A View On A High Road

This is what road conditions were like in Europe from the fall of Rome until the 19th century.  The painting is A View On A High Road by Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709), a Dutch landscape painter a pupil of the better-known Jacob van Ruisdael.  High Road was the term for a major thoroughfare.  Macadam and asphalt were a really big deal when they were introduced a couple of centuries later (see Forgotten Americans: Jacob de Smedt & Nathan B Abbott).