PEDDARS WAY (1)

Being a brief three-part personal review of some of the evidence relating to Norfolk's best known and best preserved Roman military road.

Ever since there has ever been any academic interest in Norfolk's Roman roads speculation has surrounded the Peddars Way, and for very good reason. Most ancient roads are difficult to date and often harder to interpret, but the Peddars Way is especially troublesome. On face value it is an old road which at its seaward end runs directly to Holme Next the Sea on the north-west Norfolk coast, and at its southern extremity joins another Roman road at a three-way junction near Stanton Chare in Suffolk. So far so good, but teasing questions remain - namely, who built it, when was it built, and why. And after all the passing years, there are still no clear answers.
There are no clear and definitive interpretations, either, and so in the last few decades the guesswork has continued and ideas have multiplied. For example, these many suggestions have included arguments that the Peddars Way was built:
to assist the movement of troops and supplies to and from a military ferry station, or anchorage, on the Wash or along the north-west Norfolk coast;
as a patrol road and as a means of hurrying troops into troublesome areas;
as a military boundary, to divide warring factions of the Iceni;
as a dividing line between the eastern and western Iceni tribes, affording easier access to the eastern edge of the fens and to the chalk ridge of north-west Norfolk;
as a piece of propaganda aimed at impressing the locals and thus deterring them from engaging in mischief;
as a means of giving troops fast access to at least two important tribal areas, particularly Sedgeford in north-west Norfolk, and Saham Toney/Threxton on the edge of the Brecks, and possibly to the important Iron Age ritual site at Fison Way, Thetford;
as some sort of frontier or demarcation line.
And so on and so forth. And no doubt there is an element of truth in most of them.
Three of the key elements in the argument are these: that because of its construction proportions the road is thought to derive from the Claudian rather than Neronian period, which means the building date might be earlier in the Roman period rather than later (ie, from AD43 to circa AD61); parts of it, at least, appear to have been built on a quite massive scale; and the Stanton Chare junction (where another road leads directly towards the Iceni settlement at Caistor St Edmunds) implies a more-or-less direct connection between Holme and Colchester.
At the same time there is a feeling that at Holme, where the Roman coastline may have been at least 2km further north than it is now, there might have been some sort of wharf or landing stage. But - and just like another oft-quoted theory that some stretches of the Peddars Way utilised earlier Iron Age or even Bronze Age tracks - no actual evidence has been unearthed.
Nor does the known distribution of early Roman forts - perhaps built following the first Iceni revolt in AD47 - give any particular indication as to why the road might have been built. Three of these forts did cluster around a Breckland stretch of the Peddars Way, namely those at Ashill, Saham Toney and Threxton, but they may relate to the Iceni settlements in the vicinity, not to the road. Anyway, no similar early military camps are known in the north-west of the county, close to the coastline. Or at least, none have been identified so far.