One form of the Roman Road, and one only--a very rare form--never disappears: it is the cutting through hard sand. Here and there in England--I know not how often, but I have myself found few traces of them; I should doubt if there were much more than a dozen--you get a clear cutting upon a Roman road serving no modern or useful purpose, and almost certainly dating from the construction of the way. There is the trace of the one at Ashurst, near my home--that with which I am most familiar and which I have measured most carefully. If the cutting be made in dry sandy soil of fair consistency and hardness, it can remain almost indefinitely with an unmistakable outline. There may naturally have been many other cuttings originally in softer or more yielding soils which have got filled up, but the only ones I know are through sand, which soil also tends to form those sharp ridges through which a cutting might suggest itself as more economical than a too steep gradient. ii The Roman Road not only disappears through causes which I have called inexplicable and under the obvious influence of marsh or of cultivation, it also fell into disuse, even where it did not disappear, for reasons both explicable and inexplicable. There are cases where the falling into disuse is frankly not to be explained, though these I have found mainly upon the Continent. For instance, in the road from Rheims to Chalons you have the Roman road running almost parallel to the later road, the later trace having been made for no reason that we can discover--not serving any new towns or villages--a mere duplicate of the old way. But there are more cases where the disuse of a section of the Roman Road can clearly be explained by the need for visiting centres of population, production, and commerce. The Roman system for the serving of places off the main straight road was by side roads perpendicular to the main road. The relics of these you still see on many of the Continental roads--a direct perpendicular lane or avenue joining up the château and its dependencies or the neighbouring town with the main highway. When the Dark Ages came and the main roads degraded, the by-lanes and paths which had grown up as offshoots to them and which led to the estates and villages and towns and ports and quarries, etc., to one side or the other of the Road came to be used more frequently. The main travel between distant towns was less, the local travel grew more important in proportion. And as this development proceeded sections of the Roman Road tended to fall into disuse. The local roads would be maintained and the section of main road would be left unrepaired.