The afterlife of Roman roads in England: insights from the fifteenth-century Gough map of Great Britain

Abstract

This paper presents a new Geographic Information Systems database of travel and communications routes in England and Wales derived from medieval cartographic evidence. We argue on the basis of archaeological, physical landscape, onomastic, documentary, cartographic and other historical evidence that the network of red distance lines on the Gough Map of Great Britain, dated c. fifteenth century, represents travel routes and roads connecting medieval settlements. As such it constitutes the earliest depiction of a British network of medieval overland routes at a reasonable level of complexity and geographical extent. Taking this as a very partial, but important, sample of the fuller medieval travel networks, we investigate which elements were carried over from the road network of Roman Britain. Using a selection of computational and qualitative methods and approaches, we thereby evaluate the character, regionality and relative quantity of Roman routeway survival, shedding light into the complex transformations of human landscapes that occurred both at macro (national) and micro (regional, local) scales across approximately one thousand years.