Quotes About Great North Road

It is a humiliating fact that at nineteen the keenest sorrows have a habit of yielding, with uncanny readiness, to the soothing effects of excitement and a change of scene. It is a sound instinct, after all, which takes the rejected lover to the wilds to shoot hippopotami and lions. Even the female of the species—not of hippopotami and lions—can obtain a considerable amount of balm from driving along the Great North Road at eighty miles an hour.

Aldersgate Street, the bottom of the A1 - which was the modern designation of the original Great North Road, built by the Romans two thousand years ago to march its garrisons to the very edge of the empire three hundred miles to the north. Their duty was to reinforce Hadrian's Wall, keeping the outer darkness at bay and the empire safe.