OK, no specific answer to the Irish and Gallic straight roads, but let's see if it comes out in the wash.
quote:
I've never really understood how they did that. Though unlike revisionist dreamers, I do not think that is grounds enough to propose a loopy hypothesis that we've got it all wrong
Why do you
not have grounds to think about it having gone wrong? You can't get your head around what they're suggesting, but you defer to someone else anyway. Have you been denied the key to the Executive Toilet where all the genuine logical inferences are made, or something?
Please do ask yourself again how engineers in Exeter knew that Leicester and Lincoln existed, let alone how to make a bee line for them. And how, with their paltry map-making skills, all this stupendous surveying was carried out. And why,
in the real world, any surveying would
need to be carried out.
quote:
they are hypothesised (read/heard somewhere by I.B. a Harperian revisionist) to lie over earlier tracks
Not so much hypothesised as baldly stated:
"some stretches of Roman roads used pre-existing trackways, or that the Romans continued to use existing trackways."
"Roman Roads can overlay earlier routes, but then that is to be expected"
"Yes there are trackways and roads elsewhere, but then there are also houses, villages and towns elsewhere, the concept of travelling an established route is quite easy."And this is indeed common sense.
"The army kept the pax romana and in order to do that they had to travel quickly from one point to another - Roman points that is."And when the 'country' incorporated into the Empire is a going concern (as they all were),
where are the Roman points if not the pre-existing
native points? Why would the Romans have any interest in going anywhere the people weren't going already? You conquer people, not open land.
"Our road system (excluding major routes such as motorways)was developed from trackways. These had to skirt around fields, and other property."How can the
defined fields and properties already exist before the roads/tracks that link them?
"In straight sections more like. Speed was the key and its easier to engineer sections of straight road."
the basic starting belief that straight was quicker and cheaper"This is simply not true. The quickest thing is just to re-engineer existing routes. Planning and executing straight roads with cuttings and embankments and all the rest is a massive undertaking: for the sake of saving about 20% on materials and direct labour.
If speed is of the essence, why did they wait to survey the entire country (as they must have done to get the Exeter-Lincoln road right, for instance) before starting work?
"Gradient, whether for cars, boats or marching soldiers, is always worth avoiding even at the expense of overall distance."Goes for chariots and carts, too.
"Periodically, they changed direction to correct cumulative surveying errors."There can only be
errors if the start and end points are already defined. If they are going where they like and founding towns along the way, creating the points to be linked up,
there is no such thing as going wrong.
"as going from place to place usually has a "best route" (as Tom Tom)"This is wrong, but puts it in a nutshell. It's wrong because selecting the best route (as Tom Tom) has got nothing to do with planning a new road: it has everything to do with selecting from the options already available. And usually there is only ever
one route. If Tom Tom is rammed with detailed knowledge, you can optimise some particular parameters of your journey; but there is really only one answer to "which way to Lincoln?"; while "can we go via London?" is a separate issue.
That is, unless you can show that the Romans created all the nodes on the road network,
the existence of the road network proves the pre-existence of those towns and the roads linking them.
No one really thinks the Romans created all those towns. Since when were they in the business of selecting a "state" suitable for incorporation into the Empire and then completely reconstructing its entire economy, literally from the ground up? And if they had, there would be no kinks because there would be no cumulative errors to compensate for.
(And the Romans were so special that all these towns proved to be immortal. A feat echoed by the Anglo-Saxons who created immortal villages. That's funny: cities then towns then villages? That's the complete reverse of that other great paradigm: that agriculture led to villages led to towns led to cities. Hmm.)Pre-Roman Britain was sophisticated enough to engage in long distance trade, have tribal leaders and organised warfare, export grain, use a system of weights and measures, keep pets... why would they
not have a network of roads that
defined the places the Romans needed to go in order to take over?
Perhaps this is the reason for doubting it:
"The thing about the Roman road network is that it tends to link Roman towns, and there's not much evidence for those existing in a similar fashion prior to the conquest."
"I have never dug a Roman road that had an a previous route beneath..."But this is a
systematic error because
"...the very act of building said road would remove it"
"They did build up their existing roads though, sometimes by up to a metre."The Romans were nothing if not engineers. The very building-up of the roads and the towns obliterates the evidence of earlier roads and towns. We
know to expect an
absence of evidence, and we can not use this absence to argue that the Romans were first. What have we left except common sense notions of what roads are for?
