Unwavering

I set out to explore a particular landscape feature and this dramatically confirmed that I had found it - the ROMAN ROAD. I have not adopted Trumpian affectations, I'm just mimicing the way the Ordnance Survey (OS) labels Roman archaeology. Features like the 14th century priory that we stated in earlier this month and the iron age hill fort that is on my right when I took this picture share the same Gothic typeface, despite their 2,000-year separation, but anything from the less-than-four-centuries of Roman occupation gets its own dedicated, upper-case typeface (though, paradoxically, not one that fits the modern definition of a 'Roman' font)

The internet does not know why Roman features get special treatment from the OS. Did this martial institution have a special reverence for a multi-century military occupation - or did the surveyors who designed the maps have Classics beaten into them at private school and then study it at Oxford?

Roman roads criss-cross our area. Digs have revealed a huge villa at Broughton, 3km from where this picture was taken, and where the road leads. There is a smaller villa nearby, and some evidence of a Roman village. It is fanciful to think that the exposed stone is the surface laid by Roman slaves, but I kidded myself it was, as I rode over it. Altogether I stayed with it for about 4km before returning to asphalt, meeting no-one but gratifying clouds of gatekeeper butterflies and a lone damsel-fly as I crossed a stream (with no surviving bridge, Roman or otherwise)

The crop is wheat. It's awned appearance would probably have been less remarkable to a Roman soldier than it is to me. In the mid 20th century, modern wheats had lost most of their awns - the occasional exception was called 'bearded wheat'. More recently, varieties with awns that hark back to the crop's primitive origins have become much more common. A casual glance over the hedge is no longer enough to identify if a crop is wheat or barley. Mutatis mutandis