Review
The Road by Christopher Hadley review: an early contender for the year’s best history book
Hadley's immersive account uncovers an ancient Roman thoroughfare – and argues magnificently for a different way of writing about the past
Picture him at daybreak walking the fields, eyes on the ground, mud sucking at his boots; he stops, sometimes crouches, and studies the shadows cast by the low, raking sunshine. A farmer he meets thinks he is mad. Not in the least deranged, Christopher Hadley has a magnificent, even noble obsession; he is “proving the line”, searching for a lost Roman road.
The road (known to specialists as RR21b) ran from Braughing in Hertfordshire to Great Chesterford in Essex. Today it is a quiet, tucked-away part of the countryside, but once it was at the bustling heart of Roman Britain. The road is the spine of this wonderful book. We follow it through space, walking north with the author. In a less linear way, we also follow it through the ages. The road is a “time machine”; things encountered along the way summon up history, close the gap between them and us, convey “the sense that the past might leak through to the present, and the present to the past, like ink through tissue paper”.
We are shown the Romans; how they built, and used, and thought about the road. But we also meet many of those who travelled and pondered the road in the intervening centuries. We encounter antiquarians, schoolboys, a farrier, vicars, a miller, metal detectorists, local historians, and archaeologists. All the tools of the latter are lucidly explained: stratigraphy in excavations, field surveys, geophysics, numismatics, epigraphy, aerial photography, and LiDAR (3D modelling the ground by “bouncing laser pulses off objects and measuring their reflection”).
Hadley widens the customary base of evidence to include “poems, church walls and hag stones; oxlips, killing places and Rebecca West; hauntings and immortals and things buried too deep for archaeology”. Like a novel, a big reveal is held back until the end, when Hadley produces an exciting and completely convincing explanation of why the Romans first built the road (and, as is polite in reviewing fiction, I will not spoil the ending).
The tone of un-academic honesty makes us think about how we write history. At one point in the splendidly clear endnotes Hadley cites a “Display label at Vindolanda Roman fort”, at another he admits “I cannot recall or discover where I read this”. Every historian must sympathise with the latter, but try getting either past the supervisor of your doctorate or the anonymous readers at a scholarly press. Such frankness questions the endless multiplication of references in much modern history. Why are they there? Do they add anything, or are they often no more than a form of rhetoric – look at how many works I have consulted, how many languages I can read – designed to batter readers into acquiescence?
This is no dry and prosaic history, but a work of imagination, and a deeply literary book, which takes in not just poems and Rebecca West, but graphic novels, folklore, and works of fantasy. Hadley has an ear for evocative and unusual words: sloughs and pannage, bosing and lynchets, as well as whelmed, which gives us over and underwhelmed. He writes wonderful prose. Every page contains striking images and lapidary sentences:
A woman pours from a flagon, and another woman 1,800 years hence bags a sherd from it. Fragments, clutched at, fragile, often friable, all we have left. Windows in time. Ways to the past. What am I doing but trying feebly to prise open these windows with pieces of pot and pencil marks on maps?
The Road: A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past is hard to define. Part wellies-on nature writing, part forensic archaeology, part imaginative history, the combination is enthralling. An absolute joy to read, and an early contender for every list of History Book of the Year.
The Road: A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past is published by William Collins at £16.99. To order your copy for £20 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books