WATLING STREET 97 



at lead ninety-eight years longer ; rough, full of holes, 

 mires, and swamps, and crossed by many streams. 

 Caesar came and went ; and not until Aulus Plautius 

 and Claudius had overrun Britain, and probably not 

 before many successive Roman governors had served 

 here, and reduced this province of Britannia Prima to 

 the condition of a settled and prosperous colony, was 

 the Foreigners' Road made a via strata, a paved Roman 

 Military Way. 



Its date might be anything from the landing of 

 Aulus Plautius, in a.d. 45, to the time of Hadrian, 

 the greatest of all road-builders, a.d. 120. Then it 

 became a true " street," made in the thorough manner 

 described by Vitruvius, and paved throughout with 

 stone blocks ; the " strata " from which the word 

 " street " is derived. 



Engineered with all that road-making science which, 

 not less than their victories, has rendered the Romans 

 famous for all time, the Watling Street, as the Romans 

 left it, stretched from sea to sea. Starting from their 

 three great harbour fortresses on the Kentish coast — 

 from Rutupice, Partus dubris, and Lemanis, Englished 

 now as Richborough, Dover, and Lympne — it converged 

 in three branches upon their first inland camp and 

 city of Diirovernwn, where Canterbury now stands. 

 Proceeding thenceforward on the lines of the present 

 Dover Road, the Roman road came to their next 

 station of Durolevum, whose site no antiquary has 

 fixed convincingly, but which might have been at 

 either Sittingbourne, Ospringe, Davington, or Key 

 Street. Thence it reached Durohrivae, which was 

 certainly on the site of Rochester. Crossing the 

 Medway by a trajectus, or perhaps even by a bridge of 

 either stone or wood, the road passed through Strood, 

 and branched off through Cobham, coming again to 

 the modern highway at Dartford Brent. Perhaps it 

 even had two branches here, one touching the river at 

 Vagniacae, probably both Northfleet and Southfleet ; 

 and the other keeping, as we have seen, inland until a 



