanontroppo4675 ปีที่แล้ว +20

    In the flat lands of Veneto, where I'm from, the modern highways still trace the ancient roman roads, which were remarkably straight.
    In those times, large swathes of that area that were previously forested, were cleared and subdivided into rectangular plots (centurization), and you can still see this clearly by taking a look at satellite pictures of the countryside. Other vast areas of my region were subject to frequent flooding, and most of the areas closer to the coast were marshlands. The roman roads leading to the sparse settlements in those areas were and still are elevated above ground level by a couple of meters (maybe that where the expression "highway" comes from, in English??)

    • @davidhimmelsbach557
      @davidhimmelsbach557 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      High originally meant that they were NOT toll roads. It was common in medieval times for the peerage to install toll roads (usually just a sequence of bridges) across their vast estates, and then recover their expense via tolls. Such tolls were normally exacted solely from transiting outsiders, non-tenants.
      Said tolls were almost always exacted at choke points -- river crossings, hill passes, etc. The tolls were just a cost of doing business when the alternative meant even more expense/ time in transit.
      The resistance against herd traffic across grazing lands can be witnessed as a plot element in no end of 20th Century American western films. ( Barbed wire wars. )
      The 'high ways' were originally based entirely upon pre-existing (Roman era) roads upon which the king would not allow anyone to lay tolls. They all belong to him. This royal ownership shows up in many a Spanish road name. "xxxx royale" -- meaning highway, of course.

  • @md-ps2hx
    @md-ps2hx ปีที่แล้ว +2

    What an eye catching title ...
    Your enthusiasm is palpable.
    Nicely edited content plus the music is just loud enough to complement rather than annoy or overpower the content.
    Your voice is a morph of Michael Palin & David Attenborough.
    This is good enough (as is) for mainstream.

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว

      🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

  • @einarcgulbrandsen7177
    @einarcgulbrandsen7177 ปีที่แล้ว +3

    People forget that even in our super standardized world 2 different smart phones will have a slightly different charger and cable. Same with roads today, every country has a road building standard witch is often different from their neighbor country.

  • @clivewilliams3661
    @clivewilliams3661 ปีที่แล้ว +13

    Some years ago I was working on a project on the A6, just north of Market Harborough, where the modern road is built on a Roman road. We had to arrange for an electrical service from the opposite side of A6 into our site. The electricity supplier's contractor had to thrust bore across the A6 at a depth of about 2m to miss the foundations of the Roman road that were at about 1.5m deep. Had the Roman road or the limited post-Roman road constructions been less dense then the contractor would have thrust bored at a shallower depth. This to me confirms the notion that Roman roads we deep structures.

    • @paulmryglod4802
      @paulmryglod4802 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      Also, natural ground surface level grows at about 1" per decade, a meter every 300 years or so on average. So old roads constantly used and repaired, etc will rise in due time as well.

  • @gadaxara3593
    @gadaxara3593 ปีที่แล้ว +29

    The first to describe what a Roman road actually looked like was a French archaeologist who is still alive. He was invited to give a conference at the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1988 to present his studies in the field, it was very interesting. There is a Spanish public works engineer who has a TH-cam channel that talks about roads, aqueducts, mines and Roman engineering. Is very good. Isaac Moreno Gallo+TH-cam

    • @DrBernon
      @DrBernon ปีที่แล้ว +3

      ¡Absolutely! And he also made an incredible documentary series about these topics.

  • @Linflas
    @Linflas 11 หลายเดือนก่อน +4

    The railroad gauge myth has been around a lot longer than the internet. I was a train nut as a kid growing up in the 1960's and read that in multiple books about trains.

  • @dwightehowell8179
    @dwightehowell8179 11 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    Okay smarty pants. Carts, chariots, and wagons were pulled by teams of draft animals in most cases. Oxen, horses, or mules in most cases. That pretty much fixed the width of the vehicles. Putting those wagons on rails didn't change much at first. You would have needed the same width. After you had a few hundred miles of rails built altering them would have cause issues.

  • @davidlobaugh4490
    @davidlobaugh4490 ปีที่แล้ว +14

    As a man that's moved some earth, I always wondered about all that earthwork and stone sourcing and transport. Seemed impossible overkill. And it was. 🤠

    • @nespolinho
      @nespolinho 11 หลายเดือนก่อน +3

      in italy almost all the roman roads you find are exactly as described in the book

    • @aribantala
      @aribantala 11 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

      I mean... Yeah... Just like every civilization on earth and even modern ones, not all roads are Paved, highly engineered and made like the one from the books.
      Even in modern times, not all roads are made like a Highway/Motorway; perfectly asphalted, reinforced and has proper drainage.
      Some low intensity traffic or rural areas uses Tarmac and are only reinforced with basic concrete layer, and not concrete reinforced with rebar; some even still only uses Compacted gravel.
      Romans are still bound by logistics, and the roads that are made like "in the books" are highways and urban centers, where better roads are required not only for commerce, but also defence and communication

    • @soom878
      @soom878 9 หลายเดือนก่อน

      i think the claims in the books are exaggerated, but they definitely had really solid roads, just like their aqueduct they were way ahead of their time. Although i think that their main trading routes or ways are build like that. Of course they don't build every road that way lol... and i think that's where the misconception comes from.

    • @MiroslavDrahos
      @MiroslavDrahos 5 หลายเดือนก่อน

      so your point is "For me alone it is hard, so no way 10000 slaves would be able to do it?"

  • @petertrudelljr
    @petertrudelljr ปีที่แล้ว +4

    I love the full circle comment. I've noticed this as well, going from an itinerary of landmark/point to point full circle through rough then detailed maps... back to point-to-point navigation. I'm old school though. Grew up being the navigator on family trips, checking the map, then with friends, acting as the same whilst looking for shortcuts...etc. Still don't like GPS systems and prefer the beauty of a map.

  • @annoyingbstard9407
    @annoyingbstard9407 ปีที่แล้ว +3

    I’ve never seen this bloke’s channel before but have to say I love TH-cam. The only possible platform where someone who (apparently) works in a paint shop can pontificate on absolutely anything outside his sphere of knowledge and, it seems, some take him seriously. Marvellous!

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว

      What, you looked up my education and qualifications as well as my other job!?

    • @herculesmclovin
      @herculesmclovin ปีที่แล้ว +1

      Don't forget independent podcasts also! They really are a brilliant media platform to listen into others' passions and interests in the world, with their own spin.. I love others' opinions and the way they think and produce what is an extention of them and their creativity 👏 thank you! 😊
      P.S. I highly recomend: The Blindboy Podcast.

  • @mikehenson819
    @mikehenson819 8 หลายเดือนก่อน

    I really enjoy seeing the countryside as you walk along speaking. I’m an American with family roots in England, but never been there. Seeing your countryside makes me want to visit before I’m too old.

  • @worldcomicsreview354
    @worldcomicsreview354 ปีที่แล้ว +16

    There was a prototypical "Satnav" in the 1950's which was a roll of paper with directions. You connected it to your speedo (so it could guess the distance covered and show instructions at the right time) and it would note lanmarks, turns etc.

    • @ynraider
      @ynraider ปีที่แล้ว +1

      Ancient Chinese armies had this in wagon form...

  • @mayasol3985
    @mayasol3985 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    Reg. rail gauges, there are 100 year old films from the US (I think New York) where horse drawn wagons are blending in with traffic with automobiles and trams, and the wagons get into the tram tracks perfectly with same track/wheel distance, and then suddenly turn off the street/out of the tracks like nothing. So might be true in one way; tracks are made to fit horse drawn wagons, just not the Roman ones.

  • @WillN2Go1
    @WillN2Go1 ปีที่แล้ว +4

    Interesting topic. Wide wide range of implications. One thing I learned growing up in Michigan running around on 'old Indian trails,' is they were basically just paths, in other places where there was an undeveloped patch of ground and people cut across it... it doesn't take much to wear down the local grasses, etc to establish one. The 'old Indian trails,' weren't deeply worn into ruts. If you think 10,000 years of bare feet and moccasins? Of course. How 'actually' ancient were these trails? Well, where there was a rise in the terrain, hills, ridges, they never ran along the top of the ridge. Instead where there was a ridge these trails were always just below it. Don't want to be 'day lighted,' silhouetted against the sky to potential enemies. Then when I hiked the Wessex Ridgeway in Dorset I walked on a lot of sunken lanes. Of course I figured several thousand years of foot traffic... But wait. These lanes were always wider than just the width of a person walking. Near Nettlecombe Tout was a horse farm. I saw two teenagers on the largest horses I've ever seen. The part of the Ridgeway trail near by? Churned up like it had been harrowed. So sunken lanes? Hooves, shod or not, wheeled wagons, and lots of rain.
    Did the Romans just follow the old Briton Celt trails? In some places I'm sure they did. Researching the history of Los Angeles I knew roughly where the Native American village Yang Na was located (near downtown Los Angeles) and the San Gabriel Mission, where they were sequestered and enslaved. But what path had they taken? Obviously along Valley Boulevard. Why? It's the flattest most direct route, there's only the Los Angeles river bed to cross, no forests. What else follows that same route? The Southern Pacific Railroads, railroads also want to travel the flattest route. I've since read that the cross the L.A. River at 6th street, a bit south of Valley, but there are hills in the way, so they'd have crossed the river at the widest, shallowest point (except most of the year the old L.A. River bed was dry). I don't have a source for the 6th Street crossing, and of course when they crossed there was no 6th street, or a Los Angeles.

    • @SuperFunkmachine
      @SuperFunkmachine ปีที่แล้ว

      Foot trails tend to wander , if a part of its is washed, blocked by a fallen tree or something then people would just move that bit of the path left or right.

  • @antoniorasenti8010
    @antoniorasenti8010 10 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    Thanks!

  • @Beuwen_The_Dragon
    @Beuwen_The_Dragon ปีที่แล้ว +1

    So, I don’t know anybody who actually believed that EVERY road and trackways made/used/maintained by the Roman Empire were ALL built up as massive multi layered roads.
    In larger cities with high traffic density, certainly, but EVERY road? No.
    The largest contribution of Roman Roadways was the fact that they were Constantly Maintained and cleared, to allow for unimpaired travel over distances.
    Visit a sparkly used trackway or backroad in a wooded area, without constant maintenance and clearing, branches, potholes, shrubs and entire trees will pile up over a short time. This can make travel difficult for large groups, carts, wagons and carriages.
    Another Myth you mentioned which I’ve not heard many people mention is ‘our roadways are built upon the ancient Roman roads!”
    While not true for cities, towns and villages that have popped up since then, quite a few of our modern roads are built along the same paths as the Roman roads. Now this isn’t to say that our modern paved roads are LITERALLY slabbed down on top of ancient roads and trackways, no. It simply means that our modern roads are following the same path that many of the old world roads were made. Obviously as road construction moved into the modern age and new roads were carved out, old roads were also ripped up, the ground tilled and new roads laid out.
    But no, you aren’t going to take a power hammer to the motorway and find an ancient cobblestone path under it.

  • @andrewmanning3639
    @andrewmanning3639 ปีที่แล้ว +8

    Great investigative work. I feel like I'm going to become the annoying parent when my kid comes back from school and starts showing me these things and I'll be shooting off emails to the teachers debunking their lesson plans! :P

  • @abestm8
    @abestm8 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    I love your style, sort of hands on, ignore the text books they gave us at school as it was all a narrative. To me, Pluto is still a planet as well lol. Very Refreshing attitude. Lets use our eyes and do this in a practical manner instead of relying on verbal hand me downs. I am 70 and in five minutes I just learned more than all my school days ever taught me. Thank you, genuinely.

  • @lunarmodule6419
    @lunarmodule6419 ปีที่แล้ว +3

    Makes perfect sense. Imagine the anount if work and costs to dig 6' down, then produce and handle all the material to fill it! So gar away from large cities, with low traffic, a mix of sand, dirt and gravel would have been just enough.

  • @nickryan3417
    @nickryan3417 ปีที่แล้ว +7

    What a great set of questions/thoughts/challenges. Thanks. I suspect the answer for all of them is "yes, partly, not wholly"...
    Groma: a great tool but just one of the tools in use, similar to how a modern surveyor uses multiple tools to do their job. There are some great channels showing how these tools were used and how the iterative refinements of direction led to straight(ish) lines between two places - so obvious when pointed out how it works, but also very clever and simple too.
    Construction: another yes, partly, because some roads were built like that. All of them? hell no, just the really important ones and likely the ones in major settlements where foundations and roads necessarily merged as one being different to another could cause problems. Besides which the locals would just steal the stones when nobody was looking - a practice which continued for centuries, hence "pot holes" and also why there are so few remaining examples of Roman roads as they were because they were a good source of ready quarried and sorted stones.
    Ancient trackways: The Romans weren't stupid and roads were where roads needed to be. If a road was already in place for their needs, then improve it if necessary. That's very different to every road and with so many roads and tracks, it would never happen anyway. Great point about the many kingdoms/tribes that made up the British Isles and how the Roman invasion pretty much united them and how this defined the later history of the nation, it's so easy to forget this.
    Train gauge: Other than variable sizes, early trains were built as cheaply and as efficiently as possible because otherwise it'd be very expensive. Part of this was just replacing the wheels on existing carriages and ensuring that all these were the same distance apart and this arbitrary choice of donor carriage quickly became the standard on that rail because the incentive to change the spacing of the tracks every time a new design of train came out just wasn't there (for very obvious reasons). Therefore for a given track the standard size was whatever the track was built with at first and anything that ran on it later had to have the same sizing. With many independent railways springing up, the same process will have repeated which was why there were so many gauges and the cost of standardisation was a huge thing when the rail companies merged over time. Countries that developed railways later could define an initial standard saving a lot of pain. The engineering behind tracks is oddly fascinating as well...
    Maps: Roman maps were not maps as defined in modern terminology, after all most of the space would have been useless wasted space that the average map user wouldn't care about particularly when media was very expensive. In some ways they were probably better visualised as a separate record of the way stones where from a given point the distances to the next (worthwhile) location was recorded. In other ways, they could be seen as more equivalent to a modern London Underground map - great for navigation, as that was their purpose, less great as a scaled 2D representation of a landscape - add in the times between stops and you'd have a quite comparable modern equivalent.

  • @RolfStones
    @RolfStones ปีที่แล้ว +29

    I have to shout out the TV series Time Team for teaching me a lot about this and more more of history. I hope for a Whitewick / Time Team collab someday! You guys are perfect together if it were up to me.

    • @amandachapman4708
      @amandachapman4708 ปีที่แล้ว +4

      Oh yeah! Paul with Stewart Ainsworth 👍

    • @RolfStones
      @RolfStones ปีที่แล้ว +3

      @@amandachapman4708 I would love to see that

  • @isaacplaysbass8568
    @isaacplaysbass8568 ปีที่แล้ว +2

    Love the myths, and the perspective on GPS use. I often wonder how many people know "where" they are from a mental "map" perspective, in relation to the physical geography. It seems to have become both more physically accurate and concrete, yet more abstracted.

  • @kaitlyn__L
    @kaitlyn__L ปีที่แล้ว +10

    I always thought those diagrams looked suspiciously modern. In that we do often dig that deep when running utilities under the road instead of beside it, and use multiple layers for strength and stability.
    I always expected most Roman roads to be dirt or gravel, even if dug, compressed, and levelled a bit. So many things in history and science are counterintuitive, so it’s nice when one’s intuition is correct for once!
    One comment says in highly trafficked areas they built the roads with more layers which I can certainly understand. But the myth as I understand it was that they built all their roads that way, which is clearly untrue.

    • @drsira7248
      @drsira7248 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      Travel to Italy and say that again. In the core Roman empire, they most defently build many if not all roads that way. Of course there were other tracks less developed, but those werent roads. Its the same as not all modern roads are highways. Just look at the German autobahn and landstraße, same concept same result

    • @kaitlyn__L
      @kaitlyn__L ปีที่แล้ว

      @@drsira7248 please see my final paragraph!

  • @katherinem2896
    @katherinem2896 11 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    I lived in Naples. Many of the roads are Roman. When they get too bumpy the road crew pulls up and stacks the basalt pavers and then relevels the top half meter or so of sand and gravel, adds sand, and re-lays the basalt blocks. So the roads are re-usable in a heavily seismic location.

  • @steverpcb
    @steverpcb ปีที่แล้ว +6

    Every time I drive up the Fosse Way I cannot help thinking that the romans did not build it straight, just from hill to hill !

    • @bobloblaw10001
      @bobloblaw10001 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      Yes topography deserved a mention here.. even if you had the tools to sight perfect lines over distances of 100km, you probably wouldn't want to build a perfectly straight road because it probably wouldn't be the optimum route over hills and valleys and other features.

  • @SpiritmanProductions
    @SpiritmanProductions ปีที่แล้ว +2

    Good video! May I make a small suggestion? I know it seems trivial but, when going through a country gate, can you also show it being closed, to plant that little seed in people's heads? ;-)

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว +1

      You should definitely watch this weeks video. I probably went overboard

    • @SpiritmanProductions
      @SpiritmanProductions ปีที่แล้ว +1

      @@pwhitewick Yup, climbing works, too! And one self-closing gate. 👍

  • @cerealport2726
    @cerealport2726 ปีที่แล้ว +11

    I have never been convinced that Roman roads were all multi-layered engineering masterpieces. It all would have been a colossal effort and expense for little to no return. The logistics of locating good sources of material, quarrying it, and then moving all that material around; would also have been impressive, even for ancient Romans.

    • @gertkaiser4273
      @gertkaiser4273 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      That would be the same romans that built aqueducts and castles that are still in use? Cloaca maxima built in the third century AUC and still in use 2500 years later

    • @KaiHenningsen
      @KaiHenningsen ปีที่แล้ว +1

      @@gertkaiser4273You mean that stuff where building it that way has immediate use? As opposed to six-layer stone-topped roads?

    • @cerealport2726
      @cerealport2726 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      @@gertkaiser4273 There is a big difference between building infrastructure in cities and other population centres, and building hundreds or even thousands of kilometres of very complex roads in the countryside.
      Even today, we don't build massive multi-lane highways absolutely everywhere...

    • @gertkaiser4273
      @gertkaiser4273 ปีที่แล้ว

      @@cerealport2726 I’m intrigued. Roads connect and good roads do that better. If you move goods (important ones like fermented fish sauce) there is a profit to be had by better roads. If you have an almost unlimited supply of slaves - just go on a raid- the cost factor is limited. And we are talking about imperial Rome it isn’t just a sign of power it also allows you to move legions quickly. Just saying don’t discard ideas because the cost seems to be high where the value might be in itself or unknown reasons. A bit like the Autobahn. They certainly couldn’t be justified on economic reasons but come a dictator with other motives…..

    • @cerealport2726
      @cerealport2726 ปีที่แล้ว

      @@gertkaiser4273 Good roads between major centres make sense to anyone with a brain. A good, serviceable road does not have to be paved with stone though...
      If this wonderfully over-engineered road network was so widespread, as you seem to claim, where is the evidence for widespread road building at this level of engineering in rural UK?
      Where are the quarries? where are the sand, and gravel pits to support such massive infrastructure? The Romans were crazy about documenting everything...Where is any of the documentation showing the movement of thousands of tonnes of materials and people to build such high quality roads?
      You claim there is an almost unlimited supply of slaves... but said slaves would have had to be managed. Such infrastructure would have also had a military guard to protect the workers (the UK was not peaceful for the Romans), necessitating large encampments while building very very high quality roads at a snails pace compared to building lesser quality roads much faster. Where is any of the evidence for this in the UK?

  • @Stelios.Posantzis
    @Stelios.Posantzis ปีที่แล้ว +1

    2:58 This is obviously false. The aligning or all fire beacons could take place in a very short time by using fire (secondary beacons) or other visible signs for signalling. So the notion that absurdly many people are needed and that relaying messages back and forth will take a long time is false. Signalling with visible signs travels at the speed of light and takes no time. The number of people needed is just proportional to the number of beacons needed (and not unlimited as claimed here) and the aligning can take place by agreeing on a system of communicating the required corrections of the beacons' positions via a pre-defined signalling language. The method followed would be iterative, that much is true, but the only time necessary to align every beacon would be just the time needed to move the beacons which are off-axis the distance required to get on-axis.

  • @RyTrapp0
    @RyTrapp0 ปีที่แล้ว +3

    My whole life, hearing/reading about the vaunted "Roman road construction", what with digging multiple feet down and layering a small variety of materials, etc., it *NEVER* made any sense. The idea is absurd - how the hell would the Romans manage AAAALLLLLL the resources that would be required? It would take SO much material, it would just be so time, labor, and general resource intensive to build any significant portion of the road network like this. The classic illustrations that we've all grown up seeing(even over here in North America, where Roman roads are basically God-tier level construction that could never be surpassed because of whatever ancient 'secret sauce' that modern society could just never possibly figure out... it's a bit ridiculous) of this extensive Roman road construction idea always seemed just hopelessly optimistic to me.

  • @Prospro8
    @Prospro8 ปีที่แล้ว +2

    Quite apart from anything else, not only did Roman vehicles have varying wheelbases BUT, Romans never even used 'war chariots', they didn't even exist!

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว

      I had wondered about that

  • @playwithmeinsecondlife6129
    @playwithmeinsecondlife6129 ปีที่แล้ว +6

    When I was a boy I had a collection of USGS maps that I used to plan hikes but now it's all on my phone and computer. I miss the contour lines on the paper maps, it's not so obvious on the electronic maps.
    Likewise the rumor has been that the old state routes were based on Indian trails. A little of this may be true, in the sense that an obvious land contour would be used whether by Native Americans, native British, Romans or modern people. But not slavishly.

    • @seanfaherty
      @seanfaherty ปีที่แล้ว +1

      In NorthAmerica you’re right but the Romans were famous for not following geography and just go’n straight

    • @rickansell661
      @rickansell661 ปีที่แล้ว +2

      @@seanfaherty Having just finished dipping in to my copy of Margery's 'Roman Routes in the Weald' - one of the seminal works - they weren't quite as fanatical about straight lines in the way a lot of people think. The ground does come in to things, as does who constructed the route, when and why.
      The Romans were great engineers and that does mean that they weren't completely mad! If you follow their routes in detail you will, for example, see a turn of a few degrees onto another straight alignment to cross a river at a more sensible angle, before heading off on another straight alignment. Or dog-legs round a bit of boggy ground.
      They did like their straight lines though. When they followed a ridge-top ancient route they would do so in short lengths of straight road rather than follow the original curved track. And where they could they did try and stick as close as they could to long distance straight alignments.

    • @seanfaherty
      @seanfaherty ปีที่แล้ว

      thanks for the correction and the reading list@@rickansell661

  • @benjaminstevens4468
    @benjaminstevens4468 ปีที่แล้ว +2

    The Romans were surprised when they reached Britain, by the use of war chariots, which were totally anachronistic, in the eyes of Roman soldiers, at that time.

  • @anthonydecarvalho652
    @anthonydecarvalho652 ปีที่แล้ว +4

    It's admirable that your work is correcting the standard (and still on going) information about Roman roads. Question, have your received criticism for these corrections? I have seen many times when a well intended historian bring to light the actual facts that they are attacked and sometimes ruining thier lives.

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว +1

      Thanks Anthony. Just take a delve into the comments and you'll soon find just that. What's frustrating is that I definitely do not consider myself a Historian. Just someone with an interest in various subjects. This information isnwidely available and doesn't take a lot to dig up. But as you suggest, people often don't want to hear it.

    • @KunjaBihariKrishna
      @KunjaBihariKrishna 11 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      Can you give an example of a historian whose life was ruined as you said?

  • @glenlongstreet7
    @glenlongstreet7 ปีที่แล้ว +3

    While I am shattered by this episode (I will recover soon) the 2-wheel chariot is called a carpent, hence, carpenter.
    Here across the pond, you can leave Boston on Route 2 or 20 or 90 and end up in Seattle or Everet Washington. If it works, it works. I love roads. I grew up by the turnpike, although the pikes were long gone, and the post road, although we used trucks.

  • @KatePhiz
    @KatePhiz ปีที่แล้ว +4

    Absolutely superb video Paul. Possibly your best yet.

  • @billstapleton1084
    @billstapleton1084 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    In Germany I drove on Roman roads. Roads that were built 2,000 years ago. I now live in El paso. I have watched the same section of road being totally repaired 4 different times in the past 10 years.

  • @dodgydruid
    @dodgydruid ปีที่แล้ว +4

    I was an ardent OS maps porer, whenever the local charity shops got some in I would have them and on my bedroom wall I had the local area of south London and north Kent seamlessly matched making for very interesting wallpaper. When I joined the forces, I was so adept at orienteering I ended up teaching it for a while, its also known about me is I cannot ever get lost here in Britain, if I want to drive to a place in Scotland I just head off and go, no looking at maps or sat navs as I had in the eighties driven to every part of mainland Britain in my old Hillman Avenger before it finally died on me coasting into Liverpool having thrown a rod. I can also much to some people's surprise tell where north is day or night, its a weird thing but I feel like a "pull" and that is where north is, which works quite well with my spatial awareness as I think in 3d pretty much. You might see me about in my 3 wheel van, dirty yellow and I do wander about these Dorset roads and venture into Wiltshire and Somerset as right by the borders of both, so much history in these lands round here, am hoping to get my old Vespa up and running for next summer and maybe do some camp outs.

  • @georgerutherford24
    @georgerutherford24 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    Back in the 60s a member of the AA could write in requesting directions for a holiday or other car journey.Back would come a slim document with pages of maps and specific directions.Sadly we didn't keep these, Aberdeen to Weybridge was one.

    • @rachelwalker7091
      @rachelwalker7091 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      I remember my Dad getting these for our holiday routes.

  • @fastyaveit
    @fastyaveit ปีที่แล้ว +3

    I asked my Dad a long time ago why Scotch Corner is called that as It's far from Scotland, it was an old Roman road junction. The Romans didn't like the Scots very much.

  • @jaksongpg
    @jaksongpg หลายเดือนก่อน

    Got up, switched on my TH-cam which was all manic clickbait and cannot decide what to watch. So I typed 'roman construction' (or some such) and this came up. Perfect. Thank you sir, keep it up (just what I needed to get away from all that hype on the Tyson/Paul fight). That plumb line thing is a nice bit of kit. Roads couldn't ever have been totally straight anyway because they went around mountainous terrain.

  • @Sim0nTrains
    @Sim0nTrains ปีที่แล้ว +5

    Two Horses Backsides 😂 (Sorry had to giggle on that one) Great video Paul and nice to see Stephen Fry as well

  • @whirving
    @whirving ปีที่แล้ว +2

    Finally "the algorithm" pointed me toward your channel! Liked and subscribed. Map nerd, land surveyor and halfwit explorer and man of general curiosity. Thanks for your curiosity and work.

  • @lynnwood7205
    @lynnwood7205 ปีที่แล้ว +3

    Ah man, you took all the fun out of it.
    still though, you did answer a lot of questions in the back of my head as I read about Roman roads over the years.

  • @alanprice7584
    @alanprice7584 11 หลายเดือนก่อน

    Thoroughly enjoyed the information you conveyed, back in the 70s as part of a highway construction course which also skirted the surveying aspects, we were taught all about Roman road construction and how the names for the various layers have carried over into todays terminology , pavement being the obvious one. When it came to determining levels we used a set of three "boning rods" made from identical T shaped wooden pieces, one at each end of the distance to be covered and the middle one moved up or down against pins driven along an established string line, crude but surprisingly accurate, look forward to further revelations.

  • @FiscalWoofer
    @FiscalWoofer ปีที่แล้ว +3

    Super video Paul! Love the clear debunking of what has become fairly engrained ‘fact’. Thank you!!

  • @martinwarner1178
    @martinwarner1178 ปีที่แล้ว

    Great video. In the UK we can't even keep our present roads in good fettle, so I am sure the Romans had issues about maintaining /building perfect roads. So, I'm with you on this. Peace be unto you.

  • @BritishBeachcomber
    @BritishBeachcomber ปีที่แล้ว +11

    They gave us peace. Apart from some initial resistance from Boudicca, who almost beat the Romans, their occupation was the longest period of peace this island has ever known.

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว +7

      I mean... peace through fear. Sure

    • @frontenac5083
      @frontenac5083 ปีที่แล้ว +5

      You'd have _loved_ the peace the Nazis brought to vast chunks of Europe in the 1940s. It was very, very peaceful for a while.

    • @paulx3827
      @paulx3827 ปีที่แล้ว

      @@frontenac5083 yes.ordnung mus sein,when they had to torture someone it hurted them more as us!!they were not as mean as those in ukraini

    • @unchattytwit
      @unchattytwit ปีที่แล้ว

      Agree with the above; Stalin and Hitler brought peace to millions and millions of deaths.

    • @thehound9638
      @thehound9638 ปีที่แล้ว

      Some might call it enslavement.

  • @practicing1
    @practicing1 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    that's 100% wrong. The width was defined by the emperor who demanded roads must be wide enough for 2 to pass (including bends) and there was explicit punishment set if they did not meet with standard.

  • @hagerty1952
    @hagerty1952 ปีที่แล้ว +10

    I can believe that the heavily trafficked roads through central Italy, especially close to Rome, would have very substantial foundations.
    Also, while I enjoyed the video, I was waiting for you to show the actual Roman road! I mean a handwave towards some mossy underbrush is not the same. Are the surfaces completely buried, or are they gone entirely and the only things left are the lines on the map of where they once were?

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว +1

      We tend to just have the projection of the Agger here in Britain. Check out our Roman Road playlist and we go into a little more detail.

  • @TheRealMonkeyrogue
    @TheRealMonkeyrogue ปีที่แล้ว +1

    I knew that tweet was suspicious about the roads, when the tweet was about rail gauges. Where I live, we have one of the last small-gauge trains, FROM ENGLAND here in America. It is a shorter track but they maintain it all as it was. Fascinating stuff. But there are multiple gauge tracks, even my less than amateur self knew that. So it stuck in my craw and I couldn't figure out why. Thank you for articulating it.

  • @chascarpenter5006
    @chascarpenter5006 ปีที่แล้ว +5

    Hi Paul, really enjoyed this vid, you gave it your all 110% as usual, love the myth debunking, you hit the nail on the head with this one.

  • @snooks5607
    @snooks5607 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    7:30 yea I mean doesn't the fact that they used surveying tools automatically dispel the notion that they just upgraded existing trackways? the surveying's already done if you just build on top

  • @SBCBears
    @SBCBears ปีที่แล้ว +9

    I've heard the story of the cart wheel tracks before. Know some of the history of early railways, I had doubts. Thanks for the debunking link, it's an interesting site.

  • @PsychoBiker13
    @PsychoBiker13 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    You cannot compare the roads of the frontier to those actually in the central Roman area. Supplies and workers were more scarce and was under constant threat from the Picts.

  • @mickeydodds1
    @mickeydodds1 ปีที่แล้ว +14

    But isn't the Appian Way, which is preserved outside of Rome, a good example of 'classic' Roman road metalling?

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว +6

      Yup, as are a couple of others, but not 6ft deep and not in the UK

    • @probabilmente_paolo
      @probabilmente_paolo ปีที่แล้ว

      also the Via Campana that is still used for car traffic

  • @Dave1976.
    @Dave1976. ปีที่แล้ว +2

    Great vlogging as always, Paul. You've done well to cram 5 parts into 14 minutes, found this really interesting. Learnt a bit

  • @bobsrailrelics
    @bobsrailrelics ปีที่แล้ว +5

    I learnt so many of these 'facts' at school and the various museums over the years. I did know the rail guage one was rubbish, but really interesting to hear about the others. Thanks

    • @stuartbailey9287
      @stuartbailey9287 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      On subject of railway gauges original design of the Great Western Railway was based on a wider guage than what became the UK standard guage. This is why at Bristol Temple Meads and some other GWR stations you have to be really carefull to not fall down the gap between the train and the platform. Bristolians still say Brunel and the GWR were right about using a wider guage (more space for passengers and goods) but wider guarge would have involved wider railways needing more land/cost so we ended up with crappy narrow standard guage and train delays when people (outsiders) continue to ignore the warning and fall down the gap.

  • @peterscott1111
    @peterscott1111 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    On the question of whether the Romans adopted earlier paths: I read somewhere that local paths usually followed the water table so that flocks moving along the path would have regular watering places. On the other hand military roads followed straight lines, for speed of marching over the shortest distance, or along ridge lines, for protection from ambush.

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว

      Never really considered the water issue!

  • @that_guy8893
    @that_guy8893 ปีที่แล้ว +3

    “You see, here in Britain, the roads aren’t like in the book, so they must be a myth”

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว +1

      And the vast majority of roads outside of Italy.

    • @that_guy8893
      @that_guy8893 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      @@pwhitewick does the book claim ALL Roman’s roads were made in the same way as inside Italy?

  • @martinmarsola6477
    @martinmarsola6477 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    Thanks for the video today. Reloaded out a second time, and it went right through. Again, hello to Rebecca and see you on the next. Cheers Paul! 🇬🇧🙂👍🇺🇸

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว

      Oh nooooo. Refresh and go again. Keep me posted!!

  • @yorkshirecoastadventures1657
    @yorkshirecoastadventures1657 ปีที่แล้ว +3

    I'd love to hear you make a video on the mystery Roman Villa in Eastfield Scarborough. It has experts confused and your opinion would be very interesting.

  • @davearmstrong2296
    @davearmstrong2296 ปีที่แล้ว +3

    Thank you for this really informative and educational video.

  • @austinhallmark7060
    @austinhallmark7060 ปีที่แล้ว

    Thanks

  • @samuell.foxton4177
    @samuell.foxton4177 ปีที่แล้ว +3

    the mention of Vitruvius piqued my interest, not least because I finished rereading his Ten Books on Architecture a couple of months ago, and there was little mention of roads (there was some, but not much on construction, of course his focus was on the form and construction of buildings...)

  • @user-xw6wj2qh5n
    @user-xw6wj2qh5n 10 หลายเดือนก่อน

    I grew up in a village on Ermine Street. When the council came along to put in mains sewage pipes they dug down and in doing so they hit the original Roman road. We were able to study the cross section of the road. The actual thickness was not as many books state, but the general construction was correct - including the paving. I would say the standards of construction would vary with terrain and ground and also whether there were inspectors around. It appears that many jobs were contracted out even back then, so no doubt corners would be cut wherever they could get away with it.

  • @RossMaynardProcessExcellence
    @RossMaynardProcessExcellence ปีที่แล้ว +4

    Very interesting and killed a few beliefs I held. I particularly like the railway gauge one
    Scary haircut though.

  • @Belenus3080
    @Belenus3080 11 หลายเดือนก่อน

    I saw your title and thumbnail, and my first thought as a draftsman was: this looks remarkably like how we would build a slab foundation, complete with the wall footings around the side. My second thought was, that would be insanely expensive to stretch over any distance.

  • @richardmorgan9273
    @richardmorgan9273 ปีที่แล้ว +5

    I'd always wondered about Roman road surveying - it would have involved a lot of time-consuming shuffling of the waypoints. Many of the roads were built by the legions in newly conquered territory where the possibility of counter-attacks on the surveyors would be an issue. Another problem is that many of our hill-tops would have been covered in trees where any surveyor wouldn't be able to see a damn thing!

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว +1

      Yup. I'm still trying to get my head around it thoroughly.

    • @richardmorgan9273
      @richardmorgan9273 ปีที่แล้ว +1

      Yes, starting at both ends and meeting in the middle does seem more practical. You still need a pretty good idea of the bearing of the target destination from each end, and it is possible the two roads could miss completely!@@pwhitewick

  • @stemid85
    @stemid85 ปีที่แล้ว +1

    One of the most interesting finds regarding roman roads that I heard of recently was the discovery of two parallel trenches over a dozen meters from each side of the road. I don't remember the exact distance but it was something like 20-25 meters. So that would indicate that the road was not only cleared on each side, but also somewhat protected from easily driving a cart onto it. I heard speculation that this was to ensure people passed a toll and didn't skip the toll by entering the road from the middle.

    • @pwhitewick
      @pwhitewick  ปีที่แล้ว

      Yes, i think I read the same somewhere. I believe the clearing was potentially to help avoid ambush. But not sure on either theory.