Roman roads and straight roads in the UK
The number of known Roman roads in Britain is probably far less than were there originally. There’s even a wonderful organisation set up to study their extent: https://www.romanroads.org/ England (the east in particular) has a lot of villages with the main street called “the street”. This is believed to refer to a paved road or could be a corruption of the word “straight”, suggesting that the village was created on an old straight road or a well built road. Unusual things outside Roman times (there’s little usable stone in east Anglia, also see: GK Chesterton). It follows that the word street might be a sign of Anglo Saxons building villages on old Roman roads. A little side project I’ve been working on is to map all the known Roman roads and the roads called “the street” or those with other Roman type names “straight road”, “roman road”, “the causeway”, “devil’s way” etc and see if any line up. Whilst many roads with these names will be modern roads, some will be on the same routes as the Roman roads. This map allows you to explore the extent to which this is true. It looks like noise, mostly, but there are some interesting patterns in East Anglia.
Modern road data (in blue) for England and Wales from Open Street Map, matched by name including “(?i)the strait|the causeway|straight lane|streat lane|roman lane|straight lane|the street|roman road|roman bank|roman way|straight road|the straight|streht|street road|street lane|long causeway”. East Street, North Street, South Street, West Street and Roman Way can be added by selecting the layer, but they are excluded by default as lots of new developments appear to use these names.
Ancient roads (in red) including Margary’s roads from: http://romanroadsinbritain.info/data.html, copyright M.C.Bishop with a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike or CC BY-NC-SA) licence.