Great North Roads
The Great North Roads, East and West, have a long antiquity. Their routes determined by the hard facts of topography - hills and rivers that must be negotiated. The Roman roads in purple are a good place to start as they are largely documented, but was there an earlier coherent network of roads?
We already know about ancient Stone Rows, Avenues and Ridgeways. Stone Rows vary between 3 stones in a row and the extensive dense Stone Rows in the South West England. Stone Rows and Avenues are often associated with ceremonial sites. Ridgeways on the other hand are long distance Droveways in the Lowland Zone connected with trade. These routes are associated with higher ground as it avoids the difficulties of rivers and unsuitable low ground.
It is the evidence for major roads in the Highland Zone which will be examined here. One factor that should be considered is that we may be looking at an edge effect. Namely that the only evidence that has survived is on the edge of an area rich in monuments, but the internal monuments may have been farmed out of existence or built over. In the southern Pennines, there is a large population of Ring Cairns. This makes it impossible to assign any significance to individual Ring Cairns.
While there may be coherent patterns emerging tied to particular periods, the assembled evidence might also represent the value of basing monuments near the road network, rivers and fords, no matter what the period was. Early evidence can be fragmentary or hidden and hence might appear arbitrary.
Regardless of all this, the exercise does give us a foundation for examining some very interesting archaeology. Does the network of Class 2 Henges in the East represent the equivalent of motorway service stations added during the Late Neolithic / Early Bronze Age? Are the Stone Roads of Cumbria an ancient road network from the Neolithic? Taken together does this give us a better picture of how things were organised back in the Neolithic? Tentative hypotheses will arise, but without more supporting evidence, they will most likely be considered as conjecture. This is true of a lot of Prehistory and why it is important to reassess the evidence on a regular basis and if possible, get new corroborating evidence.