Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [135]
“Well that’s it. That’s Sorviodunum.”
But to Tosutigus, even then, the drab little enclosure seemed full of promise.
“We’ll need labourers for the road,” the centurion said next. “What can you give us?”
Glad to have a chance to show his usefulness, Tosutigus at once provided them with fifty men, and to these he added Numex, despite the fellow’s protesting: “But I’m a carpenter!”
“Learn how the Romans build,” the chief ordered him. “You’ll be more useful to me then.” For he knew very well that Numex would quickly learn Roman skills and bring credit to Sarum and its chief in the future.
When he saw how the Romans built their roads, Tosutigus was astounded. The first main route lay across the high ground to the north east and was to stretch in an almost straight line from the dune to the port of Londinium some eighty miles away. As the men worked he would ride out to watch them, returning home shaking his head in wonder.
First the men dug two parallel trenches, about eighty feet apart, and piled up the earth they dug into a raised causeway in the middle, roughly twenty-five feet wide. This was the famous raised agger. Then on top of this they packed chalk, a handspan deep and cambered down from the centre, to ensure that the road surface would be well drained. Next, they brought carts of flint from local diggings, and these the legionaries laid over the chalk, packing each flint carefully down by hand until they were three or four inches deep, and filling in with chalk to make the surface even. Finally they packed six inches of gravel on top, stamping it down until it was hard and smooth.
“Sometimes, if there are ironworks in the area, we put the slag on top,” the centurion told him. “Then it rusts into a single sheet and it lasts for ever.”
Tosutigus also noticed that several roads were to intersect beside the dune. “Sorviodunum will be connected to places all over the island,” he thought happily. At the river Afon below, the soldiers built a stone causeway across the river bed and paved it to form an artificial ford.
“Why not build a bridge?” he asked.
“Bridges can be destroyed,” the centurion replied grimly. “Fords aren’t so easy to break up.”
The road across the river led south west towards the land of the Durotriges; he watched with fascination as, during the next two months, the Romans laid wooden underpinnings across the low marshy ground, laid the road surface over them, and then made the road zig-zag up the steep hill beyond. But it was what followed that made him gasp with wonder.
For across the rolling lands of the proud Durotriges, in a straight line that ran south west from Sarum, the Romans built a highway unlike anything the island would see again until the coming of the railways nearly two thousand years later. Between its deep ditches the agger was almost fifty feet wide, and it rose a full six feet high. It stretched across the landscape, straight, uncompromising and magnificent for thirty miles into the Durotrigan heartland before curving south towards the coast.
This was the mighty road known as the Ackling Dyke and its message was unmistakable: Your hill forts have fallen, it stated, but hill or valley, open land or forest, all are one to Rome. We march straight across them at our will.
As Tosutigus stood on the high ground and stared at this great new highway, so utterly unlike the ancient ridgepaths of the island that he had known before, he was lost in admiration.
“They are like bands of iron over the whole land,” he murmured. And for the first time he began to understand the real power of Rome.
That winter, word finally came from the governor, in the form of a dark, swarthy man from the governor’s staff, with small, hard eyes. He was accompanied by a clerk from the procurator’s office. He came to the point at once.
“This