running from the ruins at Limme in the direction of Pevensey have recently been observed by a competent judge.[1]
From the intervention of marshy vallies of greater or less extent, it is hardly possible that this road could long have preserved the usual straight course, but may have inclined to the west, through what is now the main street of the town of Tenterden. From the probably moist condition of Pevensey Level during the original occupation of the Roman fort there, it is uncertain what means of egress that garrison possessed toward other posts eastward and north-eastward. In different parts of this tract are numerous eyes or islands, that is, plots of sounder soil rising somewhat above the surface of the vicinity (of which islands indeed Pevens-ey is one); and if the juxtaposition of some of these elevated spots should have enabled the Romans to form a causeway, even with the addition of a ferry, northward to Wartling, it would have rendered unnecessary a most inconveniently wide circuit westward, and thence northward through Hailsham perhaps. And when Wartling was reached, it became possible to take the most direct line for meeting the road, which pointed from Limme south-westward. For this purpose, I will venture to assert, from my own long acquaintance, more or less intimate, with the intermediate country, that the Romans, from the necessity of, in military language, "turning" the many intervening ravines, could scarcely have selected a more practicable route than that of the roads now in use, which may represent, nearly if not precisely, the ancient trackways, by Boreham Street, Ninfield, Battle, Watlington, Cripp's Comer, Staple Cross, passing the Rother at Bodiam, and thence to Sandhurst in Kent. Strangers to the district may inquire, why the supposed route might not follow the coast? To which question the reply is, that, even admitting that to have been feasible from Pevensey by Hastings to Rye, yet from Rye the then state of Romney Marsh[2] and the adjacent parts would unavoidably have brought the road again into the direct line, with the
- ↑ Mr. T. Wright, "Rambles of an Antiquary" in Gentleman's Magazine for 1852.
- ↑ I gladly acknowledge my obligation to and concurrence in Mr. James Elliot's ingenious suggestion respecting the "Ancient State of the Romney Marshes," and the alterations therein during the connection of the Romans with Britain, appended to Mr. C. R. Smith's "Report on the Excavations at Limpne in 1850," 4to, London, 1852.
