Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. As the Britons fell back to the Thames, the road pursued them to the river’s edge, carrying troops, supplies and military despatches.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Great book, engaging, thought provoking, interesting, informative and poetic - a connection with the past at a time when we need to remember that the past is still with us. Much like a road itself - there are some interesting bits and then there are some bits where you’re just chugging along and the scenery is pretty pleasant but it’s scrolling past as you go on your way. Hadley's writing moves seemingly randomly from descriptions of hedgerows, to parish history and into archaeological analysis and then back again.His pieces have appeared in The Independent , The Guardian , The Times , London Review of Books , Esquire and his local parish magazine, among many other publications.

We all think we know about Roman roads because they are straight, but this book shows there is far more to them than that. Gathering traces of archaeology, history and landscape, poems, church walls, hag stones and cropmarks; oxlips, killing places, hauntings, immortals and things buried too deep for archaeology, The Road is a mesmerising journey into two thousand years of history only now giving up its secrets. Campaign roads rolled out to all points of the compass, forcing their way inland and as the Britons fell back, the roads pursued them relentlessly, carrying troops, supplies and military despatches.This book deserves to be read at least twice, first to appreciate what it reveals and then to luxuriate in its effervescent voice. A touchstone into one of the most fascinating periods in British and European history that still has resonance today. Hadley takes us down a different way, looking through a gentler window on that road's long lost days.

Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall).Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. There is equal pleasure in following him through the countryside in all seasons, sharing his reflections on how echoes of past millennia continue to be part of our present experience. Time and nature have erased many clues; they rotted bridges and raised whole woods across the route. Along the way we learn about how roads were sited, construction methods, how roads were used by and against (e. It’s a meandering journey, journal, essay, something, written with that very specific British wanky-ness that some people just love.

Although this book stuttered and stumbled at times - a bit like a traveller on The Road itself - I nevertheless found it of the greatest interest, full of information that would be hard to gain elsewhere.I read through the references, I've bought more books on the subject and I went back and forth between the book and Google Earth at several points. This is no dry and prosaic history, but a work of imagination and a deeply literary book… wonderful prose .