A History of Roman Lancashire

The road network of Roman Lancashire grew around the two main south-north routes, its most important focus being Manchester where at least six roads met. One, heading ultimately for Carlisle, ran northwards in an almost direct line to Ribchester before crossing the inhospitable uplands of the Forest of Bowland and dropping down to the Lune valley and the fort at Burrow near Hornby. A parallel road, the course of which is less certain, crossed the Mersey at Warrington and then proceeded north along the margin plain to Wigan, walton le Dale and Lancaster. There it divided, the more important branch going up the south side of the Lune to Burrow (with a secondary road on the north bank), the other carrying on towards Kendal. These two main routes were tied together by an important east-west road from York to Ribchester and into the Fylde. From Kirkham this road apparently headed westwards and for two hundred years it, and its possible objective, have been the subject of sometimes wild speculation. The Roman geographer Ptolemy refers to a place called Portus Setantiorurn, which was apparently somewhere in north west England and enthusiasts claim that this is a lost site, perhaps washed away by the sea, in the vicinity of modern Fleetwood or Knott End, both places where important coin hoards have been found. The verdict at the moment must be non proven.

There are comparatively few impressive visible traces of the Roman period in Lancashire. The lines of ramparts or fragments of walling can be seen at, for example, Lancaster where the Wery Wall, part of the fort on the hilltop above the Lune, is the only substantial piece of Roman masonry to remain and at Castleshaw and Ribchester. Other sites, such as Wigan, Manchester, Warrington, and Walton le Dale, have been completely lost beneath later development, although at Manchester a modern reconstruction of part of the fort is included in the Castlefield heritage area. The alignments of some major Roman roads are followed by stretches of modern highways or by the lines of hedgerows and field boundaries. For example, the A56 north from Manchester through Prestwich follows the Roman road to Ribchester and Carlisle, an alignment later picked up by the present unclassified lanes through Affetside west of Tottington and Blacksnape east of Darwen. Other main roads, though, have left little trace. That which went from Manchester to Wigan, described in detail by early antiquarians and marked on the first Ordnance Survey maps in the 1840s, is today scarcely detectable on the ground. One of the most remarkable stretches of ancient highway in England, the stone-paved road with a deep central drainage channel on Blackstone Edge near Rochdale, may be Roman but opinion on this question is still deeply divided. However, Lancashire can offer one of the finest of all views of a Roman road. From Jeffrey Hill above Longridge on a clear day the unerringly straight line of the road from Ribchester to Burrow in Lonsdale is picked out by lanes and hedgerows over into Yorkshire, and on the horizon, peeping over the ridge above Browsholme, is the summit of Pen-y-Ghent, the sighting point used by the Roman surveyors almost two thousand years ago.

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