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Arg
I should have bookmarked the site but can't find it now. I'm looking for a source that tells me the average speed of a horse walking uphill. Context: in Deadfall I have the characters mounted and going up foothills from a river to a plateau in one day, the 3rd day of their journey, and am trying to work out the rough distance that would be.
The journey is a couple of hours on flattish lands from the river, into the foothills and up a windy road for some hours, then probably an hour or so on the plateau itself to their destination. With appropriate stops for rest, watering, etc. They're not fiends nor are they running hell for leather, just trying to get to the destination before nightfall.
I've managed to figure out the distance they travel the first 2 days of the journey is somewhere between 80-120K (roughly 50-75 miles), as it's by horse-drawn barge (over 2 days, with a stop in the middle). Probably closer to the shorter end, really, as there's various stops to load/offload cargo and passengers.
Basically, I wrote all this stuff going by times and now I'm trying to figure out what my actual landscape looks like, and the distances. :)
The journey is a couple of hours on flattish lands from the river, into the foothills and up a windy road for some hours, then probably an hour or so on the plateau itself to their destination. With appropriate stops for rest, watering, etc. They're not fiends nor are they running hell for leather, just trying to get to the destination before nightfall.
I've managed to figure out the distance they travel the first 2 days of the journey is somewhere between 80-120K (roughly 50-75 miles), as it's by horse-drawn barge (over 2 days, with a stop in the middle). Probably closer to the shorter end, really, as there's various stops to load/offload cargo and passengers.
Basically, I wrote all this stuff going by times and now I'm trying to figure out what my actual landscape looks like, and the distances. :)
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You can get more mileage if you swap out the horses (as barges often did, since pulling is a different kind of effort.)
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And it also seems that it's not that much shorter than the actual distance from the plains of Veneto to the plateau of Asiago, which is roughly what I'm basing it on.
See my next post: I found a link off of the link you gave which gave me a bit of amusement.
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(Are there locks? Locks are rest time for the horse, but they can take time. Are there tunnels you have to leg through?
The uphill speed depends on how long the stretch is and how steep; I'd expect 25-30 miles to be doable, more possible - this sounds as if the road is fairly straightforward, so no time needed for finding the way or getting lost.
Your main restriction is the quality of shoeing - horses *can* go barefoot, but not for long distances on stony ground day after day. (and not all horses can. And people who keep their horses barefoot frequently have to not-ride on abrasive ground for part of the time). A lost shoe, and particularly a shoe that's twisted off badly can stop the ride completely if the plot demands it.
Your other restriction is a combination of weather, daylight hours, and the state of the ground.
People who do endurance rides - 100 miles in 24 hours - ride their own horses whom they know exceedingly well, ride on a prepared route AND have great maps, and frequently don't make it, so that's your upper limit for _really_ desperate riding.
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The city where they begin is built in a gorge on the coast where the river ends in a big ol' waterfall through the city.* Ships coming into the harbor below unload and are forced to pay people to haul the cargo up to the bargeport at the top** to get it moving on the next leg of the trade route. Inspiration from Pompei, where they put big stones in the road to allow people to cross the road without getting their togas messy, and the stones also kept normally-proportioned carts from going through the town so merchants were forced to pay Pompeiian carters with specially-built carts to get their stuff to and from the harbor.
So I figured it was going to be much easier for the group to take the barge a couple of days, then hire horses at the closest bargeport to their destination than to hire horses at the city and carry three days' worth of gear and provisions. Weather's fine--it's late summer and the rains of fall have not yet set in--they're actually getting a move on to beat the rains. A couple of summer showers on the second day, but nothing else.
The plateau is as high as it needs to be for the party to go from the bargeport to their destination in one day. :)
* How is the river channeled there and how does the water not erode everything? Magic. Seriously. It's been that way for centuries, and nobody today knows how the previous residents did it. RULE OF COOL YO.
** not exactly at the top, a bit further up the river, but close enough
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I've got a book on the logistics of the Roman army but haven't had a chance to really dive into it yet.
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He spends a large amount of time calculating the average caloric requirements of the average Roman soldier at the beginning. XD
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