But of greater interest is the Roman Road which connected Leap with Southampton and Winchester in one direction, and Ringwood and the west in another. Its traces may be found not only here but on the opposite side, where, still known by the Norman name of Rue Street, it passes westward of Carisbrook to the extreme south of the Island.[76] Its old appellation is preserved, too, on this side in the name of a farmhouse—King’s Rue, and Rue Copse, and Rue Common; and it is well worthy of notice that this word is even now sometimes used in the Forest, as in Sussex, for a row or hedgerow. Previous to it, however, there existed a British track, still clearly visible across the Forest, especially near Butts Ash barrows, by its deep depressions. Both roads, though, can still tell us something of the past. The opinion of late philologists and geographers, with the exception of Lappenburg and Sir G. C. Lewis, has been against the idea that the Isle of Wight was the Vectis or Ictis of the ancients. The argument, however, against the passage in Diodorus Siculus,[77] that it would be so much easier for the first traders to have exported the tin from Belerium instead of bringing it by inland transport to the Island, and then shipping it to Gaul, is founded upon ignorance. Sea carriage was then far more difficult and dangerous than land conveyance. Ancient mariners were easily frightened, and their vessels put into land every night. As Sir G. C. Lewis further remarks, foreign merchants were always regarded with jealousy and distrust, and the overland route would enable the traffic to be carried out through the whole distance by native traders.[78] Singularly enough, however, Warner[79] states that a large mass of tin was found on the very site of this old Roman road, or, rather, as the fact of the mere shapeless mass would prove, on the older British track. Not only, too, was tin brought here from Cornwall, but also, in later times, lead from the Mendip Hills. Pigs of it have been picked up on a branch of the same Roman road running from Uphill on the Severn to Salisbury, and from thence joining the Leap road. One of them, stamped with the name of Hadrian, is now in the Bath Museum. We are thus enabled to connect Leap with the famous passage of the Greek historian. Sir George Lewis’s theory has, too, been singularly corroborated in other directions, especially by the large quantities of bronze ornaments found during the excavations in the Swiss Lakes, 1853 and 1854, the metals of which could only have been brought there by an overland route.