VNorthwards now lay mile upon mile of undulating grey road, upturned every few hundred yards where fungus and dandelion had set their vegetable strength against that of stake and pile and stone; upturned and left to moulder by men who had no interest in restoring what they would never own, or by other men who had never known such roads before and looked on them as being the work of the gods, not of hands like their own. The marauding Saxon saw these roads as something like the seasons, or the budding of the chestnut, or the springing of the corn. The roads had been nobody’s business for the past two hundred years and more.
Twenty miles away, within the swaying walls of Eburacum, a few score men, British soldiers who still aped Roman manners and training, looked over the ramparts and sighe
