is that a little bit of a clickbaity title? You'd think so wouldn't you because how can
a roman road be dangerous well probably about 10 15 years ago time team did a dig
from a particular point on this roman road which we will come to later and they had to abandon it.
I'm paul and I'm rebecca welcome to roman road route number 45b the lead road
oh by the way this video is also sponsored by the good people at hello fresh oh i'm so
looking forward to that right let's go find this dangerous roman road
in the south of england there is a roman road which has been intriguing me for many years now
its official route number is 45b and is found to the west of salisbury
it's a continuation of route 45 which connected salisbury to winchester the intrigue for me
is twofold why does it seemingly just stop in the middle of the mendips no modern town or city
remains there today and secondly why exactly is this road so dangerous our first stop on
the journey is a few miles west of salisbury where i'm trying to find an interaction between
grimm's ditch and the roman road now if the maps are correct the roman road should have destroyed
the ditch which predates it by around 500 years so are the maps correct can we find the ditch
and evidence that the roman road went straight through it you find me right in grimm's ditch um
beautiful bit of the the ditch just there and ahead of me much the same what i'm looking for is
where the roman road intersected with this bit of the grim stitch here because it did
all the way along this ridge here right this is good this is good because here grim's ditch
is raised yeah and it's pretty much where we expected it to be raised
that was so cool that's exactly what we expected to find if the roman road was
here and if the date of the grim's ditch at 500ish bc is correct then we'd expect to find
the roman road obliterate grimm's ditch and grooms it to disappear we found exactly that
so that's all good so let's start tackling some of the big questions this video asks
indeed yes speaking of big questions one of the biggest questions we get asked on social media
exactly how do we continue to produce one video per week five kids between us jobs and a bunch
of other stuff i don't know how do we do it i'm not sure it kind of just happens but we do have
a whole load of stuff to help us now up until a short while ago we used to walk down the road
to our local supermarket once a day and buy a whole bunch of food for that day end up spending
a fortune on stuff we don't need that was until we signed up to hello fresh thank you not only
does it help us organize our shopping budget it also saves us a lot of time in supermarket trips
now with hellofresh you have a wide variety of meals to choose from and the best bit for us is
you can do that from the comfort of your own home and not only do they arrive fresh and timely on
your doorstep but it also dawns upon you quite quickly that you're now eating a really healthy
balanced diet because let's face it when you nip to the supermarket every day like we did well you
end up just eating what you fancy at the time yeah but don't forget hello fresh food meals are super
tasty and the best part for me is how easy it is to cook ah yes so when the meals arrive all nice
and fresh well they do so with instructions now this sounds obvious but each meals ingredients
are numbered so you can simply store away the stuff you don't need and when you are ready to
cook well you can get cooking using the super easy guides supplied it's so easy to follow and every
meal has them so for us hellofresh has saved us a bunch of time allow us to plan for a healthy and
balanced diet broadened our horizons in terms of the meals that we eat because it shows you a lot
of different meals you've never really considered before give them a try now you can subscribe to
hellofresh using our discount code below where you will get the discount they are currently
running indeed and occur that includes the the current promotion but don't forget to use our
discount code mentioned below in the doobly-doo right onwards to more dangerous roman road shizzle
so just beyond us in the valley there is monkton devrill the crossing point where this route
route b crossed with i think 42 from the south and 52 to the north there's a lot of
um controversy and speculation about where these routes cross and which way they headed from the
monumental hill above us cold kitchen hill rebecca however is wearing a white top today
he keeps getting animals all sorts yeah we've we've even named the animals we've
got sticky the caterpillar because it looks like a stick lady lady the ladybug obviously
one of the things of of noteworthiness is the lead ingots that they found at various points
all their long hair including in our background on the other side of the valley there one of
those was dated 49 a.d so that tells you that this route was set up as a as a roman
route within six years of invasion so does that tell you that actually they already knew about
the resource at the end of this route up in the mendips but for the meantime this route
pretty much disappears after cold kitchen hill so christopher hall back in the 1700's had a
had a guess at where it was and margary referred to that but for the next 10 miles
after cold kitchen hill this route pretty much vanishes until you get to frome road
so route 45 b has now brought us just north of shepton mallet we missed about 10 15 miles
or so to our east because it takes a route of a current main road there's not a lot to show you
what we're looking for now though is part of the roman road that crosses
this small road and in the field to our east apparently there's some earthworks so
let's try and climb our way through that ridiculously uh small gap in the hedge
right so i'm not sure this is right sketchy rebecca isn't it but if you think this one's
bad you've seen that one there right but ahead of us now is this little filled with
cows in we'll just have a peek in here and see if we can see the earthworks
that are on the os maps I've made it I've made it you're coming in um yeah yeah we got we got cows
right maybe here actually here is the roman road difficult to see
but i think yeah probably impossible to come out on camera but there i can clearly see a a
ditch just to this side ditch to this side aga here so highly likely this is the roman road
okay stop messing around now okay right it's all about um about the wildlife today
not the cows necessarily wildlife right in that field you can see an agar just to the uh just
the south of me there and it heads on into the field so that does show now we still haven't
addressed a couple of the questions number one why did this end up in the mendips and just stop
for no reason number two shoes important why is this roman road so dangerous why
did time teams stop their archaeological dig just up ahead of us just like that
so come up to the final spot of today's journey we're about 240 meters above sea level
now why did this roman road just stop well ahead of us is a uh as good as a roman industrial site
as you will find in this country it's almost a unique road as we say this was probably built
specifically because of the resource the lead all that was available here they may well have
known about it as we said already before the roman invasion hence where they made a beeline here so
probably a couple of hundred yards ahead of us is a rather impressive roman site
so this is it this is the point where route 45b ends and here we are in what is referred to as
charterhouse and there are workings all over here roman lead workings which we alluded to at the
start of the video or throughout the video now a lot of what you see there the earthworks aren't
necessarily those workings are the interaction of limestone and clay on those geologists but i
think that creates some kind of a shake hole or sinkholes down that valley nevertheless in 2005
when time team came here and they did one of their digs while they had to call that
dick off now they found that there was a an entire roman infrastructure here there was a fort just up
on the hill but one of the places where they did their dig was just about i don't know 3 400 yards
up on the hill behind us and there's a square feature and that was full of arsenic now when you
when you try to extract lead from lead or you have to smelt it and that creates some by products
that creates cadmium and of course arsenic as extremely dangerous in in many different forms
so we know that a lot of the final product of the lead headed inland towards salisbury and
winchester and perhaps then on down to the ports and back to europe now we know that because the
iron ingots have been found along route 45 some of them were even dated ad49 so that helped us
give the date of this site at its very latest but the biggest question that's on our mind is
why didn't they head west just across the way there to the the seven estuary why didn't the
road itself carry on towards bristol or at least to bridgewater where they could get on a boat and
make that journey a lot quicker we're going to show you one more absolutely stunning feature
and that'll probably help explain exactly why that was the case
so this is cheddar gorge it's rather beautiful and a little bit unique in its formation now
as we drive down and we reach the bottom you find the thriving bustling town of cheddar
but 2 000 years ago bear in mind the sea levels were anything between sort of 10 and
20 meters higher so instead of that you'd have found a port so it's highly likely or
certainly a good theory to say that the romans were to come down here with their lead workings
may have been able to transport them via the sea at this point
so there's every potential that that is why the roman road stopped at charter house where it did
so as we leave charterhouse and the lead workings industrial site back there and
say goodbye to roman road route 45b that we've sort of scratched the surface off today maybe
we'll do a little bit more uh in a future video i hope you've enjoyed this video and if you have
and you would like to consider signing up to hello fresh you can do so usually what can they how can
they sign up rebecca it's in the doobly-doo below the link is in the doobly-doo below click on that
and uh follow it all through a big thanks to hello fresh for sponsoring this video and making it
possible we Paul and Rebecca we'll see you one of this is um next Sunday maybe next Sunday goodbye
you