Roads

In the wet seasons rivers could still be used, though with more difficulty, but riverside and valley bottom tracks would often have been impassable, and travellers by foot, cart or wagon would have used alternative routes along higher ground. The lowlands were sometimes connected to these ridgeways by sunken roads created in part as banks were built to define fields, and in part by the repeated passage of cattle (Audouze and Biichsenschiitz 1991: 145-7). These were natural roads with, generally speaking, no man-made structures. However, where wetlands had to be traversed, as in marshy areas, or on the approaches to a river or the coast, causeways

-  roads raised above their general surroundings - had to be built (Coles and Coles 1989: 151-69).

Evidence from the Somerset levels, the Irish midlands, the Netherlands and Lower Saxony suggests that there were two main types of built roads: simple, relatively narrow footpaths for foot travellers, built of brushwood, or hurdles or planking laid longitudinally - examples are the Garvins, Eclipse and Sweet causeways of Somerset (Coles and Coles 1986); and broader, heavy-duty roads built of large timbers (often oak) laid transversely in corduroy fashion, which could be used by carts and wagons

-  examples are the bronze age causeway on the approaches to the river Ancholme near Brigg, Lincolnshire (McGrail 1981b); the 148 BC causeway at Derraghan and Corlea, Co. Longford, Ireland (Raftery 1986); and the Bohlensweg xcii of 129 BC which crossed the Wittemooor in Lower Saxony and was probably used by wheeled vehicles transporting bog iron to boats in a tributary of the river Weser (Coles and Coles 1989: 167-8).

— chapter Fifteen —