One objection to identifying the road as Roman was that based on readings of the "Iter Britanniarum"—the section of the 4th-century Itinerary of Antoninus that lists major Roman Roads and stations within Britain—there had never been any major Roman roads in the area. In 1817, Young attempted to address this problem by arguing that the course of one of the identified "iters" ("iter" 1) had been misinterpreted and ran between Malton and Dunsley, passing through Wheeldale. Such an argument was possible because the "Iter Britanniarum" was not a map, but rather a list itinerary of roads and their distance between various settlements. Roman names for settlements were used in the document. Since many of these named sites had not been conclusively matched to contemporary settlements, identification of exact routes listed in the "Iter" was often difficult. There were few other objections at the time to the causeway's identification as a Roman road, and by the twentieth century, the causeway was commonly being referred to as the "Wheeldale Roman Road," or "Goathland Roman Road".