"French Country Roads 1940's?" Topic

Hi I am about to start a new project which begins with modeling some French country roads. Does anyone know if they were prominently unsealed or asphalt or cobble stone or all three in approximate equal measures?
Bonus question should some or many or no fields be fenced with stone walls?

This is a topic I am very interested in myself. I don't have any answers, Maxshadow, but would love to know. I recently did some 6mm paved roads for WWII Western Europe and some bridges, one of which is a stone bridge which would be more typical of Western Europe. The roadway on either side of the bridge is an unpaved dirt road but I am interested to know if there were a fair number of smaller paved roads at this time.

I don't have any sources on this, but since farm traffic was still largely horse-drawn, logically, the side roads were probably not paved.

Having watched some documentaries on 1914 Retreat from Mons. etc. Lanes / small roads… (still there today)… could be dirt or well shaped cobbles ( I think referred to as Pave). The paved roads were very hard on the feet in hobnailed boots. Unsure about asphalt.
Wargame dirt roads are usually a rich brown… but some areas, would have had a much lighter… greyish colour… hence the almost white 'dust' covering many vehicles in pics.
Others will have more experience than I.

Thank you all for your help. What threw me originally were some B/W photos that appeared to be dirt but were actually reflective! rmkers point regarding the horses is a good one though. I think I'll just go with dirt out side of towns.

Roads were cobbled. The French call it pavé. If you want to see what it looks like go on YouTube and search for Paris-Roubaix. Known as the hell of the north, it is a professional cycle race that utilises surviving sectors of pavé. Brutal, brutal race.

Having personally driven around most of the Normandy battlefields, I can confirm that most of the country lanes would have been (and many still are) unpaved, as in the first of the photos here:
link
The surface is a light colour, gravelly/stoney in texture, and very dusty when dry.
Roads in towns, town squares and roads between major towns were more likely paved with cobbles and these roads would be tree lined.
Field boundaries would depend on the area; ranging from bocage in north-west Normandy, to hedges and fences in other areas. I don't recall seeing many stone walls used as boundaries, at least not like the dry stone walls in Yorkshire/ Derbyshire, etc, although farms and houses in villages often have high walls connecting the perimeter of the buildings.

R.A. Perkins, Roads and Pavements in France (1896) is available on the Internet Archives. There were subsequent editions, to the early 1900s, I think, but I have only ever used the 1896 one.

But, generally, +1 noggin2nog's excellent summary.

Some of the best imagery of period roads is in period specific postcards. The region was a tourist mecca, so these can easily be found online, and often in colour. Dirt roads, especially in towns, were often cobbled at the margins.

Roads like medievals or Romans (!) Forget it.
Only chemins, farm lanes, fields etc, dirt or irregular stones.
Routes départementales:
Most either macadam ( sort of crushed stones finish)
Routes nationales and towns most bitumen
Here a reading of period maps and the evolution on samples
link
1932 starts the yellow lines in the middle.
Can't find the proportion finished by 1940. Loads of ww2 pics can show you things. With the above link which shows period maps legends, if you find a map you can see the state of the road. Like here
cartesmich.free.fr/ww2.php

I can't comment on 1940's roads or when the change from dirt to paved took place.

I can say that on the 3 trips I've made to Normandy that finding dirt roads in 2000's was not common, but it wasn't uncommon for the more remote areas we were searching out.

All the small one lane (or slightly wider) roads around Hill 30 (US paratrooper hot spot) were dirt or crushed stone (2006 trip) and lots of the roads cutting up the fields into the hedgerows were still dirt (2013).

JcFrog – great site for maps, thanks. I've copied a few to files to shrink down for figures to hold or cover a table in a HQ.

Country lanes called officially "chemins vicinaux" are still mostly dirt, stones. They are not roads as such. Most peopke woukd never drive on them, you take them off your gps authorization. This is not Russia…
If your "battle" is a couple of companies on 600x 800m then yes, your "roads" can just be these, between farms and whatnot. But the thing passing through the village going to somewhere, if not in a right remote center or Corsica place, in 1940 would already be red brown / grey looking with maybe a yellow line etc. Plus every km one borne, showing distance, road name…

Awesome maps thank you So, looking to have a main road between villages so will see if I can reproduce a dirty bitumen with any side roads of dirt.