Dr. Francis McIntosh

And these roads are maintained.

We've got in the Vindolanda tablets again,

things talking about supplies coming in by cart and coming to Corbridge, going to collect it at Corbridge.

Corbridge seems to be a bit of a hub point.

But transport by water is always cheaper and quicker in the Roman period.

There's this excellent resource online called Orbis where you can have a look and you can do point to point and see how long it would take and what it would cost for the different means of transport.

But South Shields, we've mentioned, is on the coast, on the Tyne.

Fairly large ships could come up the East Coast

dock at South Shields, things could be offloaded into South Shields and put onto smaller boats.

And then we've got the Tyne, haven't we?

You know, it's a huge shipping route now, but it would have been then.

And there's not been any boats, Roman boats, found in Northumberland.

But in the Netherlands, the low countries, they found quite a lot because, again, of the soil conditions.

And their barges are very shallow.

Oh, well, yeah, shallow bottoms.

Yeah, very shallow bottom, you know, hardly any sort of depth in the water.

So when you have boats like that, it makes you think again about how navigable the river is and how far.

Because you could move things that way.

So transport is key.

Often the transport is more expensive than the thing itself, which changes, doesn't it, with certain items today.