Exploring Kent's Past

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Monument details

Summary

Roman road, (Kent-East Sussex), running from Rochester - Maidstone - Hastings.

Monument Types

• ROAD (Roman - 43 AD to 409 AD)

Full description

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Roman road, (Kent-East Sussex), running from Rochester - Maidstone - Hastings.
Roman road RR 13 (Margary), Rochester-Maidstone-Hastings, - For full details, including bibliography and OS field investigator comments, see Ordnance Survey Linear Archive file (RR 13), held at NMRC. (1)

In 1995 the Maidstone Areas Archaeological Group excavation 3 sections across the road in the Luck Lane area and found a roadway 2.4 m wide and 200 mm thick (7)

A section of the road was recorded in 2001 where it is exposed in a river bank near the boundary between Sandhurst and Bodiam. At this point the metalled iron slag surface extends for 9.55m, with the west end cut by the modern road bridge. The metalling varied in depth, with a maximum of 36cm 7.3m east of the modern bridge. Two ditches underlie the road, and may represent the width of a previous smaller road c.2.5m in width. A further ditch demarks the east edge of the road.
Metal detectoring in the fields to the south suggests a large quantity of metal slag in the vicinity - it is suggested that this is more than would be needed for the road metalling so there may be an iron working site nearby. (2)

Metal detector survey in 2001 at Benenden School traced the line of this road and the Benenden-Canterbury road that branches off at this point. The junction is at a high point with views over the Weald. There is some suggestion that the Benenden-Canterbury road continues further west. (3)

Cropmark south of Chatham at 575235 442275 visible on the 2007 Google Earth image. Visible running N-S for 170m with a slight kink in.

A section of Roman trackway was found at the White Horse Stone CTRL site, which is probably the main Rochester-Maidstone route.

Superficial geophysical Survey of the Roman Road between Bodiam and Sandhurst Cross. (4)

The road featured in a Historic Landscape Survey conducted in Benenden in 2016. "The Roman road then became the alignment of a lathe boundary between the two Saxon agricultural estates of Wye and Lympne (Pollard and Aldridge 2008)." (5)

A cropmark is visible south-east of Knox Bridge at 578559, 140552 on Google Earth aerial photographs of 1960. (6)

Oxford Wessex Archaeology Joint Venture, 2011, Settling the Ebbsfleet Valley. CTRL Excavations at Springhead and Northfleet, Kent. Volume 2: Late Iron Age to Roman Finds Reports (Monograph). SKE32435.

<2> Neil Aldridge, 2009, Letter from Neil Aldridge with details of sites from the Bulletin of the Wealden Iron Research Group (Unpublished document). SKE16635.

<3> Neil Aldridge, 2005, Archaeological Notes from the Weald (Unpublished document). SKE16642.

<4> Staveley, D., 2010, A Geophysical Survey of the Roman Road between Bodiam and Sandhurst Cross, 2010 (Unpublished document). SKE17093.

<5> High Weald AONB Unit, 2016, Case study report: Benenden by footpath: Field Systems in the Weald Project (Unpublished document). SKE31799.

<6> Google Earth (Graphic material). SWX15704.

<7> Kent Archaeological Society, 1995, Kent Archaeological Society Newsletter 32, 1995 (Article in serial). SKE54514.

Sources and further reading

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