From Turnham Green to Staines, and thence to Shrub’s Hill we are on the old Roman Road to that famous town which has been known at different periods of its existence as Aquae Solis, Akemanceaster, and Bath. The Saxons called the road Akeman Street. Commencing at a junction with the Roman Watling Street at the point where the Marble Arch now stands, it proceeded along the Bayswater Road, and so by Notting Hill, past Shepherd’s Bush, and along the Goldhawk Road, where, instead of turning sharply to the left like the existing road that leads to Young’s Corner, it continued its straight course through the district now occupied by the modern artistic colony of Bedford Park, falling into the present Chiswick High Road somewhere between Turnham Green and Gunnersbury. Through Brentford, Hounslow, and Staines the last vestiges of the actual Roman Road were lost in the alterations carried out for the improvement of the highway under the provisions of the Hounslow and Basingstoke Road Improvement Act of 1728, but there can be little doubt that the road traffic of to-day from Hounslow to Shrub’s Hill follows in the tracks of the pioneers who built the original road in A.D. 43; while as for old-world Brentford, it would surprise no one if the veritable Roman paving were found deep down below its High Street, long buried in the silt and mud that have raised the level of the highway at the ford from which the place-name derives. The present West of England road turns off from the Akeman Street at the bend in the highway at Shrub’s Hill, leaving the Roman way to continue in an unfaltering straight line across the scrubby wastes and solitudes of Broadmoor, to Finchampstead, Stratfieldsaye, and Silchester. It is there known to the country folk as the ‘Nine Mile Ride’ and the ‘Devil’s Highway.’ The prefix of the place-name ‘Stratfieldsaye,’ as a matter of fact, derives from its situation on this ‘street.’ Silchester is the site of the Roman city _Calleva Atrebatum_, and the excavated ruins of this British Pompeii prove how important a place this was, standing as it did at the fork of the roads leading respectively to _Aquae Solis_, and to _Isca Damnoniorum_, the Exeter of a later age. Branching off here to _Isca_, the Roman road was for the rest of the way to the West known as the _Via Iceniana_, the Icen Way, and was perhaps regarded as a continuation of what is now called the Icknield Street, the road which runs diagonally to Norfolk and Suffolk, the country of the Iceni. Very little of this old Roman road on its way to the West is identical with any of the three existing routes to Exeter. There is that length just named, from Gunnersbury to Shrub’s Hill; another piece, a mile or so from Andover onward, by the Weyhill route; the crossing of the modern highway between ‘Woodyates Inn’ and Thorney Down; and from Dorchester to Bridport, where, as Gay says of his cavaliers’ journey to Exeter:--