PEDDARS WAY (2)

Current archaeological consensus seems to have it that the Peddars Way (the name is not Roman, by the way) is, in a British sense, an early Roman military road. In some ways it looks like an add-on to the roads network near Stanton Chare, in Suffolk, where another branch of the junction headed towards an Iron Age settlement at Crownthorpe, and ultimately - and with a turn to the east - towards Caistor St Edmund (the Romano-British 'town' of Venta Icenorum was, again, a later development). Caistor also had river connections to the former estuary which, in Roman times, flowed between the later Burgh Castle and Caister forts and as far inland as the Reedham 'peninsular.'
The Peddars Way, on the other hand, ran by two other Iceni settlement areas, in the Brecklands and in north-west Norfolk, and then on towards the coast at Holme-next-the-Sea, where there may have been a quay or landing facilities.
These water connections (river, estuary, sea) are important, for research seems to emphasise that the Iceni were not only farmers and metalworkers, they were also a sea-going folk; while the Romans also developed a sophisticated logistical and re-supply network based on water-borne craft. So water was important. Indeed, travel by water was most likely quicker, easier and cheaper than travel by land. 
The Roman surveyors, most usually attached to the military, were adept at making use of existing pre-Roman tracks and at laying out new routes. Many of the Legions were also adept at road-building, which is not to say that the Way was built by soldiers. Indeed, it might have been built - of local materials - by locally recruited labour gangs perhaps overseen by military surveyors, each gang being responsible for a particular stretch of the road. Indeed, there is an unevenness in the construction of the Way which suggests this could have been so.
For example, some sections of the Way are massive in terms of width (up to 36ft), while others, like the stretch close to the crossing on the modern A17, evidently left a footprint so slight that passage of the Roman road can hardly be seen at all.
In addition to water, time is another factor to be taken into account. The entire construction phase might have taken six or seven months, though no-one knows for certain. It is unlikely, though, that the occupiers would have wanted battle-hardened veteran troops involved in such a menial task for so long as there were, as the saying goes, other fish to fry.
No visible remains of bridges have been identified - there is no suitable stone in Norfolk, so if bridges were built they would probably have been of timber and thus may have perished - though there is the merest hint at Threxton that one might have crossed Watton Brook. Without the handy availability of suitable stone, however, it seems more likely that fords were used, for the Way still crosses several waterways.
The further north-west one goes so water becomes scarcer, for aside from the Heacham river - today reduced to the merest trickle - the line of the route in 'High' Norfolk by and large follows the watershed between rivers running west into the Wash and east into the North Sea via the old estuary.
However, the one thing you can say about the construction of the Peddars Way is that the road's sense of purpose is not to be denied or its urgency decried. Like the nearby Holkham Roman road, it heads unerringly towards the sea. And while its original purpose may seem somewhat obscure today, this was clearly a road in a hurry, possibly even built in a hurry.