hi i'm paul and i'm rebecca and something quite exciting has happened the last few months
which has led us to come back to the exact landscape we've been to before and maybe
understand this landscape in a way which will help benefit society the local community the roman road
community and humanity as a whole or not but first of all a little bit of context to what we're doing
probably good idea during the last three to four years of filmmaking there's one map mystery i've
not been able to shake from my head and for that reason we find ourselves back in the exact
spot that this map mystery is home to this is the google map of our location here in southern
england and here is the os map equivalent the mystery involves a wobbly roman road
and if like me you know that broadly speaking roman roads tend to go in a straight line
or certainly in a particular direction led by that straight line now that's a starting point
and this is where things get a bit interesting roman roads have a similar numbering system
to today's modern motorways this particular one which is winchester to marlborough actually is m43
the m stands for margary, margary was a fairly well-off chap he decided where the roman roads
went i don't think he was too far off particularly a humble chap in a number of these chapters but
anyway he labeled all of the Roman with his m margaery m system oddly enough they do tend to
take this as gospel os maps historic england despite the fact that on occasion he didn't
actually say what they said he said or they got it wrong or he got it wrong or he just said we don't
know they still then quoted his gospel you sound a bit bitter not at all so are you following this
if not rewind to this bit, and that was the same for the romans not anywhere
just whipped my own head that was that big little brother i know but it got caught on the camera
and it extended and it slapped me right ahead if however you are following carry on roman road m43
is the discussion of topic today and it is unique and i mean that in its true sense of the word
because it has what i would best describe as an immediate deviation or a significant kink and
i don't just mean a zigzag type path like many of the roman rotes took i mean a clear deviation from
its otherwise perfectly straight line this is the four mile loop of toot causeway and as i've said
before not for the first time it doesn't add up if you want to avoid a valley a river an obstacle of
whatever nature you head to the furthest point away there is no need to make that immediate
deviation i can't find anywhere in this country on a roman road map where it takes such a deviation
than here on chute causeway
so what's changed in the last few months i mean we've been here before and we've filmed her before
so what's different we have last time we came here we were technically trespassing although we didn't
cross any fences we probably shouldn't have been right here this time however we spoke to the the
chap that manages the land for the farm here chap called ed ed thank you very much um so we've now
got permission to not only come back here but also look a little bit further into the farmland and
maybe help out the roman road research association so further context of the video coming right up
so we're walking east west and we're walking along this here which is grimm's ditch or grimes ditch
which has been dated to around about 500 bc now nobody really knows if it was a
a defensive um fortification of sorts because it went all the way across the south of england
and it could have been a route way perhaps but it's clear in all this and it still exists today
500 years bc that's 2500 years old
the romans came 2 000 years ago or thereabouts and they built roads and we know the roads
weren't exactly straight but they did want to go from a to b in a straight line as possible
so with that in mind what we expected to find was a cut in grimm's ditch had it
not taken the deviation around to cause right here had it not taken that huge
semicircle like deviation we fully expected to find they've gone right through grimm's
ditch not knowing what it was as such and just cut down into the side of the hill here
now when they built uh roads on the side of the hills they they had what was called a terrace so
exactly what you'd expect where they sort of dug into the side of the hill so what we were looking
for when we came here last time was a the cut and b the terrace we couldn't find the terrace
because we thought we would be taking the mickey too much in really trespassing but now we've got
permission we can do that so we're pretty close now to finding exactly what we found before
the exact place we expected to find a cut in grimm's ditch which would indicate the
presence of at least a roman road or at worst an attempted roman road i'll try and show you better
than last time because a lot of you said you didn't get exactly what i was trying to suggest
well i really don't know how well this is going to come out on camera because last
time it didn't come out that well and a lot of you said i can't see what you're looking at so
i'll try something a little bit different which might depict so we've got this way here right
behind the camera now is groom's ditch it's perfectly there you can see it all the way
right there just the other side of these two trees so those two trees
is a ditch which goes perpendicular to grimm's ditch it cuts that way
now that is exact alignment of the roman road it's exactly where we should have should have found it
perfect so let me go stand in it and walk down it and then we'll catch you up just down there
so bring the stitch that way you can see it clearly there this is the broken bone so
go down that way there you can see keep on walking down here
so i can still clearly see that massive cut all the way down the side of this hill we're
walking perpendicular to it because you can see it better than when you're in it when you're in it
it's kind of blurred by the leaves but when you're just up from it you can see looking down it never
really comes out well on camera so to highlight my point have a look at this this is the lidar
and you can see a slight indent in the side of the hill enough for a terrace or not it takes the
exact route it should do this is the exact route where the roman road would have come down had
margaery route 43 gone in a straight line here's another angle this time with rebecca walking down
it to prove how bad it comes out on camera rebecca has now stood right in the middle of the
of the the terrace let's call it because that's the proper wording for a roman road
that came down the side of the hill so rebecca if you keep walking in your in the middle of it
yeah you keep going back because i'm going to film you from this
side because it from my own eyes here it's really visible you're still in the middle
so keep going to the right of that that's it and now hang a left a little bit that's it keep going
now yeah right a bit that's it my kid going down there that is as clear as as you like
so we have managed to establish there's a moderate terrace with our own eyes
heading down the bank so now for the really obvious question what other
evidence is there to suggest that this did go in a straight line is there anything else
between the top kink and the bottom kink is there anything to suggest that they did actually join up
it should go should go just to the left of the hill for there's a hill for up there
and we think the straight line roman road would have gone through there
just to the left so we've got to the edge of this this tree plantation here
and we think the roman road should go across there now you can't see much from here you can't
see anything from here because i'm guessing that's a plowed field of days of old and of course it's
fallow now but it plowed over and over and over so what we're going to try and do is we're going
to head into this tree plantation here and see if we see any evidence at all on the ground uh again
of roman road and we're looking for ditches or terraces or the aggro of the roman road
so we head down now on to some of the more exposed farmland perhaps this will show us
some more of the clues that we're looking for but we are acutely aware that this is farmland
and has been exposed to centuries of farming and plowing of all the land in this area
disappointingly we found nothing as yet there's lots of marks in the landscape here but there's
nothing that's obviously in the direction and nothing obvious it looks like a roman road
which is really disappointing you get the air of i want to find something to fit my theory
but there is nothing now that doesn't mean to say it doesn't exist at all
it just means to say that this area could have been plowed over a million times
and then these very young relatively young trees have been planted
so we continued our walk around this part of the valley and we found nothing the line
should have continued here across this plowed field and into the trees just ahead of us there
again no lidar and nothing on the google map overlay and of course nothing on the ground
so what can we glean from this third visit well it was there we know it was there and we've made this
conclusion before we definitely know it's there it cuts through grimm's ditch exactly where it should
do if that roman road carried on in a straight line so what does that mean for us well maybe
they built it and then they changed their mind absolutely that's been suggested before by uh some
comments in our last video maybe they've built it and they just changed their mind but that sounds
a little bit amateurish that doesn't sound very roman and very planned ahead does it why would
they not go to that westernmost point in more of a straight line instead of that immediate deviation
so i guess the other theory would be was maybe it did go straight on for a period of time but then
when they use more heavy machinery artillery troops you name it then maybe they change it
thereafter maybe maybe it wasn't tough enough i think until somebody does a proper official
archaeological dig there we're never really going to know but we're confident
at one stage that road did go down the hill in a straight line so that is our third visit and
again thanks to ed for allowing us permission to go on that bit of land and explore a bit further
we did find the terrorists that we had suspected was there so we're quite chuffed about that but
if someone wants to do an archaeological dig on that then uh yeah crack on oh but let's
know yeah that's not the opposite right thanks for watching a another whitewater production um
we've had covered in the house so we haven't been able to film too much hence
while we're using a couple of back catalogues of videos but we're back on the track next week
goodbye now
you