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Monks ‘discovered’ Arthur and Guinevere’s graves in 1193, just when funds were needed for a new abbey.
Roman roads
A comprehensive road system underpinned the exceptional degree of mobility and trade that characterised the Roman Empire, and much of the modern road system in Europe and the Mediterranean region is built on top of Roman constructions. Roman roads are also among the earliest relics of antiquity to be studied and mapped.
Despite this, the authors of a paper published in Scientific Data in November 2025 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06140-z) estimate that we only know the precise location of 2.7% of the Roman road network, while the routes of 90% are conjectural and 7.3% entirely hypothetical. The authors calculate that their own analysis has doubled the number of known routes, resulting in the most detailed and comprehensive open digital dataset of roads in the entire Roman Empire yet published.
The new Digital Atlas of Ancient Roads (itiner-e.org) covers the area of the Roman Empire in AD 150 and includes roads pre-dating the Roman conquest that continued to be used during the Roman period. It was created by identifying roads from archaeological and historical sources and locating them using modern and historical topographic maps and remote sensing, and the routes are linked to settlements listed in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places (http://pleiades.stoa.org).
The total length of the roads thus mapped amounts to just under 300,000km. Of these, a third consist of the main roads that formed the core of the Roman terrestrial transport network. The authors say this number is unlikely to increase significantly, since these include all the best documented routes, known through milestones, itineraries, and historical sources. What remains to be researched in much greater detail is the far greater proportion of secondary roads that underpinned the structure of more local mobility, so there is still much scope for new Roman road discovery in all parts of the Empire.
Potential for many more
One example of a new road has just been published in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association for 2025. Some 38 years ago, in 1987, the author Alan Richardson pointed to the evidence for a 32km road in the UK known in parts as the Staffordshire Way, recorded as Roman as early as 1620 and marking the boundary between the counties of Staffordshire and Cheshire. Alan has now found documentary support for his conjecture that the road was much longer and that it was probably built between AD 48 and AD 70, when the Roman army sent to conquer Britain was (according to Tacitus) facing stout resistance in what is now Wales and the West Midlands.
Much later, in 1405, Owain Glyndŵr, the Welsh military commander who led a 15-year war against English rule in Wales, made a pact with two English rebels to overthrow King Henry IV and divide up the kingdom between them. The treaty envisaged shifting the Welsh border eastwards to the line of the ‘old or ancient way’ (vetus si antiqua via), which the treaty describes as running from Worcester to the source of the River Trent, and from there to the source of the River Mersey. After that, it joins a known Roman road heading for Castleshaw Roman fort and then on to the legionary fortress at York. Plausibly it continued south to the Roman legionary fortress at Gloucester, making a total length of 195km.
Meanwhile, Dr Mark Merrony, of Oxford University, has announced the discovery of a hitherto unknown section of Roman road in south-west Wales, contradicting previous assumptions that the Romans did not garrison that portion of Wales. Used in the medieval period as a drovers’ road and in more recent times for military training, the road is deeply sunken in places. The route is marked on some early maps as Hen Ffordd (‘Old Road’), a name, it appears, often associated with roads that date from the Roman period.
The truth behind an Arthurian legend
Among the many interesting stories published on the website Medievalists.net is an article by author and historian Lorris Chevalier, who encountered a reference in a 13th-century theological work to the tombs of the Knights of the Round Table. In a tract from 1250-1261 containing material for preachers to use in composing their sermons, Étienne de Bourbon claimed that he had seen the graves where ‘the Romans fought Arthur’s household and where innumerable warriors on both sides had fallen’. He locates the graves near a village he calls Aleuse in the diocese of Autun, France, and he says that most of the countless tombs now contain nothing but dust.
In exploring what might lie behind this eye-witness account, Lorris determined that Étienne’s Aleuse aligns with the present-day village of Saint-Émiland, about 15km south-east of Autun. Medieval charters attest to the earlier names Lahusia and Leusia, probably derived from the Romance luizel/luysel/luseau, from the Latin locellus (box or casket) or loculus (a burial niche in a catacomb).
None of these names are surprising once you realise that this village was a major centre for the production of stone coffins during the late Roman and early medieval periods. Conveniently sited on the Roman road from Lyon to Boulogne, the village served as the distribution centre for sarcophagi hewn from local quarries. ‘Innumerable tombs of great size’ were described by 17th-century travellers, and, as late as the 19th century, the Abbé Lecreuze remarked on the many sarcophagi visible in the cemetery and in surrounding fields, with fragments used to pave the streets and whole coffins inverted as flagstones.
Lorris Chevalier concludes that this is a very early attempt to link the Arthurian legends to a specific landscape, though not quite as early as the enterprising monks of Glastonbury who ‘discovered’ the graves of Arthur and Guinevere in 1193, just when funds were needed for a new abbey.
Killing the dead
Graves furnished with everything necessary for a happy afterlife are the stock in trade of archaeologists and provide evidence that the idea of life after death is as old as humankind. In normal circumstances, the spirits of the dead are seen as a force for good, able to exercise benign influence over the living if placated or treated with respect and honour. Logically, they can turn nasty if they suffer a violent death, or if their tombs are neglected by their successors.
It is these latter restless spirits that concern Oxford professor John Blair, whose latest book, Killing the Dead, traces the ancient and surprisingly widespread belief that the dead can rise from their graves to wreak havoc in the community, and argues that ‘deviant burials’, including decapitation, burial face-down, and pinning to the grave with wooden or metal spikes, aim to keep them locked down.
One of the very earliest textual references to this practice takes the form of a cuneiform inscription in the tomb of Queen Yâba at Nimrud (modern Iraq), dating from the 8th century BC, in which it is recorded that she was tightly bound to frustrate her ability to bite, suck, chew, or speak after death. In Hamlet (Act 5, Scene 1, lines 220-225), the priest officiating at the burial of Ophelia objects to being commanded by the king to give her a Christian burial, despite the fact that she took her own life: ‘Her death was doubtful’, he says, and hence ‘Shards, flints and pebbles should be thrown on her’ – a symbolic form of pinning down a body that might become restless.
The best-known example of belief in predatory corpses dates from the epidemic of so-called ‘vampire-killing’ that took place in the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1710 and 1760, with an average of 15 recorded instances of corpse ‘killing’ a year over that period. The Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780) was so concerned that she issued a decree in which she described the exhumation and burning of corpses as superstitious, declaring ‘we will in no way allow such sinful abuses in our territories; they will henceforth be subject to the most severe penalties.’
John concludes that the restless dead are most likely to be attacked at times of societal stress, marked by events that upset the customs and belief systems that underpin stable life. Catastrophic events and periods of acute violence and disease are easily blamed on the malign influence of the dead, who are only separated from the living by the thinnest of veils in many forms of religious belief and cultural practice.
Chris Catling is an archaeologist and writer, fascinated by the off-beat and the eccentric in the heritage world.
