The Research Timetable

October 2021 – after I’d done the walk, I contacted Historic England (for the OS Archaeology Department archive), HFWG, ROLLR and started reading about the Gartree Road.

November 2021 – set up a map archive, visited ROLLR.

December 2021 – visited Historic England.

January 2022 – started fieldwalking.

February 2022 – drafted a summary of progress to date, and thoughts about the future.

Some Learning Points

I initially accessed Nichols on line via the University of Leicester Special Collections, which was very useful. The on line text is searchable – I looked for Gartre Road (sic) and Via Devana.  However, it was only by luck that I stumbled across the index and was able to track back to Nichols’ sources (although I expect I would have come across them in the physical copies I accessed in the London Library and ROLLR.)

The visit to the OS Archive led me back to references in the TLAHS, which hadn’t been on the index search I’d done, which just goes to show the benefit of poking around and following other people’s research: I turned up Vol 34 (1958) p81 – G R Lee, Vol 42 (1966-7) p86 – J A Derry and Vol 43 (1967-8) p60 – J A Derry. Steph Turville found Derry’s work in her literature search (as did I) but we both initially missed Lee (1966-7).  Lee’s article was just titled ‘Glooston’ and I’d specifically looked for ‘Gartree Road’ which, although mentioned in the text, wasn’t picked up in the index. 

I found the essay by Bellairs (TLAHS 1893) via the Bibliography of British and Irish History website (“BBIH”) and not in the TLAHS index.

Don’t necessarily take authoritative bibliographies at face value – the Cambridge University ‘Enclosure Maps of England’ doesn’t have a listing for Slawston, but ROLLR does has a copy of the written award.

The downside of being amazed how much has been digitised and is available on line is the amount of time you can spend following leads down the rabbit hole on the internet …