If you’ve found this page you definitely qualify as a Great North Road obsessive – and deserve to be introduced to another.

Bernard Dady likes writing songs. They are creative, thought provoking, quirky and fun. They cover any topic under the sun from stained glass windows to druids.

Happily, he chose to compose one (in fact four in one) about the Great North Road.

Its neatly done and cleverly encompasses the span of years and miles which is the topic of this website. Enjoy!

Bernard explains:

I am intrigued by the space between history and myth. This piece consists of four songs (and a reprise) that explore the Great North Road in the UK. The road has meandered its way north between London and Edinburgh since before Roman times. Like a river it has taken different routes and has more recently been tamed by modern road building.

The old north road (Ermine Street) was built by the Romans and followed a route to the east via Lincoln, across the Humber by ferry and on to York (Eboracum). I imagined the ninth legion marching north from Londonium. Especially this legion, as it mysteriously disappears before 120AD. Legend says through its destruction fighting the Brittonic tribes north of Hadrian’s Wall. Some historians think later on mainland Europe. Whatever, they are the ghost legion of the reprise at the end.

We travel the road both north and forward in time. In the middle ages, some time in the 1200s, we follow the trackway on its more westerly route, through Sherwood to Barnsdale Forest, the haunt of Robin Hood. Most of that forest is now disappeared. Hence the lament in that section.

By the 1700s the Great North Road carried both the post and passengers by horse drawn coach. It remained little more than a rutted track. There was no national road building programme in Britain between the Roman era and the twentieth century.

It took four days, if you were lucky, to get from London to York. Around this journey grew the myth of Dick Turpin, the famous highwayman. Given the banditry and loss inflicted on travellers, it is interesting that we have forged the myth of the honourable highwayman. Turpin was not the only criminal working the Great North Road.

The final song takes us to the modern day, travelling the surfaced road, now blandly called the A1 (or A1M where it has been upgraded to multiple carriageway motorway). We pass Anthony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North‘ just south of the River Tyne and then cross the Roman Wall close to Newcastle. Now the journey is about speed and the road is straightened and it avoids the towns and villages that it once linked, thanks to the modern day ‘bypass’.

Journeying in Northumberland we end with echoes of history. The ancient kingdom of Bernicia and then greater Northumbria. Invasion by pagan warriors from across the north Sea and the origins of British Christianity on Holy Island (Lindisfarne). From Scottish border raiders to modern day freight traders.

Yet through all of this the ghosts of the IX Hispana legion still march the Great North Road. In my song anyway.