Christopher Hadley takes us on a lyrical journey into this past, retracing and searching for an elusive Roman road that sprang from one of the busiest road hubs in Roman Britain. His passage is not always easy. Time and nature have erased many clues; bridges rotted and whole woods grew across the route. Carters found an easier ford downstream, and people broke up its milestones to mend new paths. Year after year the heavy clay swallowed whole lengths of it; the once mighty road became a bridleway, an overgrown hollow-way, a parched mark in the soil. Gathering traces of archaeology, history and landscape from poems, church walls, hag stones and cropmarks, oxlips, killing places, hauntings and immortals, and things buried too deep for archaeology, this book is a mesmerising journey into two thousand years of history only now giving up its secrets.