The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient TurnpikeHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Dover Road (England); England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs
A military expedition would naturally be encamped beside a stream, where
the cavalry could water their horses, in preference to a waterless
district; and therefore, Newington and Judde Hill, which both stand beyond
an easy reach of flowing water, cannot have such good claims to have been
the site of Durolevum as either Sittingbourne, or Bapchild, whose name,
indeed, is a corruption of the Saxon Beccanceld, "the pool of the
springs." The flow of water throughout the country must in those remote
times have been much greater than now, for dense forests then covered a
great part of the island, and induced rains and moisture. In fact, the
Dover Road was until recent years remarkable for the number of
considerable streams and trickling rills that flowed across it, either
under bridges or across fords, and it is not so long since those that
crossed the highway at Sittingbourne and Bapchild were diverted or dried
up. They must have been broad streams when Caesar led his legionaries up
the rough British trackway in pursuit of the Cantii, and the still very
considerable brook that crosses the road at Ospringe would have then
attained the dimensions of a river. It might be well to look to Ospringe
for the original Durolevum, for the situation must have been admirable
from a military point of view; and, moreover, it was near, if not then
actually on, the head of a navigable creek leading directly to the sea,
where Faversham now stands.
But when archaeologists leave the consideration of Caesar's and his
successors' military station and seek the site of Durolevum town or city,
they unaccountably lose sight of the fact that this Roman province of
Britannia Prima was obviously very populous, and that Durolevum, instead
of being a small isolated town, must needs have been the centre of a
thickly populated district of smaller towns, hamlets, and outlying villas,
stretching for miles along the now solitary reaches of the Dover Road, and
reaching down to the Upchurch marshes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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