A1-The Great North Road
The A1 enters Nottinghamshire four miles south of Newark. The county boundary follows a little stream called the Shire Dyke and the road crosses it at the (completely insignificant) Shire Bridge. Thirty-four miles on the road reaches Yorkshire near Tickhill and Bawtry having crossed the Trent at Newark. But there was a more westerly route that crossed the Trent in Nottingham itself and headed for Doncaster through Sherwood Forrest following the present route of the A614. Some writers have regarded this as the North Road but since the road between Newark and Bawtry was often in a poor state of repair as it crossed the soft Keuper Marls and Sandstone of the Upper Trias, which produced more mud than road metal, travel may have been easier on the westerly route. Or maybe not; here's Holland Walker, writing in 1928:
The Old North Road is of immemorial antiquity. It joined the North and the South of England together, and crossing the Trent in the neighbourhood of the present Trent Bridge, it passed through Nottingham and so away by Rufford to Blyth and the North. This road was of great importance all through the Middle Ages, and along it passed all manner of wayfarers, some good, many bad. The presence of the latter did not make for the popularity of roads, and so villages gradually developed a little off the road. The roads were largely left to themselves, and for the most part led the anxious, thief-expecting wayfarer through remote and uninhabited districts. Gradually it was found safer to take the more devious roads that passed from village to village, and so the great trunk roads became more and more lonely. Moreover, no provision was made for their upkeep, and in spite of laws and statutes they became choked with thorns and wild growth and more than ever foundrous and perplexing, so that finally guides became necessary to conduct travellers along them from place to place. For thirty miles, from Nottingham to Blyth, the Old North Road passed through forest land whose intricacies made guides more necessary than ever.
Thanks to Andy Nicholson at Nottinghamshire History and Archaeology where there is more.
Walker writes of ...crossing the Trent in the neighbourhood of the present Trent Bridge.... He may have been referring to Nottingham, a rather westerly form of the Great North Road. Celia Fiennes, writing in the 1690s, finds no bridge: We enter Nottinghamshire and here I met with the strongest and best Nottingham ale that looked very pale but exeedingly clear, thence to Nottingham town, and we fery'd over the Trent, which in some places is so deep but waggons and horses fords it;
The Glasgow Mail followed the Great North Road in its early days but after 1821 it turned off at Newark and ran through Ollerton and Worksop to Doncaster, where it picked up its former route via Scotch Corner and Penrith to Glasgow.
The Roman route from Lincoln entered Nottinghamshire at a ford across the Trent between Marton and Littleborough but soon left the county at another ford on The River Idle near Bawtry. The Romans had a crossing in the Newark area but this does not seem to have been part of the main route north.
Lincolnshire
©Biff Vernon 2001, 2002, 2003