A1-The Great North Road
Scotch Corner is today an important junction of trunk roads leading into eastern, and west and central, Scotland, and the Romans were responsible for making the first trunk roads to meet there for that same purpose. A road branches north-westward to Penrith here. The Roman junction was situated about 300 yards north of the modern roundabout, and at this point the northern road made a slight reversed curve which has now been ironed out in its reconstruction as a great dual-carriageway road, though the old course still exists in the western verge as a lay-by for lorries. Margary
Oil painting of Scotch Corner by Biff Vernon
As a road junction this a place with history, a junction of Brigantian trade routes in pre-Roman Britain. In AD 71 the Romans took control of the North when they defeated the Brigantes, a great Northern Celtic tribe at The Battle of Scotch Corner. The Brigantes were ancient Britons, speaking the language from which Welsh is derived, who occupied most of Yorkshire and Durham and were the largest single tribe in pre-Roman Britain. The Stanwick fortifications, five miles north-west of Scotch Corner, form the most extensive Celtic site in Britain. They were a sophisticated group whose agriculture and metal-working technologies were as advanced as any in Europe. They just didn't write about it.
Look at the 1857 OS Map to see layout of the road junction had then - just a simple cross-roads with a pub, the Three Tuns on the corner. In the 1930s, the grand Scotch Corner Hotel was built and a roundabout created but the original alignment of the approach roads was maintained. Eventually the A1 was put in a cutting further east, under the eastern end of the roundabout and straightening the road that had kinked, first one way, then the other, just north of the old cross-roads. Slip roads were constructed and the old course of the road partly abandoned. The two pubs south of Scotch Corner, the Crown and Anchor and the Blue Anchor are no more.
The kinks in the old road's alignment were explained by M.D.Anderson thus:
The almost superhuman efficiency of most Roman road-builders becomes even more impressive when we note their occasional lapses. They were not infallible, and, a few hundred yards north of Scotch Corner, two misaligned sections of Dere Street (the present A1) had to be joined by a short stretch running at an angle of forty degrees to the general direction, until this historically interesting blunder was corrected by modern engineers.
Strange, then, that Scotch Corner isn't 300 yards further north, where the Roman roads meet.
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In John Warburton's map of Yorkshire from 1720 the Roman Roads are drawn rather straighter than reality. Scotch Corner is the crossroads west of Middleton. There is no sign of the kink in the Roman road just to the north where the Carlisle road branches off to the west. The Great North Road is the road shown passing Barton and leaving for Darlington to the north-east, while the road to the north, running close to the Roman line, leads to Piercebridge and Bishop Auckland. |
Before the grade separated junction.
| There's a big modern service station in the north east corner of the A1-A66 junction, (leave the A1 and there's an access road off the roundabout), with a cafe and shop and vases of flowers in the loos - yes, even in the gents. But for a traditional roadside cafe (and loo without the flowers) go up the A66 for about 100 yards in a Penrith direction. The Vaughan family run the Scotch Corner Transport Cafe Truck Stop This café used to be a little shed on the south roadside but in the 1990s a kink in the A66 was straightened, leaving the café, now brick built, in a large lay-by formed from the old road, while the A66 traffic speeds past to the north. |
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Bessie Garfoot-Gardner, writing in 1949, was impressed by the local facilities: "For over a hundred yeas the old "Three Tuns" offered a popular welcome to travellers. It has been replaced by a really magnificent house, the Scotch Corner Hotel. This has 50 modernly equipped bedrooms, and its public rooms include an American Bar."
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Here's a picture of a bus with the Scotch Corner Hotel behind it in 1990 before it became the Quality Hotel Darlington (for reasons best known to its new owners, though they've kept the old sign). The photo was taken by Gordon Richardson who has a gallery of pictures from around Britain. Is this the biggest expanse of virginia creeper? For a picture without the bus try here. |
In British Archaeology Letters Blaise Vyner writes:
"While one of their characteristics is straightness, they often do not actually cut through the landscape but tend to run with the grain, especially when approaching river and stream valleys. A good example is the route of Dere Street through North Yorkshire and County Durham. This route is indeed dead straight for many miles because the landscape allows this, but on the southern approach to Piercebridge the road takes a sinuous curve around a piece of rising ground near the southern bank of the Tees, before reverting to its alignment. This and other such variations go unnoticed because the roads are usually drawn straight, or appear to be so when shown on small-scale maps."
And as we travel north from Scotch Corner we have choices at Junction 56 of the A1(M). The Roman route heads almost due north, now as the B6275, for Piercebridge. For a while the road through Barton and Stapleton to Darlington was the A1, connecting Scotch Corner with the old Great North Road at Darlington, but then came the motorway bypassing Darlington and the little road stayed little. Let's take it.
At Barton lived Margaret of Hebburne who "saw three centuries, being born in 1598, and dying in 1704, aged 105".
B & B Lincolnshire B&B
©Biff Vernon 2002, 2003
