[Illustration: A Sketch Map of the Roman Road from Malton to the Coast,
and a Plan of the Camps on the Road at Cawthorne. (_From the Ordnance
Survey_.)]

Coming to the firmer ground of the actual remains of the Roman roads and
camps, we find that traces of a well-constructed road, locally known as
Wade's Causeway, have been discovered at various points on a line drawn
from Malton to Cawthorne and Whitby. Some of these sections of the road
have disappeared since Francis Drake described them in 1736,[2] and at the
present time the work of destruction continues at intervals when a farmer,
converting a few more acres of heather into potatoes, has the ill-luck to
strike the roadway.

[Footnote 2: Drake, Francis: "Eboracum," p. 36.]

In the month of January this year (1905), I examined a piece of ground
newly taken under cultivation at Stape. It was about half a mile north of
the little inn and just to the west of Mauley Cross. The stones were all
thrown out of their original positions and a pile of them had been taken
outside the turf wall for road-mending and to finish the walls against the
gate posts, but the broad track of the roadway, composed of large
odd-shaped stones, averaging about a foot in width, was still strikingly
in evidence--a mottled band passing straight through the
chocolate-coloured soil.

All who have described the road state that on each side of the causeway
where it remains undisturbed there is a line of stones placed on their
edges in order to keep the stones in place, but in this instance the
stones were too much disturbed to observe their original formation. Among
the furrows I discovered quantities of flint-flakes, indicating the
manufacture of stone implements on this site, no flints being naturally
found in the neighbourhood.

The road went through the most perfectly constructed of the three square
camps at Cawthorne from west to east, cutting through one corner of the
adjacent oval camp. It then seems to have passed down the slack a little
to the north-east, and crossing the stream below (probably in Roman times
by a wooden bridge) it takes a fairly straight course for the little
hamlet of Stape just mentioned. The slope from the camps is extremely
steep, and in 1817, when Dr Young wrote his "History of Whitby," he tells
us that there were no traces of the road at that point. Going back to
1736, however, we find that Drake, in his "History of York" published in
that year, says, "At the fo