22nd April 2025

Nature writing is a love of mine,  McFarlane is the leading author as far as I was concerned.  But I have just found another writer, not in the same vein, but in that vein of discovering all the truths that may lie at our feet.  So the above is what I shall listen to in the future but the book I am listening to at the moment 'North Road' by Rob Cowen is the current one.  He begins, and I am only at the beginning with an archaeological dig at or near Catterick, and coincidentally the archaeologist in charge is Steve Sherlock. 

 I have Sherlock's book on the Anglo Saxon  cemetery at Street House, Loftus.  Sherlock uncovered a burial ground that had been used over a long period of time, from the Neolithic to the Saxon period.  He had found a 7th century 'bed burial' of a royal A/Saxon princess, so pagan rather than Christian.  Beautiful jewelry was found in the graves of the women, telling us that sophisticated taste existed.  Never dismiss the people of history as ignorant or lacking in vanity.  Their lives were probably more difficult than ours but they groomed their hair and wove their cloth, and probably experimented in their kitchens!

Street House jewelry

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But as usual I have deviated from my subject which is about the 'Great North Road'.  The Romans had built a road called Ermine Street from South to North.

 The road was later called The Old North Road, we have probably all once travelled sections of it.  I recognise Grantham, Retford and Melton Mowbray, when we travelled up from Chelmsford to Whitby  The road originally followed the route from London to Newcastle but in the 18th century it went further to Edinburgh.

In Rob Cowen's book he traces some of his relatives from Doncaster moving down to London to start a business there and doing quite well out of it.  I think it was a string of fish and chip shops.  They were friends with Richard Burton, which is neither here nor there but interesting all the same.

Well it brought up memories when my family moved down South from the Black Country to London in 1957.  It had all come about because my grandfather who was chief engineer at the Villiers company, motorbike engine makers had been given the job of running a similar company in London call J.A.Prestwich.  Both firms though went down pretty quickly.  Leaving him to start his own small company in Great Dunmow but that is another story.

It suddenly occurred to me that we had travelled back and forth on the newly opened M1 though my memory says that parts of it were unfinished.  The old Rover car we had, we always had Rovers, had been hit in the back by a lorry but being the sturdy beast it was had taken the blow and just moved forward on its suspension.  A write off.

There is a poem out there somewhere, which traced the footsteps of a calf as it wandered through a wood haphazardly.  The path became a trackway, then a lane, then a road and finally ended up as a motorway.  The Romans of course built straight from horizon to horizon.