Quote Originally Posted by johnboy View Post
Yep.
Or at least; that's what it's called in our language.
We're 750 ft up the side of a dormant volcano, so any metal (ie rocks/gravel,) are volcanic in origin.
And extremely hard.
I'm surprised, jb! You must have been looking at the girls in Latin class when they had the discussion on "metallum"
Gravel is known to have been used extensively in the construction of roads by soldiers of the Roman Empire (see Roman road) but in 1998 a limestone-surfaced road, thought to date back to the Bronze Age, was found at Yarnton in Oxfordshire, Britain.[23] Applying gravel, or "metalling," has had two distinct usages in road surfacing. The term road "metal" refers to the broken stone or cinders used in the construction or repair of roads or railways,[24] and is derived from the Latin metallum, which means both "mine" and "quarry".[25] The term originally referred to the process of creating a gravel roadway. The route of the roadway would first be dug down several feet and, depending on local conditions, French drains may or may not have been added. Next, large stones were placed and compacted, followed by successive layers of smaller stones, until the road surface was composed of small stones compacted into a hard, durable surface. "Road metal" later became the name of stone chippings mixed with tar to form the road surfacing material tarmac. A road of such material is called a "metalled road" in Britain, a "paved road" in Canada and the US, or a "sealed road" in parts of Canada, Australia and New Zealand.[26]
I recall you telling me we'd be driving on a "metal road", and then turning on a nicely maintained gravel roadway.