More newly published evidence on local Roman roads, and also an item of possible relevance to the route that the Gawain-poet knew and had his Sir Gawain take into North Staffordshire. In the form of “The Roman Road in East Cheshire: Unfinished Business”, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 2025. Sadly this academic journal item is paywalled at a ridiculous £56, but there is at least an abstract…

This short notice considers the possibility that a medieval reference of 1405 provides a missing clue to the existence of a Roman road in east Cheshire. This road, which later marked the western boundary of the Macclesfield Forest, continued southwards via the Staffordshire Way on Congleton Edge to the village of Six Ashes near Wolverhampton, and very probably thence to the Malvern hills and the Severn estuary. Northwards it continued as Staley Street west of the Tame valley on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, and probably further. It is suggested that in the AD 50s and 60s, the Romans connected the Severn and Humber estuaries by a road to facilitate the swift lateral movement of forces across their front. After the conquest of the Midlands the road had no enduring military value but may subsequently have been exploited as a trade route.

“The Staffordshire Way” here is presumably a reference to the modern long-distance footpath. On “the western boundary” of the forest, the History of Macclesfield states…

The Forest of Macclesfield […] western boundary was approximately the present London Road from the Rising Sun Inn to Prestbury, from thence along the Macclesfield township boundary to Gawsworth, where it avoided the precincts of the church and continued south to the Dane.

But it’s then a huge jump by the new article’s author between the Congleton Edge and all the way down to Wolverhampton. Actually not Wolverhampton at all, except by modern postcode. It turns out that Six Ashes is far west of Dudley and near Bridgenorth.

So it’s an interesting claim that touches on local topography. But the paywall means one can’t find out more. One wonders what evidence the author has for claiming the long Congleton Edge -> Six Ashes run, if any? Since the abstract suggests the (new?) “1405” evidence relates only to “a Roman road in east Cheshire”, and not down through Staffordshire. If it also referenced Staffordshire, then surely the abstract would say so?

And if there was once an early road along the Congleton Edge, then where would it go after that?

Roman roads were largely straight and the straight Congleton Edge line points directly at Mow Cop. Which was quarrying some of the best millstones in Europe, and thus would logically need sturdy roads to haul the finished millstones out.

One then has to suppose the hypothetical road would go on from Mow Cop, to somewhere around Talke and hook up with our known early Roman road going to Chesterton… and then to what would become Stoke. That said, some of our Roman roads do appear to go nowhere/somewhere and then stop. There’s one which was unearthed for a long length in 1961 at Hanchurch during motorway work, and seemed to go nowhere. Also the Roman road from Buxton towards Leek, which I would guess didn’t need to go further… because it only needed to access the sheep country of the Moorlands rivers via the trackway along the Morridge edge?

The new £145 academic collection Magical Tourism and Enchanting Geographies: Storytelling, Heritage, Fantasy, and Folklore (2025) has the chapter “Can you hear the knights breathing? Invisible heritage and the magic of Alderley Edge”. For which I can find an abstract at least…

“… home to a legend of which variant versions are found across Europe from antiquity to the present: the legend of the sleeping king or hero and his army, who will awaken when need is greatest. [I explore] the relationship between the legend (as a distinctly medievalist imagining), its medieval precedents, and its new re-imaginings in contemporary literary and oral culture of the NW Midlands [of England], which present a new chapter in a long regional oral and literary culture of storytelling as placemaking.”

Presumably the chapter relates partly to the Invisible Worlds project (2020-23), which created a phone-app AR guide for visitors to Alderley Edge.

I’m pleased to learn that David Cliffe of Leek is doing good work uncovering the photographic history of the town of Leek and the wider Staffordshire Moorlands, and publishing the results as accessible books.

He’s also integrating the knowledge into local mystery novels in his Old Leek Mystery series…

Tragedy strikes when a travelling theatre visits the Staffordshire market town of Leek in Edwardian times. The town also becomes embroiled in suspicion of foreign agents. Local photographer Nathaniel Blake and his teenage daughter Cora turn amateur detective and find themselves in peril.

Having obtained the various OS map coordinates from the North Staffordshire Journal of Field Studies (1967), I can now plot more precisely the line(s) of the ancient Roman Road that ran from Chesterton – Stoke – Longton. The map used is public-domain OS and pre mass-housebuilding.

Updated: fixed dumb WordPress blogging software, which had scaled down the large image automatically. Now links to the full large version!

New on Archive.org, Wolstanton: (Wolstan’s Town) A Brief History of the Ancient Church, Parish and Village (1908) by Percy W. Adams. Second edition.

Pugin After Dark, a local festival set for 2026 at Alton in the Staffordshire Moorlands. Focused around the works of Pugin in the district, including Alton Castle. If the Castle will be open is unknown. It’s now a Catholic children’s centre, and so far as I know there are otherwise no open-days.

I’ve found a local item I missed in 2019, an article going by the unpromising name of “Investigation leading to the Scheduling of RR181”, in the Roman Roads Association Newsletter, Summer 2019. Titled differently on the newsletter’s contents-page as “RR181, from realisation to Scheduling”.

Stoke-on-Trent’s Roman road (the ‘Ryknield Street’) from Chester to Derby had, as the article details, been missing knowledge of “its first four miles as far as Langley Common [west of Derby], where no confirmed evidence of the road had ever been identified.” The newletter’s article is mostly about the discovery of this lost Langley Common route and the consequent scheduling.

However, page 7 of the same article also usefully details the route back to Stoke-on-Trent and the fort at Chesterton in Newcastle-under-Lyme. This reveals a vital new bit of lidar evidence for Stoke…

Where the Roman line crosses Queensway close to its junction with the A53, lidar [i.e. ground-penetrating radar] reveals a substantial road cutting, now appearing artificially filled. It is conceivable that the Roman road survives well within the cutting.

This is of course only a trace, but it adds good evidence to my suggestions that the Basford Bank was more-or-less the place the road came down off the ridge and crossed the marshy Fowlea valley. The valley would have been just too waterlogged further down, as it approached the Trent. If the road sloped slowly down the valley side from Wolstanton Marsh towards the bottom of the Basford Bank, or if it came down steeply at the old Basford Bank (now the quiet lane behind the modern road) must remain unknown for now. However, the possible need for a deep cutting suggests it came down a steep slope as it approached the Fowlea.

After crossing the Fowlea and the valley-bottom, then much wider and marshier than today, the road must have got up onto somewhat higher ground east of the Fowlea. Before then proceeded on through Cliffe Vale towards its known route past what is now Stoke Station, and then across the Trent (roughly where the University nature reserve is now) and out through Fenton and along part of King Street.

Here is what the article means by the “line”, which I’ve marked approximately here…

Green indicates the two possible approaches to the Fowlea, either across the top of Etruria Woods and gently down the valley slope, or dropping off the valley side steeply at the old Basford Bank lane.

One might thus whimsically imagine a footsore Roman legion rocking up at the Holy Inadequate pub, had it been there back then, thirsty and in need of reviving drafts of ale! Unfortunately there’s no precise location for the lidar discovery of the buried cutting at the Queensway / A53 junction, and that item in the Roman Roads Association Newsletter article is unreferenced. Possibly it can be seen on recent lidar maps, but I can’t immediately find where those are online. Archiuk.com has a lidar map for Stoke, but it fails to respond and is anyway possibly not up-to-date.

There has also been another key recent lidar development, that I also missed. This discovery was made at the Chesterton end of our Roman road, as detailed at the Roman Roads in Cheshire website…

The route of the [Roman] road is well documented in the north of the county [of Cheshire], but the nearer it got to Chesterton the more its course was lost, with several alternative suggestions. The biggest clue to tracing it south is that the road direction just south of Sandbach appears to be in alignment on the high ground near Bignall Hill / Wedgwood’s Monument. This represents a logical direct alignment, but until lidar [i.e. ground penetrating radar] the evidence was not forthcoming. [But] we can now be confident that the route took a very direct course and went over Bignall Hill / Wedgwood’s Monument, as the lidar evidence is convincing there.

The direct route approached Chesterton fort along the ridge of high ground around [the east side of] Wedgwood’s Monument. The latter would have been a very logical position with excellent view ahead to set out the alignment to Middlewich — assuming it was set out south to north. With the release of Series 2 lidar we now have the [exact] route across Bignall Hill/Wedgwood Monument. [Nearby] Red Street would appear to be a clue [to the presence of an ancient road, due to its name]. It is [however now revealed to be] slightly off line, but must have been named after the [nearby] road.

Or after its purloined stones, perhaps? The routes are very close, and it would have been relatively easy to cart the stones over.

This discovery adds another local node to the route. It came up off the Cheshire Plain and slipped around what is now Wedgwood’s Monument and into North Staffordshire. Which also makes it, in mediaeval times, Sir Gawain’s likely route into North Staffordshire. I had suggested the nearby Red Street for this entry-point in my recent book on Gawain, but now there’s an even more precise mapping. But that’s another story.

So it’s good to learn that the old road isn’t totally forgotten today, and that the lidar boffins still occasionally probe the likely route and make solid discoveries.