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will be necessary to seek elsewhere for such data as may 
be of use in the present inquiry. To do this effectually we 
must take up entirely independent ground; and, avoiding 
all inconclusive speculation, deduce from the well known 
facts of Romano-British history the materials which the 
obscurity of our subject requires. By adopting this plan, 
I trust we shall ultimately arrive at a more satisfactory 
conclusion than we should were we to adopt the principles 
on which the inquiry appears to have been hitherto 
conducted. 
In their search after the ancient roads through this parish, 
our local historians seem to have been under the impression 
that most of the channels of communication between the 
cities and towns of Brigantia, if ever laid down either by 
the Aborigines or their Roman conquerors, had been diverted 
and lost in very early times. One would infer from the 
imperfect success which attended their search, that the 
excellent roads which the Saxons found everywhere, in 
firm condition, throughout the island, were unsuited to their 
wants, and that either they or succeeding generations incurred 
the labour and expense not only of enclosing the ancient 
roads within their pastures, but of forming new ones, 
more circuitous in their direction, and less durable in their 
construction ! History is at variance with this theory. But 
it seems never to have entered into the speculations of our 
antiquaries that the cities of Brigantia stood, if possible, in 
greater need of roads between them than the cities of any 
other province of Britain, or that such roads might actually 
have been constructed. And they appear never to have 
entertained the possibility of the ancient pack-horse roads, on 
which they pursued their archaeological investigations, being 
entitled to an antiquity beyond that of a few generations, 
but whose age they were unable to determine. It seems 
never to have occurred to them that Roman legions might 
