The Beautiful Network of Ancient Roman Roads (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Beautiful Network of Ancient Roman Roads (2015)

atlasobscura.com

104 pointswglb41 comments

We have many in the South of England. As a kid I walked and biked them. Most are dirt trails now, grown over. But if you look on maps it's clear they are the shortest, straight path between major towns. Modern roads twist and turn around them.

I am showing my embarrassing ignorance of history here, but I don't know why that happened. Maybe something to do with land rights, and the "enclosures"? Anyway something important was lost in the communication systems of England between the Roman era and today.

See The Rolling English Road By G. K. Chesterton

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48212/the-rolling-eng...

:-)

"The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head."

Thanks for that delight.

So we shall blame alcohol? "The cause of and solution to so many of lifes problems." :)

Modern road don't only try to minimize the distance but also other factor like slopes. If you look at old railroads there is a very big constraints on slope and you will see very complex trajectories in hilly places.

Modern railroads typically have extremely tight restraints on slope. This allows trains to be longer and reduces overall shipping costs. In fact, the desire to make railroads less steep has led Americans to do incredible things, like building the Whittier Access Tunnel (and the port of Whittier at all) to avoid trains going uphill coming from Seward.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittier,_Alaska

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portage_Glacier_Highway#Anton_...

https://www.cookinlethistoricalsociety.org/articles/opening-...

A68 up north. It's Dere Street. Some great sweeping vistas as it flows across the border ranges. My favourite route north, get off the A1 and roam!

Road networks just match the most efficient paths of the era they were built in. The economic map changed a lot in the feudal era and most Roman roads (some of which high maintenance) were simply abandoned.

A legion has pretty strong land rights.

They were the first roads built. They could do whatever they wanted in an age with no civilized settlements or pre existing structures.

Um. Civilization didn't start with the Romans even if they certainly expanded what was meant by the term in northern Europe.

Is bredom avoidance a factor? (Too long) straight roads = less attentive drivers.

Somewhat related to the topic: ORBIS – The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World https://orbis.stanford.edu/

> Along these roads ran messengers, as a type of precursor to the American Pony Express a relay of horsemen could carry a message 50 miles a day.

Is there any real connection between both?

It sounds strange. Relay horses seems just an obvious solution to tired horses when you give more priority to speed than cost.

I think they're just pointing out that they use relay horses. I wonder how many times in history that's been both possible and needed - the expense is relatively high compared to sending a single rider.

If I remember correctly, from what I read, relay horses allowed the message to arrive faster. Horses get tired too, so after a certain distance the rider would get a fresh horse.

By the way see the Man versus Horse Marathon [1] which proves that horses aren't that fast on long distances, in this particular case 22 miles (35 km).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon

For all its role in Americana, the Pony Express lasted something like 18 months having come in just prior to the telegraph.

Zero connection. Just literary license.

> spanned from Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland

Straight off the bat that’s wrong.

Hadrian’s Wall is in England not Scotland.

I guess they could be thinking of Antonine’s Wall but that’s a different story.

In general, I agree. Although in the context of the actual quote, there was so much back and forth trading of land in northern England over the centuries that to say Hadrian's Wall was in at least partly in Scotland at one point isn't necessarily wrong.

Sorry but no.

Common myth. The wall has never formed an England Scotland border.

One of those "technically true, the best kind" things. Raised north of the wall in Edinburgh, I was very aware how Northumberland was similar to my landscape and mentality of the locals. They have bagpipes. the TH in thumber leads to asking if its a T and Humber and it does refer to the river Humber, its the land north of the humber. It makes you think how Yorkshire leads there. Certainly the Jacobites didn't pause long at Hadrians wall heading south, the last time England was invaded at scale (They got as far south as Derbyshire)

North of Hadrians Wall is sometimes treated as more Scottish than not. South is the other way round.

So not a border, but instead perhaps, a boundary which encompasses Scotland more than not?

The Border Reivers crossed the Tweed, the badlands north of Hadrians wall were part and parcel of a cross-border community which made its own laws, and in turn led to laws against them.

The border was .. mutable. Hadrian's wall was not the border.

> the TH in thumber leads to asking if its a T and Humber and it does refer to the river Humber, its the land north of the humber. It makes you think how Yorkshire leads there.

IIRC, Northumberland was the only part of Northumbria that didn't get absorbed into the Danelaw (the swathe of north and central England conquered and settled by Vikings from the late 800s), which is why it retains the name of the former, much larger region.

But that's not what @ghaff was saying. They said:

> to say Hadrian's Wall was in at least partly in Scotland at one point isn't necessarily wrong

Cumbria, which contains the western end of the wall, was part of Scotland at the time of the Domesday Book (1086), and wasn't incorporated into England until some years later.

So there was a period of time when part of Hadrian's Wall was, in fact, in Scotland.

The The Alcántara Bridge is very striking. Something about its simplicity is awe inspiring. It's almost 2000 years old and still absolutely amazing. I wonder what things built today will be around in 2000 years.

Probably a bunch of PHP :)

It also depends on what counts as "stands". How much maintenance and reconstruction is allowed?

The bridge suffered many destructions due to warfare and has been fixed many times since construction

You will find this is true of almost everything ancient that was never lost. Things that aren't maintained are rediscovered a thousand years later under a dirt mound. Almost everything old in Europe is renovated every few hundred years or even more frequently.

Hydro-power dams, nuclear fuel storage, bunkers, maybe some bridges/roads.

I'm guessing/hoping most horrible concrete construction will be destroyed by humans.

> Via Appia was also the site where, in 71 BCE, around 6000 members of Spartacus’s slave army were crucified on the hillsides.

Ignorant question: did Romans kill people on crosses before the Christian era?

The cross became a symbol of Christianity because Jesus was crucified, not the other way around.

Moreover, crucifixion is just a pragmatic approach to traditional public executions. Many societies have used trees and walls to hang, kill and display the executed their necks broken, beaten to death, lashed, lynched, asfixiated, left to die of thirst or exposure... the method doesn't really matter, the point is they are there for everyone to see.

With the added "benefit" of being an extremely slow and painful way to die.

Yes

Yes, death by crucifixion predates Jesus. The Ancient Romans used it often.

It predates Rome entirely[1]. They either picked it up from Carthage, or the Greeks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion#Pre-Roman_states

Yes, Jesus was just another guy that got crucified.

I recently came across a piece of a Roman road while hiking the Pyrenees. Astounding to see something that old, and to realize just how far the Roman empire extended.

I was riding Peddar’s Way[1] in England last year.

It was an old Roman road but I was told by someone on the trail it actually dates back to pre-Roman Britain.

That blew my mind. To walk or ride roads so old and yet so unchanged.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peddars_Way

The quality of Roman road construction was very good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads#Via_munita

Seems like engineers and artists were the same persons or worked together.

Seems this held true up until the industrial revolution.

There are also some in West Germany, it's always astonishing actually seeing them

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