That 'perfectly preserved' Roman road in England felt off to me

I drove up to see the section near Leicester last month, the one everyone posts photos of. Yeah it looks cool, straight lines and all, but something bugged me the whole time. The edges are TOO clean. Like someone pressure washed it last week clean. I get they excavated it, but the original stones were probably worn down by carts for hundreds of years, not this uniform flat slab look. Are they secretly rebuilding these sites for tourists and passing it off as original? Has anyone else walked a "preserved" site and thought the same thing?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_simon21d ago

Or maybe the drainage ditches got restored too... nobody talks about water flow.

kim.zara21d ago

Thats actually a really good point. Everyone focuses on the pretty landscaping and the fancy new plants, but the real hero might be the underground stuff nobody sees. If the drainage is working right, it changes everything about how the soil stays moist and where the water actually ends up. Could be the reason why things are finally growing instead of just flooding out every time it rains hard. Plus, good drainage stops the roots from rotting, which is a silent killer for a lot of these projects. It’s like the boring mechanical fix that makes all the visible stuff finally work the way it should.