08-28-2013, 09:07 PM
Quote:The difficulty with its being a pass... is the presence of the wood. Paulinus evidently regarded this as a blocking feature.
That's a good point. Tacitus does say that the position was 'closed' by the wood at the rear. But this could be a literary device, contrasting the 'closed wood' (silva clausum) behind with the 'open plain' (apertam planitiem) in front... Anyway, I would argue (of course!) that the steep wooded north-west slopes of the Chiltern escarpment would effectively prevent any flanking of the Dunstable position, and the woodland (apparently) covering the site of modern Dunstable itself would prevent the deployment of troops behind the Roman lines. It was still a through-route, just a very constricted one.
Quote:the Iceni were looking for a final battle and they somehow strangely felt compelled to play into Roman hands by using their new fangled road network.
The gap in the hills from Flamstead through to Dunstable was, I would think, almost certainly a road long before the Romans turned up! If the Britons were at St Albans, it was no great distance away either...
Nathan Ross