HOW MANY ROMAN ROADS ARE KNOWN IN BRITAIN?
Even though Britannia was on the margins of the Empire, over 6,000 miles of Roman roads are known of with reasonable certainty. Historians have been able to deduce where some of Britain’s main Roman roads existed not only from archaeological evidence, but also from something called the Antonine Itinerary. Probably produced in the third century AD, it listed series of place names, with distances between them, along routes. Fifteen itineraries were in Britannia. Spread across much of England, and extending into Wales and lowland Scotland, they formed our first national road network. Often, you can identify them from straight-ish sections of roads on a current road atlas. Many modern trunk roads follow the same course as Roman ones: besides the Fosse Way south-west from Lincoln, the A2 from Canterbury to London and the A5 onwards from there to Wales (Watling Street); the A68 from Corbridge near Hadrian’s Wall to Edinburgh (part of Dere Street); and many others still follow the original or
