![]() ![]() There was a cohort of leather-clad auxiliaries on the road today, swinging along at the steady Legion’s pace that had brought them down from Isca Silurium at twenty miles a day the new garrison coming to relieve the old one at Isca Dumnoniorum. The road saw them all, and the cohorts of the Eagles for whom all other travellers must make way. It was a busy road and saw many travellers: traders with bronze weapons and raw yellow amber in their ponies’ packs country folk driving shaggy cattle or lean pigs from village to village sometimes a band of tawny-haired tribesmen from farther west strolling harpers and quack-oculists too, or a light-stepping hunter with huge wolf-hounds at his heel and from time to time a commissariat wagon going up and down to supply the Roman frontier post. From the Fosseway westward to Isca Dumnoniorum the road was simply a British trackway, broadened and roughly metalled, strengthened by corduroys of logs in the softest places, but otherwise unchanged from its old estate, as it wound among the hills, thrusting farther and farther into the wilderness. ![]()
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