Roads and Tracks
Broadmayne’s oldest pathway is the prehistoric South Dorset Ridgeway, which forms part of the parish’s southern boundary. To the west, its line is followed by the modern road from the top of Chalky Road towards Came Down.
Roman roads run within a few miles of Broadmayne, though not within the parish. In Thorncombe Wood and nearby, there are still traces of the major road which connected London with Exeter and the south-west via Silchester, Old Sarum, Badbury Rings and Dorchester. Another road linked Dorchester with the Roman port at Radipole, and still forms part of to-day’s Dorchester to Weymouth road.
Broadmayne’s Main Street must have had its inception as part of the unplanned network of tracks which grew up all over the country from Saxon times onwards, connecting towns and villages as the need arose.
The droves which form a notable part of the parish’s layout would have been in daily use for centuries, bringing the flocks of sheep down from the hill pastures to be folded on the arable and fallow fields at night and taking them back in the morning. It seems likely that Chalky Road started its life as one of these droves. Many of the old droves were ploughed out of existence in recent years, but Osmington Drove, Bramble Drove and South Drove still exist, and others have been reinstated as public rights of way.
How to exchange goods and services between one region and another has been a major consideration from the earliest trade in flints and stones down to the twentieth-century preoccupation with the import, export and service of tourists. Prehistoric trackways beat out the routes by which flints were distributed from sources in East Anglia, Wiltshire and elsewhere. As man progressed from flints to axes, he drew on the northern and western areas of igneous rock for his raw materials. Stone axes came to Wessex from Cornwall, an axe from Welsh stone has been found at Maiden Castle, and one from the Lake District axe-factory near Great Langdale was discovered at Upwey. Cornish tin, smelted with copper, produced the implements of the Bronze Age. At the same time, there could be no trackway, for trade or any other purpose, through the vast areas of forest, swamp and heath which covered so much of the country. The main pre-Roman tracks were forced to keep to the higher ground and especially favoured well-draining chalk and limestone soils. The South-Dorset Ridgeway, from Ballard Down to just beyond Bridport, was one of these, with other ridgeways lying towards the north and west of the county.
For the Bronze Age people in particular, the Ridgeway offered a vast majestic burial ground, with its remarkable series of barrows strung out along the sky-line. Later in the prehistoric period, it linked the hill-forts of Abbotsbury to the west and Flowers Barrow (a little beyond Lulworth) to the east, with the Chalbury fort, a mile or two to the south of Broadmayne, in the middle. Overlooking both the coast and a wide inland panorama, it still gives us the pleasures of those spreading views which are such a characteristic feature of the Dorset landscape. Those same wide views must have been a matter of very serious importance to the prehistoric tribes who had to rely on their own immediate eyesight for any warning of an approaching enemy.
The first hard-surfaced, deliberately engineered roads were built by the Roman invaders, and there were no more such roads until eighteenth century. The Roman roads were designed to meet the needs of a conquering Imperial power – first to move its armies around, and then to administer a subject country. The predecessors of the modern trunk road and motorway, they went in a business-like way from one major centre to another, and were built to carry the busiest traffic of their day.
The roads which served the travellers throughout the Middle Ages and for many later centuries were very different. They were not deliberately planned and built, but grew up over the centuries as and when they were needed. Unsignposted, and without much in the way of a hard surface, they were deeply rutted, muddy, sprawling affairs, and when they became impassable the traveller simply swung to one side or the other, so that the roadway grew wider and more wavering. Heavy goods went by water where possible, and otherwise by packhorse. Travel was by horseback, and the few wheeled vehicles which lumbered along behind their horses or oxen found it heavy going.
By the 18th century the demand for something more suited to carriage and cart became insistent. At the same time, the increasing enclosure of the old open fields and commons meant that for the first time the road had to run between hedges instead of spreading itself from side to side to avoid the worst patches. The 18th century’s answer to these problems was to set up Turnpike Trusts to repair existing highways, and even to make new ones; but it took the two Scottish roadmen Telford and Macadam to work out how to make hard-surfaced roads, on solid foundations and with good drainage, that were usable summer and winter alike. Dust then became a serious summer problem, and the first experiment with topping the road with tarmac is recorded as taking place in 1907. A girl growing up just before the 1914-18 war, and wanting to walk two or three miles from village to market town, would put a duster in her pocket to clean up her shoes when she reached the town streets.
For a road to remain serviceable, some sort of arrangement has to be made for its maintenance and repair. For the Romans, the solution was simple: the tribe through whose territory a road passed had to see to its upkeep. In the medieval period, a great deal of road maintenance was undertaken by the monasteries, with their wide and scattered lands. The monasteries were dissolved by Henry VIII, and from Elizabethan times onwards successive parliaments spent a lot of time tinkering with Highway Acts of one sort or another. There were many attempts to stop road surfaces decaying yet further by laying down laws about the sort of wheeled traffic that might use it – width of wheels, distance between wheels, maximum number of horses per vehicle, etc. Other Acts sought to provide for road repair and maintenance by bringing in something akin to the Roman system of making the local inhabitants (now defined by parish and not by tribe) responsible for the job, under the unpopular and inefficient system of ‘statute labour’ by which every able-bodied man in the parish was obliged to put in 6 days’ labour a year on the parish highway, or to find a substitute. The system worked badly, and the Turnpike Acts transferred the cost of highway upkeep to the users of the road. Turnpike Trusts were set up, and given power to raise a loan for the cost of repairing a road, and to put gates across it and charge a toll for passage.
Some Modern Roads & an Ancient settlement
Roads & Bridleways as shown on the Inclosure Award Map
