reserved in the
name of the street upon the Middlesex shore. The Watling Street is
fairly fixed in all its journey from the coast to the Archbishop's
palace on the banks of the river. On the Middlesex shore it is lost,
but it may be conjectured to have run in a curve somewhere in the
neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace up on the higher ground west of the
Tybourne, parallel with or perhaps identical with Park Lane until we
find it certainly again at the Marble Arch, whence in the form of the
Edgware Road it begins a clear track across North-Western England.

As for the Fosse Way, it only just touches the valley of the Thames.
It crosses the line of the river in a high embankment a mile or so
below its traditional source at Thames head, but above the point where
the first water is seen. A small culvert running under that embankment
takes the flood water in winter down the hollow, but no longer covers
a regular stream.

Besides these four crossings of the old British ways above London
Bridge there is the crossing of the Roman Road at Staines, which may
or may not represent a passage older than the Roman occupation. We
have no proof of its being older. The river is deep, and, unless the
broken causeway on the Surrey shore is regarded as the remains of
British work, there is no trace of a pre-Roman track in the
neighbourhood.

The crossing at Staines was the main bridge over the middle river
during the Roman occupation; no other spot on the banks (except London
Bridge) is _certainly_ the site of a Roman bridge.

But apart from these there are two unsolved problems in connection
with the roads across the Thames Valley in Roman times. The first
concerns the passage of the upper Thames south of Eynsham; the second
concerns the road which runs south from Bicester and Alchester.

As to the first of these, we know that the plain lying to the north of
the Thames between the Cotswolds and the Chilterns was thoroughly
occupied. We have also in the Saxon Chronicle a legendary account of
the occupation of four Roman towns in this plain by the Saxon
invaders. By what avenue did this wealthy and civilised district
communicate with the wealthy and civilised south?

It is a question which will probably never be answered. There is no
trace remaining of Roman bridges; perhaps nothing was built save of
wood.

The obvious short-cut from the Roman town of Eynsham across the Witham
peninsula to Abingdon bears no signs of a ford approache