High Street
Galava to Brocavum
The route
The road climbed from the fort at Galava at Ambleside, at the head of Windermere, up onto the long north-south ridge above Kirkstone and held to it for most of its length before dropping into the Eden valley at Brocavum at Brougham near Penrith.
Along the ridge itself the road runs above seven hundred metres, over open fell with no shelter of any kind, which takes it higher than any other Roman road in England. The ridge has taken the road's name: the mountain is called High Street, one of very few English hills named after a piece of Roman infrastructure. Not every archaeologist accepts the whole line as Roman, since much of it survives as a worn hollow rather than a built embankment.
The surveyed line
- Mapped length
- 31 km
- Mapped segments
- 1
- 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
None whatsoever. No modern road follows it, and none ever will. The A592 over Kirkstone Pass crosses the same range by a wholly different and much lower line.
See also: which modern roads follow Roman lines, and how closely.
Where to see it
The full traverse from Ambleside to Brougham is a serious mountain walk and one of the finest ridge routes in the Lake District. The summit plateau of High Street itself carries visible traces of the road, and the broken agger can be picked out along the ridge in several places.
Go in clear weather. The ground is exposed and the navigation is not trivial in cloud.
Common questions
Is High Street the highest Roman road in England?
Along the ridge it climbs above seven hundred metres, higher than any other known Roman road in England. The line has been questioned in places, since much of it survives as a worn hollow rather than a built embankment.
Is the mountain named after the road, or the road after the mountain?
The mountain is named after the road. High Street is one of a very small number of British hills to take its name from Roman engineering.
Why did the Romans build a road along a mountain ridge?
Because the ridge was the easiest continuous line available. The valleys below were boggy, wooded and broken by lakes; the high ground was open, drained and gave clear sightlines for surveying.