A1-The Great North Road
British road transport history is quite a mystery. Considering how important roads are and have been, remarkably few books have been written about their history. Never mind, this page will put the record straight.
It all started about 12 000 years ago, after some distinctly non-anthropomorphic global warming had cleared away the last Ice Age, when people walked into what was later to become, with a bit of sea level change, the British Isles. The next 8000 years are certainly more mystery than history but there are a few hints as to how things started at Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire and Star Carr, North Yorkshire.
A lot has been said about ridge ways and the need to avoid the deep dark impenetrable forests. But there is very little evidence that roads along hilltops were any more common than lower routes; they were just more likely to be preserved. And the deep dark impenetrable forest had enough sunlight for the regeneration of oak and hazel seedlings with glades kept open by a substantial population of large herbivores. So they were probably neither deep, nor dark, nor impenetrable.
There is a good deal of evidence of trade and transport long before the Roman road builders started work. The ancients were quite willing and able to move some pretty big things about the countryside. Just consider what sort of low loader would be required and how much congestion would ensue if, today, someone tried moving monoliths the size of the Devil's Arrows at Boroughbridge.
Little is known about the development of wheeled transport. By the time folk were burying their chariots in their graves, such as at Wetwang, East Yorkshire, carts were pretty sophisticated. The Romans found a country already set up with a half decent road network. They added the other half.
An intriguing history mystery is whatever happened to the Roman roads? Some of them have been used continuously and now lie buried well below tarmac level but many were abandoned. Some just didn't go in the right directions for a differently organized society with new settlement patterns. Others, however, run close and parallel to modern roads, yet lie abandoned. Did traffic decline so much and for so long that the Roman road decayed to the point at which it was easier to start afresh on a new line?
Historically the need to maintain bridges has long been recognized. The Statute of Bridges (1531) decreed that, in the absence of any traditional duty upon an individual, parish, hundred, corporation or other body to keep a particular bridge in repair, it should be maintained by the county. It gave the County Quarter Sessions powers to levy a parochial rate and appoint surveyors to undertake the repair and rebuilding of bridges. The Statute empowered Justices of the Peace to compel landowners or corporations to repair bridges, at the same time the Highways Act empowered Justices of the Peace to appoint Surveyors to each Parish to ensure that the inhabitants repaired roads and bridges.
Activity on the roads seems to have been considerable in medieval times, both for trade and for leisure, if pilgrimage can be described thus. There may have been a decline in traffic in the 14th century, coinciding with the Black Death, and later on the dissolution of the monasteries upset the organization of road maintenance so that by the time demand picked up the roads were found to be foundrous.
Enter the Statute of Phillip and Mary in 1555 and the start of a series of serious pieces of legislation appertaining to the roads. From here on we do have an increasing body of documentary evidence for how folk got about, how quickly and for what cost. The postal service has its origins in Tudor times, essentially for the communication of government business. To get a message from one place to another faster than a runner could manage a horse was required. But horses soon get tired so what was really required was a series of horses, waiting at about ten mile intervals, to act in relay. That took a bit of organizing. A civil servant on government business could turn up at any time, unexpected, riding a horse belonging to someone ten miles up the road and demand a fresh horse, pay the statutory compensation of a penny per mile and then disappear over the distant horizon. There had to be someone ready to retrieve the tired horse. All this became the responsibility of the postmaster. Remuneration from the government business would, typically, be insufficient to give up the day job. So the postmaster was often also innkeeper and maybe farmer and horse-breeder too. Gradually the carrying of private mail augmented the business, as did the horsing of private travellers. To 'ride post' was to travel not on one's own horse but to hire a fresh horse at each 'stage', to be returned by a postboy (who usually wasn't a boy) and demanded payment for his effort.
Until the 18th century most travel was done on horseback rather than with wheels. This was true of everyone from royalty to the merely rich; everyone else walked. There were wagons but they were painfully slow lumbering affairs. It was generally pleasanter to walk. Freight went by packhorse. And then came the stagecoach.
Jackman quotes from Dr Bannatyne's scrap-book, as given in Cleland's Statistics of Glasgow: The public have now been so long familiarized with stage-coach accommodation, that they are led to think of it as having always existed. It is, however, even in England, of comparatively recent date. The late Mr Andrew Thompson, Sen., told me that he and the late Mr John Glasford went to London (i.e. from Glasgow) in the year 1739, and made the journey on horseback. That there was no turnpike-road till they came to Grantham, within one hundred and ten miles of London. That up to that point they travelled upon a narrow causeway, with an unmade soft road upon each side of it. That they met, from time to time, strings of pack horses, from 30 to 40 in a gang, the mode by which goods seemed to be transported from one part of the country to another...
The east coast route of the Great North Road long remained a better road than the western route to Glasgow, as Smiles recounts in his biography of the road builder Thomas Telford:
Although Glasgow had become a place of considerable wealth and importance, the roads to it, north of Carlisle, continued in a very unsatisfactory state. It was only in July, 1788, that the first mail-coach from London had driven into Glasgow by that route, when it was welcomed by a procession of the citezens on horseback, who went out several miles to meet it. Bu the road had been shockingly made, and before long had become almost impassable. Robert Owen states that, in 1795, it took him two days and three nights' incessant travelling to get from Manchester to Glasgow, and he mentions that the coach had to cross a well-known dangerous mountain at midnight, called Erickstane Brae, which was then always passed with fear and trembling. As late as the year 1814 we find a Parliamentary Committee declaring the road between Carlisle and Glasgow to be in so ruinous a state as often seriously to delay the mail and endanger the lives of travellers.
Local funding for repairs proved unequal to the task and, in recognition of the national importance, an Act passed in 1816 allowed Parliament to grant £50,000 for the rebuilding of about 70 miles of the road under the supervision of Thomas Telford.
B & B Lincolnshire B&B
©Biff Vernon 2002, 2003