"How is the new steward coming along, Artos?" I asked my assistant one day in late spring. We were walking out of Winterfell and through Winter Town.
"Adequately, my lady," he replied. "When Lord Cerwyn suggested his daughter, Jonelle, for the position, I was… doubtful. But she knows her letters and numbers quite well, and by her own words, she learned alongside her brother, Clay Cerwyn, at his lordship lessons."
"So she will be able to perform all the duties expected of a steward?"
"Aye, she will," he agreed.
"And what do you think about it?" I pressed.
"I think that, ten years ago, such an arrangement would have been impossible, my lady," he replied. "But given your example, I think more lords and merchants will be more open to the idea."
"I agree," I said with a smile and a nod. "It is important, though, to ensure she is competently performing all of her duties. She accepted the role; I expect her to perform at least as well as any other steward."
"Given what I've seen of her, I believe she will, my lady."
"Good."
We passed outside of Winter Town to the project that was just beginning there. The King's Road didn't actually pass through Winterfell, but ran less than a mile from the outskirts of Winter Town on its way north. The first leg of my project would be the road from Winter Town to where it met with the King's Road.
In short, I decided it was time to fund concrete roads. While this stretch would be paid for out of my own pocket, if Ned approved, I would talk to him about funding more road improvement all over the North.
"Donnel," I greeted the foreman for the work crew. Looking around, nearly three dozen men were busily digging away at the existing road. "How is the work coming?"
"Adequately, my lady," he answered. "We're plowing out the road bed and the ditches at the moment."
I nodded. Rather than having the men dig by hand, I'd elected to use plows to churn and loosen the soil. All the men would have to do is scoop it into carts for either disposal or later use.
Based on the principles of the Roman roads, I'd designed a road that should, once built, require little maintenance. Barring a total washout, the only real maintenance it would need was the filling of potholes, or the replacement of short sections of paving.
With the porous multilayer road bed made of larger and smaller chunks of stone and gravel, any liquids that get under the surface layer of the road would seep out into the ditches, and with the poured concrete road surface tilted slightly toward the edges, it should allow for water to run off rather than flood the road.
Using plows to do most of the initial digging, and only coming through with shovels to refine the rough cuts the plows made, saved a lot of time and labor. Adding in a heavy stone roller pulled by a team of horses to pack the native earth road bed down before adding the other layers also firmed up the foundation and would hopefully increase strength.
I'd also elected to use the slag from the blast furnaces as infill material in the road beds. Not only did this get rid of it, the slag was unlikely to erode away; it would make a decent material for the road base. I'd considered using it as paving stones, but I didn't think the production would keep up with the demand. On top of the infill material, a fine concrete mixed with local gravel and small stones (anything smaller than a man's thumb) would be poured to keep the infill in place. This layer would have the 'hump' in the middle to allow water to run off. The final surface layer would be slabs of cobbled concrete.
As much as I wanted to use the carved blocks of basalt or native stone that the Romans used as paving stones, I thought that would be terribly labor intensive and expensive. Instead, locally sourced cobbles would have to suffice. Perhaps at some point if I found a source of good shale or sandstone that broke into flat but strong pieces, I'd switch to using that as paving stones.
In the meantime, cobbled roads would suffice. They were rather durable, after all. I'd tested the cobbled slabs as best as I could; the men had walked on it, jumped on it, ran over it with both empty and loaded carts, and generally abused it to the best of their abilities. The mixture of quicklime, sand, pea gravel, and cobbles held together quite well. I'd have to see how well it held up to weathering, but I was rather optimistic about it.
"How much do you think you'll be able to do in a day of work?" I asked.
"I couldn't say, milady," he shrugged. He gestured at the work that was currently underway. Currently, the ditches had been dug and the native earth was being packed down. The work zone was about a hundred yards long at the moment. "This stretch here has taken us two days. At this rate, it'll take us a sennight before we can start pouring."
"I see," I replied with a frown. "How is the flow of materials?"
"We're close to the quarry, so we're not waiting for anything," he replied. "But as we get further away, and if the weather doesn't cooperate, that may change."
"I see," I sighed. Perhaps my expectations were too high, given how used to modern machinery I was, but this seemed… a lot slower than I'd hoped for.
"If it helps, milady, I think the pace will improve as the men get more experience," he replied. "And more workers would certainly help."
"I understand," I replied. "I'll see what I can do."
The slightly less than a mile stretch from Winter Town to the King's Road took a little more than a month and a half to finish. Work had, indeed, sped up as the men had grown accustomed to it, though nowhere near as fast as I'd hoped they would be.
'Paving all the main roads in the North is going to take years,' I thought with some dismay. 'I could speed up the process by hiring more work crews and establishing new concrete plants in other lords' lands, but that would be terribly expensive…'
Given the economic body blow the Crown had dealt us, I wanted to be cautious with how I spent my money. It wasn't the materials that were costing money; it was the labor.
'If only I had a few Roman Legions to throw at the issue,' I mentally complained.
Alas, there were no standing armies at my command, and given the medieval society, the establishment of a standing army would be seen as a major threat. After all, lords only called their banners when they were at war, or were soon to be at war.
'Still, even if the project takes twenty or thirty years, it'll make travel and trade much easier in the North,' I rationalized. 'So maybe only a few work crews at a time for now. Progress will be slow, but if we keep it to the largest and most important roads…'
"Well, Ned?" I asked. "What do you think?"
"This might be the finest road I've ever seen," he replied.
He was standing on the crest of the hump in the center of the road, stamping his boots against the hard road surface. The road ran mostly straight, curving slightly here and there with the topography of the land. The road was wide enough for three carts to run abreast; any wider and it would have taken longer to construct, but any narrower and a broken wheel or axle would have blocked traffic.
Ned stared at a cart as it rumbled by, moving at a trot rather than at a walking pace. Even with the cobbles embedded in the concrete, their surfaces were flush with the level of the road, presenting a smooth surface for the carts' wheels to roll over. Given the pace at which carts could travel over this road, if all the major roads were paved, trade could travel nearly as fast as a man on horseback.