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Section 3:
The Roads
The world of long-distance coach travel
The first roads
The Celts were trading across Europe and although nothing remains of their roads, they must have followed fixed routes
The Romans built roads, famously straight. These are the first roads that we in England are familiar with
After the Romans left, our roads fell into disrepair. Find out what happened
After the dissolution of the monasteries, even the church’s work ended
During the Stuart period the first beginnings of improvement appeared
The first proposal to improve Britain’s roads
The first person to take active steps to improve the roads
As pressure for improved transport links grew, this engineer made a real difference
Perhaps the most famous roadmaker, His method is still essentially in use today
Britain’s roads at last allow fast long-distance travel
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Anecdotes written by people who actually travelled on the coaches
The coachmen, the inns, the coach proprietors - they’re all here. Come in and meet them
Britain’s roads were pretty impassable for most of our history. Coach travel was very difficult until they improved
Wheeled transport evolved over many years. Find out how coaches developed
Sources and information about how I came to create this website
Home Page of the Coaching Website
The bad roads made for slow progress, averaging about two miles per hour, and the entire journey was made with the same horses, so overnight stops were essential. It all made for a long and uncomfortable journey.
Despite this, they were a commercial success and added to the growing need to improve England’s roads. The first turnpike system had been created in 1656, but it was only on one part of the Great North Road.
In 1675 Thomas Mace, one of the clerks of Trinity College, Cambridge, published a pamphlet which addressed the condition of the roads. He had a plan!
Its title was brilliant – so of its time:
It described how the country was for the most part unenclosed, so that when the traffic had worn the road into deep ruts, or when mud had rendered it impassable, the waggons, carts, and laden horses went wide and struggled past each other using the nearest firm spots.
Thomas wrote: “Much ground is now spoiled and trampled down in all wide roads, where coaches and carts take liberty to pick and chuse for their best advantages; besides, such sprawling and straggling of coaches and carts utterly confound the road in all wide places, so that it is not only unpleasurable, but extremely perplexing and cumbersome both to themselves and to all horse travellers.”
As traffic went round unpassable sections of the road, the route became wider and also curved round the original track.
This is the cause of the many twists and turns that still exist in many of our roads. When we see an old road winding snake-like through a flat country, with no hills or other obvious reasons for its circuitous course, we may in most cases, safely attribute this apparent indecision and infirmity of purpose to these ancient difficulties, thus perpetuated.
This ancient state of things occasioned many disputes and even fatal affrays between the packhorse men, who carried goods slung across their horses’ backs from one part of the country to the other, and between the market-folk and those who travelled on horseback and coaches. Mace would himself seem to have experienced some of these contentions as to who should take the clean and who the muddy part of the road, for he writes with great bitterness about “these disturbances, daily committed by uncivil, refractory, and rude, Russianlike rake-shames, in contesting for the way.”
He continues:-
His plan was to get the roads into good repair, and then, employ “day men” every five miles or so, who could easily keep them in order. The prospect induced him to rise to poetry:
So far good. But then comes the heavy traffic to destroy the good work:-
That it was not put into execution is a matter of history.
Thomas Mace, clerk in the choir at Trinity College Cambridge and probably the person illustrated here.