Akeman Street
Verulamium to Corinium
The route
Akeman Street ran west from Verulamium at St Albans, where it left Watling Street, and headed for the Chilterns. It passed through Tring and Aylesbury, then ran across the Oxfordshire clay past Alchester near Bicester, a small walled town at an important junction.
West of Alchester it continued past the villa at North Leigh and through the Windrush valley to reach Corinium Dobunnorum at Cirencester, where it met the Fosse Way. Watling Street, Akeman Street and the Fosse Way together enclosed the wealthiest and most Romanised part of the province.
The surveyed line
- Mapped length
- 120 km
- Mapped segments
- 15
- Line certainty
- Conjectured
Measured across every Itiner-e segment attributed to this road. A conjectured stretch is one whose course is inferred from evidence either side of it; that covers 100% of the mapped length here. This describes how precisely the line is known, not whether the road existed.
The road today
The A41 picks up the line near Tring and follows it, on and off, toward Bicester. West of there the modern road network largely abandons it, and the Roman route survives as minor lanes and green tracks through west Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds.
See also: which modern roads follow Roman lines, and how closely.
Where to see it
North Leigh Roman Villa in Oxfordshire sits just off the road and has a fine mosaic under cover. The green lane sections between Kirtlington and Ramsden are walkable and unusually undisturbed.
At Cirencester the Corinium Museum sets the road in the context of the town it served.
Common questions
Where does the name Akeman Street come from?
It is Old English. The Anglo-Saxons called Bath Acemannesceaster, the town of Aceman, and Akeman Street was understood as the road leading toward it from the east.
Is the A41 a Roman road?
Along part of its length. Between Tring and the Bicester area the A41 follows Akeman Street reasonably closely, though the correspondence is looser than that of the A5 with Watling Street.