Returning from war

...But if in your boyhood you had read Jusserand with D'Arcy Thompson's book also in mind, you derived a lasting feeling that the preexistence and physical condition of the road-ways of the fourteenth century had a great deal to do with causing and shaping the life of that period.

You derived the feeling that roads had played an active part in the great formations, language, law, and order and so forth, which arise in an energetic society.

You saw that the great roads of the world should be studied, not merely for the ways in which they exhibited various heydays of various civilizations, but for the ways in which heydays of civilizations came into being.

You saw, in short, that in the great academic department of morphology there had to be a special room devoted to the study of roads

Frank Morley, soldier returning from war in search of deep England, in The Great North Road (1961).