Gently where the roads go

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In the east country the air is sparkling, in the west country the air is tender, but in this place, in the middle of England, the air is asleep all the time. It isn’t flat, it isn’t hilly. It isn’t beautiful, it isn’t ugly. It isn’t town on the one hand nor country, quite, on the other. It is the land of the Great Road, a subsection missed by the geographers, a land moulded and informed by the great passages of men. First the prehistoric tribes, sending their slinking scouts before them, moving cautiously over the lowlands to unhunted forest upcountry; then the Celts, the horse-tamers, chanting songs of Bran and Gwydion; and the Romans, great marchers, paving the miles to Pictishland; followed Angle and Saxon, fierce quarrellers and kingdomers, the Danska, fiercer than them all, and his French-speaking cousins; baron, pedlar, shuffling friar, tinker, soldier, murderer, thief, riding, treading, rolling the wheels of their ponderous slow carriage; Armada message, crop-haired troopers, levies northward to Culloden; po-shay, mail-coach and curricle along with fret-chimneyed steamers; and the coughing, clanking upstart following its symbolical red flag, maturing quickly, multiplying, inheriting the Road in a generation. All these set their stamp on the passive, silent land, making it like no other land: that which bounded the Great Road. Having for meaning, southwards to London, weary marches to the Tweed, the environs of an inn, the turn which concealed a highwayman. Nobody came there to look at it, nobody saw it with pleasure. Ghosts tilled it, ghosts dwelt in it, but North and South was its only significance. Day by day, century by century, traffic and souls crowded through it; sterilizing it by long denial into the rank of the semi-real.

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