i love the landscape around this part of the uk broadly speaking this is east
wiltshire and perhaps more specifically well just behind us is the town of marlborough
this location is littered with history spanning millennia
from 5 000 year old burial mounds two and a half thousand year old ditches and so much more and
for our more modern history our beloved abandoned railway but today we aren't here for any of this
we're here to try and find the traces of some roman roads now we've got two questions number one
can we find these roman roads and number two what exactly does a roman road junction look like
so first of all some context to where you find us today now for the time team lover
you may recall an episode where they found 55 000 roman coins series 17 episode 6 a potted history
oh my god i'm going grey yes 55 000 roman coins in a field just outside marlborough a significant
and roman settlement sat in the valley here just to marlborough's east now to the south
of this site two roman roads met somewhere here in savannah forest as part of the roman road network
so before we head to the junction of these two routes in question today are there any remains
of these two routes so what we decided to do is have a look at the the last three miles or so
of each route the first one today is the m43 now that essentially is a road that connects
cirencester this huge important conerbation of cirencester in roman terms
down to the ports on the south of england and across over to europe so this road that we're
looking for first of all m43 has huge significance so you'd think it would be quite prominent here in
savanake forest just south of the junction that we're going to come to very shortly
right so the track where we're on is only about 20 yards so if we walk into the trees
here rebecca 20 yards or so okay we should hopefully come to what looks like a roman road
so ahead of us now you can see we're stood right on the center part of what they would call the
aggar so that's the main bit of road we've got a ditch either side so you're going to stand in
that ditch so we can show the viewers i'm going to stand in this ditch either side of the roman road
all right so there's rebecca and if i get down here you'll see between us here is the ditch of
the very difficult to show you on camera we are either side of the roman road which is right here
so the location of our search for both of these roman roads leading up to the junction
is essentially done today completely in savannah forest we thought it would be perfect kind of
relatively untouched it's i think the oldest privately owned ancient woodland in the country
again difficult to come out on camera but you can see a faint road ahead exactly behind me
ditch either side and this m43 route is marked significantly on modern os maps
it's marked on all the old maps on the national library of Scotland as a route through it it's not
so prominent on the lidar and you can kind of tell that by there's only a real faint hint that it's
here it is here you can tell that and that adds up because it was a significant route a really
important route because it led Cirencester all the way down to the ports and back across to europe
just had a really interesting thought to our immediate right is the wands dike or the wands
ditch and it was a a ditch built maybe sort of between 50 200 years after roman occupation
now the point of this roman road we're looking for today m43 there's a point where the wan stuck
cuts across it perpendicular so would that potentially give us a profile of the roman
road if we can find the if we can find it i think it's just over here somewhere
a little bit underwhelmed by that because this is the one spot where os
said beyond that ditch there the wands like which cuts perpendicular road beyond that
ditch there they said it's a really good it shows you on the map so all the earth works
not a lot on lidar so that should have been a clue for us instead of us now going to go
toward the junction that we're going to show you what does a roman road junction look like we're
going to quickly pop over to m44 the other route that comes in and joins just to the north there
at the top of savannah forest we're going to show you m44 because a lot of that is on the lidar and
it shows some good examples crackers and red pepper hummus everybody can oh water who knew
okay rebecca this is the bible the roman road bible can you turn to page 99 99
oh check that out that was clever couldn't have done that if i tried
okay where are we at oh old serum to mildenhall yeah what route number is that regarding it
number 44. 23 miles okay we're looking for route 44 now we are looking for route 44.
a very direct line of road or trackway can be clearly traced north north eastward from old saram
i'm not going to try and pronounce that in them roman
so we're trying to find now m44 margarita route 44 and that travelled from Salisbury old serum
all the way up to the junction that we're trying to find here near Marlborough or perhaps closer
to mildenhall or as the locals call it meinl so either way the roman town was called coutinho
i believe that's how you pronounce it my pronunciation is on point today
did you get all that everybody mine minol coutinho
as suspected because when we checked out the lidar there was a lot to see of m-44
just ahead of us is route m44 about a mile south of where the junction
is will come to shortly but perhaps more impressively behind us is that surveyed oak
potentially i think we read 1100 years old so 900 years after the romans first sort of landed here
that grew and a thousand 100 years later it's still here today
it's so difficult to find some of this today because a lot of this is sort of grassy i mean
we're thinking that through there we should find something that's a quick so a little
just a very quick peek in here because you can i mean i feel like i'm in a ditch now right
you're lower down than you are over there now this is the exact spot where this m44 crosses
the avenue there and yeah i mean i feel like i'm oh i feel like i'm definitely on it here rebecca
i feel like it's also impossible to show everybody on the camera but i also do feel like
you're if you go that way a tiny bit
uh yeah i feel like you're in the middle of the road now and there's a ditch there and a ditch
there and this is perfectly aligned um if i go this way a bit further and how well you can see
but the alignment is right there which is exactly where it is on the map so this does
work in my head you've got a slight ditch over to the left and where rebecca has stood
now we've got the other side of the ditch so i'm happy that this is
quite pronounced here including the jar of marmite down on the floor in front of me
so we're nearly at the most northern end of route m44 we haven't shown you much of the
route because there's only so much so much forest that we can show you but perhaps we've saved the
best bit till last this is as i say the most northern part and the agar here the top level
of the middle of the roman road is perhaps as most prominent that we've seen all day today
now considering that this route m44 was like a subsidy route it was a tertiary route almost
according to margary and the m43 just through the trees was a main route north for their armies
well it's strange because that's nowhere near as prominent as what we're stood on right now
it's absolutely crystal clear even with the foliage on the ground now
you can see clear ditches either side and a huge agar we are very very close now to the top
which is about 100 meters that way where we should meet m 43 and we should find out
what a roman junction looks like before it headed down the hill into minol and into the the coutinho
we are now both walking up the ditches to try and make sure we don't lose track of m44 Rebecca's on
the other side in that other ditch let's go through here and see if we can see rebecca
so this is the ditch the becker's over there on the other ditch and the road here is in
front of us so this is fine this is good this is what we wanted because
so what that tells us rebecca is the road is right through there you've come up the ditch just south
of that tree there yeah my ditch is just down there so the roman road goes there so right in
the middle yeah that's fine so the task now was to find where these two routes met m43 and m44
the roman road junction and we weren't far away so we split up and i took m 43 and rebecca stayed
on route 44 and we both followed those routes more or less north to try and stay on their exact track
it soon became apparent that whilst we could pinpoint the exact location of where these two
junctions met well there were no earthworks here whatsoever i think perhaps if we dug
a few feet down we may find the answer we're looking for that's weird second that's pretty
close in fact it could be because the width of the road that could be oh yeah yeah and
one or two of us could have gone either way but that's mad so does this does this white post
mark the spot is this what a roman road junction looks like so in in the weirdest way possible
we've marked that exact spot of what appears to be some kind of pipeline marker uh mod pipeline
marker of some kind has the exact spot that m43 and m44 um congregate, that's a coincidence
very bizarre coinciding so what does a roman road junction look like well I've scoured the internet
to find more on this very subject but aside junctions in towns the earthworks of a roman
road junction outside of a town for the time being seem like they're going to elude me
it's been a little adventure for us we've been meaning to do this for a long time
come and have a look at some of the roman roads in savannah forest and we haven't been disappointed
by what we've seen certainly of the last bit of m44 now that last bit of m44 was discovered by
sir Richard hall and even margary um tells us that in his book which is a fascination
in itself so we have been Paul and rebecca we have been mooching around roman roads in
savannah forest trying to find the junction which is just over there um by the weird gpss pipeline
thing but there we go um i hope you've enjoyed today's little uh wonder in the beautiful seminar
for us if you have then join us each week but for the meantime we'll see you next sunday 5pm