HFWG said they’d investigated the ‘accepted course of the road’ based on ‘old Ordnance Survey Maps [which] show the road leaving the line of the existing trackway’. But working back through OS mapping from the current 1:25,000 edition (revised Jan 2010) it quickly became clear that ‘old Ordnance Survey Maps’ don’t show course of the road leaving the trackway; it’s a construct of recent (1954) OS mapping. ‘Course of’ looks like a simple extrapolation to the next point at which the road existed as a physically surveyed gravelled track, ironically at ‘Romans Farm’, on the 1885-6 one to twenty five inch map. 

Although the OS confidently mark ‘Roman Road – course of’, the Victoria County History is clear; the road isn’t there.  Nichols, although broadly supporting the OS route, includes amongst his supporting references and correspondence a clue to an alternative route.

So, a first hypothesis could be established; nothing was visible to the HFWG geophysics survey because the road wasn’t there.  A review of Nichols’ source, and clues in the landscape, suggested one possible alternative route.

But is it true? What might a detailed search through the written clues, and the clues in the landscape itself, reveal?