de bene esse: 'Roman' roads were actually built by the Celts, new book claims

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

The myth of straight Roman roads has been exposed by a new book which claims the extraordinary engineering feats were the work of the Celts.

Part of the Fosse Way in Gloucestershire, which a new book claims was built by the Celts, not the Romans Photo: ALAMY

The findings of Graham Robb, a biographer and historian, bring into question two millennia of thinking about Iron Age Britain and Europe and the stereotyped image of Celts as barbarous, superstitious tribes.

In reality the Druids, the Celt’s scientific and spiritual leaders, were some of the most intellectually advanced thinkers of their age, it is said, who developed the straight roads in the 4th Century BC, hundreds of years before the Italian army marched across the continent.

“They had their own road system on which the Romans later based theirs,” Mr Robb said, adding that the roads were built in Britain from around the 1st Century BC.

“It has often been wondered how the Romans managed to build the Fosse Way, which goes from Exeter to Lincoln. They must have known what the finishing point would be, but they didn’t conquer that part of Britain until decades later. How did they manage to do that if they didn’t follow the Celtic road?”

Mr Robb, former fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, first came up with the theory when he planned to cycle the Via Heraklea, an ancient route that runs a thousand miles in a straight line from the tip of the Iberian Peninsula to the Alps, and realised that it was plotted along the solstice lines through several Celtic settlements.

He mapped the positioning of hundreds of other towns and cities in France, Britain and Ireland and found that the Celt’s had organised them to mirror the paths of their Sun God, created a network straight of tracks following the solstice lines across swathes of the continent.

The Ancient Paths, released tomorrow, suggests that the Druids possessed map-making skills that historians believed were discovered centuries later and created the “earliest accurate map of the world”.

But their scientific and mathematical achievements have been long forgotten as there is no written evidence and their history has been replaced the stereotypes of them as wood-dwelling wildmen.

“Anything to do with the Celts and the Druids seems very implausible and that is why I spent five years on this, I thought it can’t be true, I have to disprove it,” Mr Robb said. “But they were a very advanced civilisation.

“There is an underlying sense that the civilisation that won must have been superior and that clearly isn’t the case.

“There is a lot of admiring what the Romans did, but they didn’t do it in a void, and it might be nice if there was a more nuanced view of the almighty Romans.”

A full review of The Ancient Paths will be available in The Daily Telegraph's Saturday review section.