"Paving stones in a Roman Town" Topic

Recently, I was able to purchase the Roman building set from Forged in Battle in the UK. Its a really lovely set of buildings and I want to be sure that I present them in the best possible way.

Once painted, my intention is to mount them on a 6" by 6" plastic base. My feeling is that the central area, and perhaps the main street, should be paved? If so, what is the best way to model the paving? The buildings are somewhere between 15mm and 10mm, so the stones should probably be small in appearance.The side streets could probably just be of earth.

Since I know next to nothing about making terrain, I'm open to any and all ideas. I'll be using the town for Post-Roman Britain.

Thank you.

Check the wall paper online stores. There are some nice stone (alligator) Patterns.

Embossed plastic card such as Slaters PDF link

IIRC a lot of Roman roads were surfaced with gravel. They still had curbstones and an underlayment.

The smaller the scale means the size of the relief, cracks etc, would be tiny if at all noticable. Find a suitable stonework/paving pattern on the web, copy, resize and print
link

Google 'Pompeii streets' and have a look at the photos. They were paved and had raised pedestrian pavements at the sides. An interesting feature is the 'stepping stones' for pedestrians to cross the road without getting their feet covered in water/mud/horse dung etc. The gaps were presumably set at the correct distance for carts to pass.

Of course, by the time you got as far away as Britain it may have been less sophisticated….

Some road pavement found in Chester was 'sandstone rubble' link
and in Exeter gravel
link – some of the stone fragments seems to be decent sized – larger than pebbles.

Thank you to Wackmole, Swampster, Weddler, Pauls,and Cerdic for the excellent advice and links.

I took a look at the embossed plastic card recommended by Swampster, and ordered some to use for the center of town and the main street. The side streets will be textured with fine basing gravel.

I'm very grateful for everyone's help.

I have recently returned from visiting Pompeii, Herculaneum and Ancient Ostia.

I can't help but feel that the large rounded stones that we can see today were some sort of base layer and that there must have been a smoother layer on top, as put forward by Weddier. Otherwise there would have been a lot of lame horses and donkeys, I very nearly turned my ankle a few times when having to actually walk in the roadway.

We saw the stepping stones, due to the high kerb edges, only in Pompeii, the kerbs were lower and there were no stepping stones, that we came across, in either Herculaneum or Ostia.

I think in Pompeii the flagstones are showing the effects of erosion – partly weather, partly the 15000 visitors who might visit in a day (and that is a limit imposed to restrict damage) and who almost all go in the same areas rather than spread out like the original population. The Romans would have likely replaced the more worn surfaces several times by now.
Some of the lesser trod paths seemed to be in better condition although those going up the slope showed the damage caused by frequent streams of water.

Even with the damage, the surface of the streets of Pompeii and Herculaneum were still a lot less pot holed than a couple of the back streets of Ercolano which I made the mistake of venturing down.
The current caretakers do replace some surfaces but these seem to be the sidewalks which are not generally flagstoned.

The stepping stones are there because the streets, like those of all pre-industrial towns, would have been filled with horse and donkey s**t. The flagstones wouldn't have been visible, just a nice thick brown layer with cart tracks in it.