Transportation

Storm-Hit TV Series ‘Walking Britain’s Roman Roads’ Starts July 1


Spare a thought for historian and TV presenter Dan Jones, battered by Storms Ciara and Dennis earlier this year as he and a windswept production crew filmed a six-part documentary series about Britain’s Roman road system.

“The storms hit during the second week of filming,” series producer Simon Harries told me via Skype.

“The crew was working on the Dere Street episode, filming at Hadrian’s Wall,” recounted Harries.

“They were in whiteout conditions, able to film only when the snow stopped blowing in their faces,” he added.

Walking Britain’s Roman Roads starts July 1. The 48-minute-long episodes feature seven of Roman Britain’s main roads: Watling Street (Kent Coast to Shropshire), Ermine Street (London to York), Dere Street (York to central Scotland), the Stanegate (parallel to Hadrian’s Wall), Fosse Way (Exeter to Lincoln), Ermin Way (Silchester to Gloucester) and Stane Street (London to Chichester).

The 2,000-mile trunk road network built (and rebuilt) across the 400 or so years of Britain’s Roman occupation is strikingly similar in length to the U.K.’s 2,300-mile motorway network. Many stretches—such as much of the 18 miles of the A1(M) between Dishforth to Catterick—are even on the same alignments.

This length of the Great North Road is part of the 225-mile Dere Street, which ran from Roman Eboracum through to the Antonine Wall between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde in the central belt of what we know today as Scotland.

The Romans didn’t originate Dere Street; they upgraded it. A Mesolithic settlement near the A1 at Catterick unearthed by archaeologists shows that the route of the Great North Road is at least 8,000 years older than the Romanized version.

Walking Britain’s Roman Roads—broadcast on the digital platform of the U.K.’s Channel 5, with international airings later in the year—focusses on major roads. There were perhaps another 8,000 miles of connecting and minor roads in Roman times.

Filmed for Channel 5 by Rumpus Media, the series joins others from the same production house, including Walking Britain’s Lost Railways.

Having survived the named storms, Walking Britain’s Roman Roads went into post-production during the pandemic.

“We had just finished filming when lockdown was imposed,” said executive producer Fintan Maguire.

“The editing had to be done remotely. Producers and editors worked from their homes. All sorts of cloud computing and editing systems had to be put in place quickly.”

Jones, more usually a medieval historian, suggested script changes on the fly, and his voiceovers—which now had to be recorded remotely—were supervised by Harries over Skype.

“I was sitting in my house looking at a shot of the dubbing theater screen,” remembered Harries.

“I could hear Dan’s voice coming through. And I could talk to him over Skype just to say, ‘oh, let’s try that again.’ Or he would query a factual detail, and we’d rewrite the odd line to suit.”

Compiling a TV series remotely took longer than if the post-production crew could sit together, but generating fresh content for lockdown viewing might result in higher viewing figures.

“There has been general uplift in viewing across all channels,” said Maguire.

“With people at home more and often consuming more TV, more people might watch the series.”

Walking Britain’s Roman Roads is more about history than walking. It features Jones with talking heads such as academics, archaeologists, and experts such as potters and—to demonstrate the Roman cleansing ritual of scraping olive oil from skin—a masseuse.

“The series seems to be a good general introduction to Roman roads in Britain, showing that they are often still visible in the countryside,” said Dave Armstrong, editor of the newsletter for the Roman Roads Research Association (RRRA).

“The series could inspire those with a passing interest to investigate further, discovering more about the way the Romans constructed their roads, how and why they laid them out with the distinctive straight alignments—and start seeking out missing segments and undiscovered Roman roads, of which there still seem to be many.”

RRRA chairman Mike Haken has watched the first program in the series and told me by email that it was “good that the series was made.”

However, the script was inaccurate in parts, he claims.

“This follows a pattern common to most current populist historical TV programs,” he added, “not letting the facts get in the way of a story.”

Among the mistakes, says Haken, is the assertion that the Roman army traveled in chariots.

“They had stopped using chariots in warfare well over a century before [the Romans arrived in Britain],” said Haken.

“Caesar ridiculed Britons for still using them,” he added.

He also takes issues with describing a section of stone blocks underneath a tattoo parlor in Rochester, Kent, as the survival of a “little bit of Watling Street.”

“The paved surface is almost certainly not part of the Roman road,” states Haken.

“Several cellars along Rochester High Street have had Roman remains found in them, all from settlement and structures alongside the road, not the road itself.”

This mislabeling in the series is “regrettable,” believes Haken, because it “creates the false impression that Roman roads in Britain were paved with stone blocks [when], as far as is known, outside of settlements they were not.”

(The famous Via Appia may be capped with paving stones for some of its distance near Rome, but most Roman roads were usually topped with small, compacted stones, a road surface treatment known as metalling. Contrary to popular opinion, a metalled road isn’t a hard, tarmac road, it’s an all-weather gravel road.)

Other mistakes in the series include the claim that Roman Verulamium, southwest of the modern city of St Albans in Hertfordshire, was discovered in the 1930s.

“That was just when [famous British archaeologist] Sir Mortimer Wheeler worked on it,” pointed out Haken. In reality, Ancient Verulamium was known to Elizabethan antiquarians.

While agreeing not every fact in the series passes muster, archaeologist Mike Bishop, author of The Secret History of the Roman Roads of Britain (2019), told me by email:

“I think part of the appeal [of a series like this] lies in the fact that people can relate to Roman roads influencing our own infrastructure and settlement patterns.”


Walking Britain’s Roman Roads begins on Wednesday, July 1, at 9 pm on 5Select, a British free-to-air television channel. It is available on Freeview channel 55, Sky channel 159, Freesat channel 133, Virgin Media 152, YouView, Talk Talk and BT channel 55. The international distribution of the series is being handled by TCB Media Rights.



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