All roads lead to... North Tawton?

You may have heard that upstate New York is called a "four-season climate."  Sounds nice, doesn't it?  What they neglect to tell you prior to moving here is that the four seasons are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Fucking Winter, and Road Construction.

That last bit is a frustrating one, because even though the summers here are quite nice, the constant freeze-thaw cycle of the other three seasons plays absolute hell on our roads.  Ithaca, the nearest decent-sized town to where I live, is a lovely place in many respects, but it often seems like little more than a giant maze of potholes.  So it's no wonder that the road construction crews use our fleeting summers to make what repairs they can before the deluge of snow, ice, and road salt starts once again.

The difficulty we have in maintaining our transportation corridors highlights how amazing it is that there are still largely intact roads from Roman times, nearly two thousand years ago.  To be fair, they didn't have the amount (nor type) of traffic our highways have to endure, but still, it's a testament to Roman engineering prowess that they even still exist.

Blackstone Edge Long Causeway, West Yorkshire, second century C.E. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nigel Homer, Looking down the Roman Road - geograph.org.uk - 92590, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The topic comes up because of a cool new study out of the University of Exeter that used LIDAR (Laser Imaging, Detection, And Ranging), a technique that can detect surface structures even through dense undergrowth, to locate traces of a network of Roman roads in Devon and Cornwall that archaeologists didn't even know existed.

What was most surprising is that the hub of the road network wasn't the city of Exeter, but the much smaller town of North Tawton (which currently only has about two thousand inhabitants).  Exeter was a Roman town -- they called it Isca Dumnoniorum, after the Dumnonii, a local Celtic tribe -- but the more centrally-located site of North Tawton (the Roman Nemetostatio) was the center of the radial spokes of the network.

"Despite more than seventy years of scholarship, published maps of the Roman road network in southern Britain have remained largely unchanged and all are consistent in showing that west of Exeter, Roman Isca, there was little solid evidence for a system of long-distance roads," said Christopher Smart, who led the study.  "But the recent availability of seamless LIDAR coverage for Britain has provided the means to transform our understanding of the Roman road network that developed within the province, and nowhere more so than in the far southwestern counties, in the territory of the Dumnonii."

The result was that they were able to identify over a hundred kilometers of roads that were previously unknown to archaeologists, giving them a much better picture of how people moved in Romano-Celtic Britain.  The map they generated suggests that the network not only connected Roman outposts to each other, but incorporated pre-existing Celtic towns -- showing that the conquering Romans preferred to leave intact the settlements of the people they ruled (at least the ones who didn't fight back).

"In terms of chronology, it is likely that the proposed network is an amalgam of pre-existing prehistoric routeways, Roman military campaign roads or 'tactical roads' formally adopted into the provincial communications system, and of those constructed during peacetime in a wholly civilian context," said João Fonte, who co-authored the study.  "This evolutionary model is supported by the fact that the network does not solely connect Roman forts and their hinterlands directly, which are often connected by branch roads, but instead appears to serve a broader purpose than required by military supply."

It's astonishing to think that nearly two millennia later, we can still find the remnants of the roads used by the Romans in Britain.  Makes me wonder what future archaeologists will find of our civilization.  Will there be anything left of the asphalt paths we create for our cars?

Hey, if we can still locate the remains of the cobblestone paths put down by the Romans, I think there's an excellent chance the archaeologists of the future will be able to find out a good bit about our highways, too.  "Wow," they'll say.  "Those people in upstate New York sure knew how to repair potholes."

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A visit to the scepter'd isle

For the last couple of weeks, I was on holiday in England.  Traveling is one of my passions -- if I could make a living traveling, I'd quit my day job in a heartbeat -- and England is a lovely place to visit.  The last time I was there was twenty years ago, when I was on a solo hiking trip from Blackpool (on the Irish Sea) to Whitby (on the North Sea), a walk that I mostly remember because it rained for three weeks straight.

This time, though, we lucked out, and had stupendous weather.  We spent a good deal of our stay in the southwestern counties of Cornwall and Devon, and were treated to spectacular vistas of rocky coastlines and beautiful seaside villages.

Mevagissey Harbor, Cornwall

While in Cornwall we also experienced a wonderful tradition called a "cream tea" that involves scones, jam, and an amazing invention called "clotted cream" that Wikipedia says has "a minimum fat content of 55%" and was undoubtedly invented as a surreptitious job security strategy by the British Heart Foundation.

One thing that impressed us about England as a whole, but the southwest in particular, is that they can grow damn near anything.  At an amazing botanical garden near St. Austell in Cornwall, The Lost Gardens of Heligan, we saw a collection of camellias, dahlias, hundred-year-old Nepalese tree rhododendrons, and... pineapples.  I kid you not.  The brilliant South African amaryllis relative, crocosmia, is everywhere, growing not only in gardens but along roadsides and train track embankments.

Crocosmias in Heligan

Another must-see if you ever make it to that part of the world is the Eden Project, a set of beautifully-maintained geodesic domes each devoted to different biomes -- they have a rain forest, a Mediterranean chaparral, a desert, and so on.  It was built on land reclaimed from an abandoned kaolin mine, and features (you guessed it) more spectacular gardens.

The Eden Project

I could have lived in the rain forest dome pretty much permanently.

Speaking of kaolin, as amateur potters, my wife and I had to visit Wheal Martyn, near Ruddlemoor, a porcelain clay museum and working kaolin mine.  If you own a piece of English porcelain, chances are the kaolin -- the constituent of porcelain clay that makes it white and allows it to be shaped -- came from here.

From there, we headed off to London, a city I'd never been in before (having spent my entire previous visit to England north of the city of Manchester).  Having New York City as my mental model of a large, cosmopolitan city, I was immediately impressed by how clean London is, how orderly everything (especially the Tube) is, and how polite everyone seemed to be.  I swear, Londoners use the word "Sorry" as a greeting.  More sightseeing, including Kew Gardens (we have a thing for gardens, you might have noticed), a couple of museums, and the Tower of London, and then it was off to Suffolk.

What brought us to Leiston, a little town on the Suffolk coast, was Minsmere, a phenomenal wildlife refuge.  Illustrating Dave Barry's quip that "there is a fine line between a hobby and a mental illness," the entire reason for visiting Minsmere was...

... birds.  I'm an avid birdwatcher, and if you like birds, Minsmere should be on your bucket list.  I won't bore you non-birders with the details, but let's just say that watching a Barn Owl hunt at dusk was one of the high points of my vacation.

Then we continued north to the beautiful cathedral town of Durham, which is in a region of England where they speak a variant of English composed almost entirely of consonants.  The north of England demonstrates the accuracy of Oscar Wilde's comment about England and America being two countries separated by the same language.  I had many conversations like the following:

Taxi driver:  "S'h'w l'ng y'r'n D'rh'm, eh?" 

Me:  "Only a few days, unfortunately." 

Taxi driver:  "t's l'v'ly t'wn, n't?" 

Me:  "It sure is." 

Taxi driver:  "M'n sq'd b'f'n l'rg b'lt'sqt?" 

Me:  "Oh, definitely."

The upshot of it was that most of the time, I had no idea what I was responding and/or agreeing to.  But people were very friendly, probably because at some point in the conversation I had inadvertently agreed to make them the beneficiaries of my will, or something.

While in Durham we visited Carol's ancestral castle, Hylton Castle, near Sunderland.  Her great-grandmother was a Hylton, and they descend from nobility and (ultimately) King Edward IV, a fact of which she reminds me when I start getting uppity.  In fact, she considered stopping by Buckingham Palace while we were in London to say hi to her Cousin Elizabeth, but figured that might not go over so well considering that Carol has more than once publicly mused about how many people she'd have to kill to be in succession for the English throne.  (Best estimate: 857,209,281 people are ahead of her in line.  But hope springs eternal, right?)

Practicing the "Royal Wave" in front of Hylton Castle

Then it was back to London for a day, and off home, during which the only negative thing on this entire holiday occurred -- the airline lost my suitcase, despite our flight being a single-leg non-stop.  I'm not sure how they did this, unless they opened the cargo hold and chucked it out as we flew over Greenland, or something.  They've promised it's been found and is being returned, but I haven't gotten it back yet.  I hope it's returned soon, not least because I keep having to do laundry because all but three pairs of underwear are in that suitcase.

But all in all, it was a wonderful holiday, and thank you for indulging me not only a three-week break from writing Skeptophilia, but my devoting a day's post to a mini-travelogue.  During my hiatus I was sent a number of good topics by loyal readers, because while I was gone the world apparently went on being weird, illogical, and irrational, to no one's particular surprise.  So tomorrow I'll be back at it again.

Refreshed, rejuvenated, and with luck, wearing clean underwear.