Fosse Way

The Fosse Way ran from Isca Dumnoniorum at Exeter to Lindum at Lincoln, near-straight for nearly four hundred kilometres. It marked the western frontier of Roman Britain in the years immediately after the invasion of AD 43, before later governors pushed the line forward into Wales and the Pennines. The name comes from the Latin fossa, meaning ditch: a defensive earthwork once ran beside it. Today the road survives as a chain of country lanes across Somerset, Wiltshire and the East Midlands, kinked occasionally by enclosure but never far from the line a surveyor's groma laid down two thousand years ago.