Phase 2 of my walk starts on Saturday.
I'll be following the road built by Thomas Telford, mostly in 1815-19 but completed with the opening of the Menai Suspension Bridge in 1826. According to his recent biographer, Julian Glover, "Nothing like it had been proposed in Britain since the Romans and there was to be nothing like it again until the building of the first motorways in the 1950s".
In a sense, he was continuing the Roman tradition of roadbuilding to get to a distant destination. This is more literally so in terms of my own mission, because he continued the Roman Watling Street in what was to become (give or take a few miles here and there) the A5 in 1923.
However, I also see Thomas Telford's road as the precursor of the motorways. Like the motorways, his road though North Wales cut across swathes of open land, avoided villages that would have got in the way, built brand new bridges, cuttings and embankments; all in order to speed up the journey time.
Andrew Hudson's book is about This Ancient Road. On my walk along Watling Street I was certainly seeking out traces of something ancient. Telford's road, in comparison, is only two hundred years old, and it's not going to be hard to find. I suspect that my Phase 2 walk will be more about the beginning of modern roads.
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