Tripontium, Venonis

Resuming along the byway I had left last night, I enjoyed a little more of the off-road Watling Street.

Then it was a hard slog along the A5 trunk road all the way.

This was made the more uncomfortable by there still being no footway, the grass verge uneven in places and occasionally overgrown, overhanging blackthorn and hawthorn a particular problem.

Another reason for this lack is that the road doesn't pass through any villages, to some extent an observation also applicable yesterday. When I walked through Middlesex and Hertfordshire, I passed through a succession of villages with an old church on or close to the road, and a line of old inns and shops strung along the road. The demands of modernity meant the A5 was taken round a bypass.

However, since I crossed the Great Ouse on leaving Stony Stratford, I have been walking along the Watling Street which formed the border between the Anglo-Saxons the Danes. People wouldn't have wanted to live on a border, where they might be unsure whose law applied, or might be at risk from border skirmishes. The settlement pattern established then was for villages to be one side or another, churches often visible but some way off, and the road as parish boundary. This pattern has survived unchanged to this day. For much of the territory covered today, I had Warwickshire on my left and Leicestershire on my right, as the county boundary, too, follows the road.

I got to the site of Cave's Inn (prop. Edward Cave, c. 1680), previously the site of Holywell Priory, and much earlier, the Roman station Tripontium. It gives its name to a nearby business park, which is nice.

And then High Cross, the crossroads with the Fosse Way, and Roman station Venonis. The monument here, put up in 1712 by the Earl of Denbigh supported by the magistrates of both counties, celebrates the junction and the nearby tomb of a Roman commander. The tomb has disappeared and the monument hasn't done so well either, nearly destroyed by lightning in 1792 and much-adorned by graffiti since.

Despite the crossroads, the Romans didn't leave much behind at Venonis. The equivalent junction of diagonal-running roads had moved to Smockington, my next calling point, by the 17th century. Ogilby's Leicester road crossed here, and Celia Fiennes passed by on horseback in 1698, when it had commodious inns. Harper, visiting in 1902, harked back to the coaching age, and until the 1970s the staggered junction here was with the A46 trunk road.

There is little sign of anything here now that might suggest the service of travellers: just a farm and three houses. The house at Smockington Hollow has a Georgian doorway and could be the former Greyhound inn.

Nowhere for me to stay at Venonis or Smockington: my destination was at the present-day equivalent junction with the M69.