Icknield Street

On 25 June 1863 the Birmingham Daily Gazette gave its readers a route for a summer walk. Ride to Perry Barr, it suggested, then walk by “the Gough’s Arms, Oscott College, Romans’ Field, King’s Standing, and enter the Park”, along “the great Roman road, Icknield Street. This is a favourite way, and richly does it deserve to be so.”

The walkers of 1863 were crossing farmland and old heath. Their path is now Kingstanding Road, and the Roman road behind the name is one of the oldest things in Kingstanding.

Wall to Metchley

Icknield Street, also written Ryknild or Ryknield Street, was a Roman military road of the first century AD. This stretch ran between Wall, the Roman Etocetum, and Metchley. On its way it crossed the open heath of Perry Barr.

Following the line

The maps show where it went. In 1775 William Yates lettered a road “Street” running north to south across the heath, on the line of today’s Kingstanding Road and the old Holly Lane. The Ordnance Survey’s one-inch map, revised in 1831–32, prints “ICKNIELD STREET” along the road near the Royal Oak, heading north towards Sutton Park. In 1900 the antiquary B. C. A. Windle wrote that the Street “was identical with Holly Lane”.

The Victoria County History of Staffordshire was more cautious in 1908. South of Kettle House, the farm that stood just south-west of today’s Circle, it said the Roman road “does not exist as a modern road”. The line was there, in other words, but not the road itself.

The line mattered for another reason. It also served as a boundary, with the Perry Barr parish line drawn along it, and the county boundary with it.

The King’s Standing beside the road

The mound that gave Kingstanding its name stands right beside the line, and writers have disagreed about exactly where for more than two hundred years. Stebbing Shaw, in 1798, put the road “a few yards East of King’s Standing”. The official list entry for the scheduled barrow turns that round, placing the mound “to the east of Ryknield Street Roman road” and “adjacent to the route”. W. H. Duignan, in 1902, was content with “within two hundred yards”. Which side the Romans passed on is still open. That they passed close by, nobody doubts.

A little to the south, on the west side of the road, lay Romans Field, named on the map of 1831–32. Historic England’s record for it is brief and to the point: “Roman coins found in Roman Field.”

Looking for the road itself

For all that, nobody has yet found the road in the ground here. No length has been excavated in or near Kingstanding, and none is scheduled. A resistivity survey at Perry Barr, made ahead of a pipeline to find the road from Wall to Metchley, recorded “no definitive evidence”. A dig at Prince Albert School in Perry Barr set out to investigate the Roman road and found a Bronze Age pit alignment instead.

To see the real thing, go north. In Sutton Park a length of about 2.6 kilometres is protected within the park’s scheduled monument, and in 1863 a small bronze coin of Constantine was found beside it. A newspaper writer in 1909, following the Street south, noticed how thoroughly it had vanished from the fields. But for the names of fields and places beside the road, he wrote, it would in places be difficult to identify, adding: “Romans Field is close by Icknield Street”.

Romans Field is under houses now, and the heath was enclosed two centuries ago. Yet the line held. Every bus that climbs Kingstanding Road towards the Circle is following, as near as anyone can tell, a road the Romans laid out nearly two thousand years ago.