The life of Thomas Telford, civil engineer. With an introductory history of roads and travelling in Great Britain

Front matter

Cornell University Library arV1726

The life of Thomas Telford, civil engine

Cornell University Library

Preface

The present is a revised and in some respects enlarged edition of the ' Life of Telford,' originally published in the ' Lives of the Engineers,' to which is prefixed an account of the early roads and modes of travelling in Britain.

From this volume, read in connection with the Lives of George and Eohert Stephenson, in which the origin and extension of Eailways is described, an idea may be formed of the extraordinary progress which has been made in opening up the internal communications of this country during the last century.

Among the principal works executed by Telford in the course of his life, were the great highways constructed by him in North Wales and the Scotch Highlands, through districts formerly almost inaccessible, but which are now as easily traversed as any English county.

By means of these roads, and the facilities afforded by railways, the many are now enabled to visit with ease and comfort magnificent mountain scenery, which before was only the costly privilege of the few ; at the same time that their construction has exercised a most beneficial influence on the population of the districts themselves.

The Highland .roads, which were constructed with the active assistance of the Government, and were maintained partly at the public expense until within the last few years, had the effect of stimulating industry, improving agriculture, and converting a turbulent because unem-

a2 iv PKEFACE.

ployed population into one of the most loyal and wellconditioned in the empire ; — the policy thus adopted with reference to the Highlands, and the beneficial results which have flowed from it, affording the strongest encouragement to Government in dealing in like manner with the internal communications of Ireland.

While the construction of the Highland roads was in progress, the late Bobert Southey, poet laureate, visited the Highlands in company with his friend the engineer, and left on record an interesting account of his visit, in a manuscript now in the possession of Kobert Eawlinson, O.E., to whom we are indebted for the extracts which are made from it in the present volume*

London, October, 1867.

Contents

EAELY KOADS AND MODES OF TEAVELLING.

CHAPTEE I.

Old Koads,

Chap. I. THE ROMAN " STREETS." 3

and the moor, sufficiently answered their purpose. Yet even in those districts unencumbered with wood, where the first settlements were made — as on the downs of Wiltshire, the moors of Devonshire, and the wolds of Yorkshire — stone tracks were laid down by the tribes between one village and another. We have given, at the beginning of this chapter, a representation of one of those ancient trackways still existing in the neighbourhood of Whitby, in Yorkshire; and there are many of the same description to be met with in other parts of England. In some districts they are called trackways or ridge ways, being narrow causeways usually following the natural ridge of the country, and probably serving in early times as local boundaries. On Dartmoor they are constructed of stone blocks, irregularly laid down on the surface of the ground, forming a rude causeway of about five or six feet wide.

The Eomans, with many other arts, first brought into England the art of road-making. They thoroughly understood the value of good roads, regarding them as the essential means for the maintenance of their empire in the first instance, and of social prosperity in the next. It was their roads, as well as their legions, that made them masters of the world ; and the pickaxe, not less than the sword, was the ensign of their dominion. Wherever they went, they opened up the communications of the countries they subdued, and the roads which they made were among the best of their kind. They were skilfully laid out and solidly constructed. For centuries after the Eomans left England, their roads continued to be the main highways of internal communication, and their remains are to this day to be traced in many parts of the country. Settlements were made and towns sprang up along the old " streets ;" and the numerous Stretfords, Stratfords, and towns ending in "le-street" — as Ardwick-le-street, in Yorkshire, and Chester-le-street, in Durham — mostly mark the direction of these ancient lines of road. There are also numerous Stanfords, which were so called because

b 2

OLD EOADS.

Chap. I.

they bordered trie raised military roadways of the Bomans, which ran direct between their stations.

The last-mentioned peculiarity of the roads constructed by the Bomans, must have struck many observers. Level does not seem to have been of consequence, compared with directness. This peculiarity is supposed to have originated in an' imperfect knowledge of mechanics ; for the Bomans do not appear to have been acquainted with the moveable joint in wheeled carriages. The carriage-body rested solid upon the axles, which in four-wheeled vehicles were rigidly parallel with each other. Being unable readily to turn a bend in the road, it has been concluded that for this reason all the great Boman highways were constructed in as straight lines as possible.

On the departure of the Bomans from Britain, most of the roads constructed by them were allowed to fall into decay, on which the forest and the waste gradually resumed their dominion over them, and the highways of England became about the worst in Europe. We find, however, that numerous attempts were made in early times to preserve the ancient ways and enable a communication to be maintained between the metropolis and the rest 6f the country, as well as between one market town and another.

The state of the highways may be inferred from the character of the legislation applying to them. One of the first laws on the subject was passed in 1285, directing that all bushes and trees along the roads leading from one market to another should be cut down for two hundred feet on either side, to prevent robbers lurking therein ;*

* Bruuetto Latini, the tutor of Dante, describes a journey made by him from London to Oxford about trie end of tbe thirteenth century, resting by the way at Shirburn Castle. He says, "Our journey from London to Oxford was, with some difficulty and danger, made in two dayB ; for the roads are bad, and we had to climb hills of hazardous ascent, and which to descend are equally perilous. We passed through many woods, considered here as dangerous places, as they are infested with robbers, which indeed is the case with most of the roads in England. This is a circumstance connived at by the neighbouring barons, on consideration of sharing in the booty, and of

Chap. I.

ANCIENT EOAD ACTS.

but nothing was proposed for amending the condition of the ways themselves. In 1346, Edward III. authorised the first toll to be levied for the repair of the roads leading from St. Giles's-in-the-Fields to the village of Charing (now Charing Cross), and from the same quarter to near Temple Bar (down Drury Lane), as well as the highway then called Perpoole (now Gray's Inn Lane). The footway at the entrance of Temple Bar was interrupted by thickets and bushes* and in wet weather was almost impassable. The roads further west were so bad that when the sovereign went to Parliament faggots were thrown into the ruts in Eing-street, Westminster, to enable the royal cavalcade to pass along.

In Henry VIII.'s reign, several remarkable statutes were passed relating to certain worn-out and impracticable roads in Sussex and the Weald of Kent. From the earliest of these, it would appear that when the old roads were found too deep and miry to be passed, they were merely abandoned and new tracks struck out. After describing "many of the wayes in the wealds as so depe and noyous by wearyng and course of water and other occasions that people cannot have their carriages or passages by horses uppon or by the same but to their great paynes, perill and jeopardie,'' the Act provided that owners of land might, with the consent of two justices and twelve discreet men of the hundred, lay out new roads and close up the old ones. Another Act passed in the same reign, related to the repairs of bridges and of the highways at the ends of bridges.

But as these measures were for the most part merely permissive, they could have had but little practical effect in improving the communications of the kingdom. In the these robbers serving as their protectors on all occasions, personally, and -with the whole strength of their band. However, as our company was numerous, we had less to fear. Accordingly, we arrived the first night at Shirbum Castle, in the neighbourhood of Watlington, under the chain of hills over which we passed at Stokenchurch." This passage is given in Mr. Edward's work on 'Libraries' (p. 328), as supplied to him by Lady Macclesfield. '

6 OLD EOADS. Chap. I.

reign of Philip and Mary (in 1555), an Act was passed providing that each parish should elect two surveyors of highways to see to the maintenance of their repairs by compulsory labour, the preamble reciting that " highwaies are now both verie noisome and tedious to travell in, and dangerous to all passengers and cariages ; " and to this day parish and cross roads are maintained on the principle of Mary's Act, though the compulsory labour has since been commuted into a compulsory tax.

In the reigns of Elizabeth and James, other road Acts were passed; but, from the statements of contemporary writers, it would appear that they were followed by very little substantial progress, and travelling continued to be attended with many difficulties. Even in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, the highways were in certain seasons scarcely passable. The great Western road into London was especially bad, and about Knightsbridge, in winter, the traveller had to wade through deep mud. Wyatt's men entered the city by this approach in the rebellion of 1554, and were called the " draggle-tails " because of 'their wretched plight. The ways were equally bad as far as Windsor, which, in the reign of Elizabeth, is described by Pote, in his history of that town, as being " not much past half a day's joumeye removed from the flourishing citie of London."

At a greater distance from the metropolis, the roads were still worse. They were in many cases but rude tracks across heaths and commons, as furrowed with deep ruts as ploughed fields ; and in winter to pass along one of them was like travelling in a ditch. The attempts made by the adjoining occupiers to mend them, were for the most part confined to throwing large stones into the bigger holes to fill them up. It was easier to allow new tracks to be made than to mend the old ones. The land of the country was still mostly unenclosed, and it was possible, in fine weather, to get from place to place, in one way or another, with the help of a guide. In the absence of bridges, guides

Chap. I.

COUNTRY TRACKS AND LANES.

were necessary to point out the safest fords as well as to pick out the least miry tracks. The most frequented lines of road were struck out from time to time by the drivers of pack-horses, who, to avoid the bogs and sloughs, were usually careful to keep along the - higher grounds ; but, to prevent those horsemen who departed from the beaten track being swallowed up in quagmires, beacons were erected to warn them against the more dangerous places.*

In some of the older-settled districts of England, the old roads are still to be traced in the hollow Ways or Lanes, which are to be met with, in some places, eight and ten feet deep. They were horse-tracks in summer, and rivulets in winter. By dint of weather and travel, the earth was gradually worn into these deep furrows, many of which, in Wilts, Somerset, and Devon, represent the tracks of roads as old as, if not older than, the Conquest. When the ridgeways of the earliest settlers on Dartmoor, above alluded to, were abandoned, the tracks were formed through the valleys, but the new roads were no better than the old ones. They were narrow and deep, fitted only for a horse passing along laden with its crooks, as so graphically described in the ballad of " The Devonshire Lane." f

* See Ogilvy's 'Britannia Depicta,' the traveller's ordinary guidebook between 1675 and 1717, as Bradshav/s Eailway Time-book is now. The Grand Duke Cosmo, in his ' Travels in England in 1669,' speaks of the country between Northampton and Oxford as for the most part unenclosed and uncultivated, . abounding in weeds.

From Ogilby's fourth edition, published in 1749, it appears that the roads in the midland and northers districts of England were still, for the most part, entirely unenclosed, t This ballad is so descriptive of the old roads of the south-west of England that we are tempted to quote it at length. It was written by the Bev. John Marriott, sometime vicar of Broadclist, Devon; and Mr. Bowe, vicar of Crediton, says, in his 'Perambulation of Dartmoor,' that he can readily imagine the identical lane near Broadclist, leading towards Poltemore, which might have sat for the portrait.

In a Devonshire lane, as I trotted along T'otber day, much in want of a subject for song, Thinks I to myself, half-inspired by the rain, Sure marriage is much like a Devonshire lane.

8 OLD KOADS. Chap. I.

Similar roads existed until recently in the immediate neighbourhood of Birmingham, now the centre of an immense traffic. The sandy soil was sawn through, as it were, by generation after generation of human feet, and by pack-horses, helped by the rains, until in some places the tracks were as much as from twelve to fourteen yards deep ; one of these, partly filled up, retaining to this day the name of Holloway Head. In the neighbourhood of London there was also a Hollow way, which now gives its name to a populous metropolitan parish. Hagbush Lane was another of such roads. Before the formation of the Great North Koad, it was one of the principal bridle-paths leading from London to the northern parts of England ; but it was so narrow as barely to afford passage for more than a single horseman, and so deep that the rider's head was beneath the level of the ground on either side.

In the first place 'tis long, and when once you are in it, It holds you as fast as a cage does a linnet ; For howe'er rough and dirty the road may be found, Drive forward you must, there is no turning round.

But tho' 'tis so long, it is not very wide, For two are the most that together can ride ; And e'en then, 'tis a chance but they get in a pother, And jostle and cross and run foul of each other.

Oft poverty meets them with mendicant looks, And care pushes by them with dirt-laden crooks; And strife's grazing wheels try between them to pass, And stubbornness blocks up the way on her ass.

Then the banks are so high, to the left hand and right, That they shut up the beauties around them from sight ; And hence, you'll allow, 'tis an inference plain, That marriage is just like a Devonshire lane. '

But thinks I, too, these banks, within which we are pent, With bud, blossom, and berry, are richly besprent; And the conjugal fence, which forbids us to roam. Looks lovely, when deck'd with the comforts of home.

The ivy waves fresh o'er the withering rose,

And the ever-green love of a virtuous wife

Soothes the roughness of care, cheers the winter of life.

Then long be the journey, and narrow the way, I'll rejoice that I've seldom a turnpike to pay; And whate'er others say, be the last to complain, Though marriage is just like a Devonshire lane.

Chap. I. MIET KOADS OF SUSSEX. 9

The roads of Sussex long preserved an infamous notoriety. Chancellor Cowper, when a barrister on circuit, wrote to his wife in 1690, that " the Sussex ways are bad and ruinous beyond imagination. I tow 'tis melancholy consideration that mankind will inhabit such a heap of dirt for a poor livelihood. The country is a sink of about fourteen miles broad, which receives all the water that falls from two long ranges of hills on both sides of it, and not being furnished with convenient draining, is kept moist and soft by the water till the middle of a dry summer, which is only able to make it tolerable to ride for a short time."

It was almost as difficult for old persons to get to church in Sussex during winter as it was in the Lincoln Fens, where they were rowed thither in boats. Fuller saw an old lady being drawn to church in her own coach by the aid of six oxen. The Sussex roads were indeed so bad as to pass into a by-word. A contemporary writer says, that in travelling a slough of extraordinary miryness, it used to be called "the Sussex bit of the road;" and he satirically alleged that the reason why the Sussex girls were so longlimbed was because of the tenacity of the mud in that county; the practice of pulling the foot out of it "by the strength of the ancle" tending to stretch the muscle and lengthen the bone ! *

But the roads in the immediate neighbourhood of London long continued almost as bad as those in Sussex. Thus, when the poet Cowley retired to Chertsey, in 1665, he wrote to his friend Sprat to visit him, and, by way of encouragement, told him that he might sleep the first night at Hampton town; thus occupying two days in the performance of a journey of twenty-two miles in the immediate neighbourhood of the metropolis. As late as 1736 we find Lord Hervey, writing from Kensington, complaining that " the road between this place and London is grown so

' Her Sussexiense.' By Dr. John Burton.

10 OLD EOADS. Chap. I.

infamously bad that we live here in the same solitude as we would do if cast on a rock in the middle of the ocean ; and all the Londoners tell us that there is between them and us an impassable gulf of mud."

Nor was the mud any respecter of persons ; for we are informed that the carriage of Queen Caroline could not, in bad weather, be dragged from St. James's Palace to Kensington in less than two hours, and occasionally the royal coach stuck fast in a rut, or was even capsized in the mud. About the same time, the streets of London themselves were little better, the kennel being still permitted to flowin the middle of the road, which was paved with round stones, — flag-stones for the convenience of pedestrians-being as yet unknown. In short, the streets in the towns and the roads in the country were alike rude and wretched, — indicating a degree of social stagnation and discomfort which it is now difficult to estimate, and almost impossible to describe.

Chap. II. EARLY MODES OF COjSYEYANCE. 11 CHAPTEE II

Early Modes of Coitteyaxce.

Stjch being the ancient state of the roads, the only practicable modes of travelling were on foot and on horseback. The poor walked and the rich rode. Kings rode and Queens rode. Judges rode circuit in jack-boots. Gentlemen rode and robbers rode. The Bar sometimes walked and sometimes rode. Chaucer's ride to Canterbury will be remembered as long as the English language lasts. Hooker rode to London on a hard-paced nag, that he might be in time to preach his first sermon at St. Paul's. Ladies rode on pillions, holding on by the gentleman or the servingman mounted before.

Shakespeare incidentally describes the ancient style of travelling among the humbler classes in his ' Henry TV.' * The party, afterwards set upon by Falstaff and his companions, bound from Bochester to London, were up by two in the morning, expecting to perform the journey of thirty miles by close of day, and to get to town " in time to go to bed with a candle." Two are carriers, one of whom has " a gammon of bacon and two razes of ginger, to be delivered as far as Charing Cross ; " the other has his panniers full of turkeys. There is also a franklin of Kent, and another, " a kind of auditor," probably a tax-collector, with several more, forming in all a company of eight or ten, who travel together for mutual protection. Their robbery on Gad's Hill, as painted by Shakespeare, is but a picture, by no means exaggerated, of the adventures and dangers of the road at the time of which he wrote.

* King Henry the Fourth (Part I.), Act II. Scene 1.

EARLY MODES OF CONVEYANCE.

Chap. II.

Distinguished personages sometimes rode in horse-litters ; but riding on horseback was generally preferred. Queen Elizabeth made most of her journeys in this way,* and when she went into the City she rode on a pillion behind her Lord Chancellor. The Queen, however, was at length provided with a coach, which must have been a very remarkable machine. This royal vehicle is said to have been one of the first coaches used in England, and it was introduced by the Queen's own coachman, one Boomen, a Dutchman. It was little better than a cart without springs, the body resting solid upon the axles. Taking the bad roads and ill-paved streets into account, it must have been an excessively painful means of conveyance. At one of the first audiences which the Queen gave to the French ambassador in 1568, she feelingly described to him " the aching pains she was suffering in consequence of having been knocked about in a coach which had been driven a little too fast, only a few days before." f

Such coaches were at first only used on state occasions. The roads, even in. the immediate neighbourhood of London, were so bad and so narrow that the vehicles could not be taken into the country. But, as the roads became improved, the fashion of using them spread. "When the aristocracy removed from the City to the western parts of the metropolis, they could be better accommodated, and in course of time they became gradually adopted. They were still, however, neither more nor less than waggons, and, indeed, were called by that name; but wherever they went they excited great wonder. It is related of "that valyant knyght Sir Harry Sidney," that on a certain day in

* Part of the riding road along which the Queen was accustomed to pass on horseback between her palaces at Greenwich and Eltham is still in existence, a little to the south of Morden* College, Blackheath. It winds irregularly through the fields, broad in some places, and narrow in others. Probably it is very little different from what it was when used as a royal road.

It is now very appropriately termed " MuJdy Lane."

t ' Depeches de La Mothe Penelon,' 8vo., 1838. Vol. i. p. 27.

Chap. II. PRIMITIVE COACHES. 13

the year 1583 he entered Shrewsbury in his waggon, " with his Trompeter blowynge, verey joyfull to behold and see." *

From this time the use of coaches gradually spread, more particularly amongst the nobility, superseding the horse-litters which had till then been used for the conveyance of ladies and others unable to bear the fatigue of riding on horseback. The first carriages were heavy and lumbering : and upon the execrable roads of the time they went pitching over the stones and into the ruts, with the pole dipping and rising like a ship in a rolling sea. That they had no springs, is clear enough from the statement of Taylor, the water-poet — who deplored the introduction of carriages as a national calamity — that in the paved streets of London men and women were " tossed, tumbled, rumbled, and jumbled about in them.'' Although the road from London to Dover, along the old Eoman Watling-street, was then one of the best in England, the French household of Queen Henrietta, when they were sent forth from the palace of Charles I., occupied four tedious days before they reached Dover.

But it was only a few of the main roads leading from the metropolis that were practicable for coaches ; and on the occasion of a royal progress, or the visit of a lordlieutenant, there was a general turn out of labourers and masons to mend the ways and render the bridges at least temporarily secure. Of one of Queen Elizabeth's journeys it is said : — " It was marvellous for ease and expedition, for such is the perfect evenness of the new highway that Her Majesty left the coach only once, while the hinds and the folk of a base sort lifted it on with their poles."

Sussex long continued impracticable for coach travelling at certain seasons. As late as 1708, Prince George of Denmark had the greatest difficulty in making his way to Petworth to meet Charles VI. of Spain. " The last nine miles of the way," says the reporter, "cost us six hours to conquer them.'' One of the couriers in attendance complained that

* Nichols's ' Progresses,' vol. ii., 309.

EARLY MODES OP CONVEYANCE.

Chap. II.

during fourteen hours he never once alighted, except when the coach overturned, or stuck in the mud.

When the judges, usually old men and bad riders, took to going the circuit in their coaches, juries were often kept waiting until their lordships could he dug out of a bog or hauled out of a slough by the aid of plough-horses. In the seventeenth century, scarcely a Quarter Session passed without presentments from the grand jury against certain districts on account of the bad state of the roads, and many were the fines which the judges imposed upon them as a set-off against their bruises and other damages while on circuit.

The Old Stage Waggox.

[By Louis Huard, after Rowlandson.]

For a long time the roads continued barely practicable for wheeled vehicles of the rudest sort, though Fynes Morison (writing in the time of James I.) gives an account of " carryers, who have long covered waggons, in which they carry passengers from place to place ; but this kind

Chap. II. STAGE WAGGOXS. 15

of journeying," he says, " is so tedious, by reason they must take waggon Yery early and come very late to their innes, that none but women and people of inferior condition travel in this sort."

The waggons of which Morison wrote, made only from ten to fifteen miles in a long summer's day; that is, supposing them not to have broken down by pitching over the boulders laid along the road, or stuck fast in a quagmire, when they had to wait for the arrival of the next team of horses to help to drag them out. The waggon, however, continued to be adopted as a popular mode of travelling until late in the eighteenth century ; and Hogarth's picture illustrating the practice will be remembered, of the cassocked parson on his lean horse, attending his daughter newly alighted from the York waggon.

A curious description of the state of the Great North Road, in the time of Charles II., is to be found in a tract published in 1675 by Thomas Mace, one of the clerks of Trinity College, Cambridge. The writer there addressed himself to the King, partly in prose and partly in verse, complaining greatly of the " wayes, which are so grossly foul and bad ; " and suggesting various remedies. He pointed out that 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 extreme perplexin and cumbersome both to themselves and all horse travellers." It would thus appear that the country on either side of the road was as yet entirely unenclosed.

But Mace's principal complaint was of the "innumerable controversies, quarrellings, and disturbances " caused by the packhorse-men, in their struggles as to which convoy should pass along the cleaner parts of the road. From what he states, it would seem that these " disturbances, daily committed by uncivil, refractory, and

16 EARLY MODES OF CONVEYANCE. Chap. II.

rude Eussian-like rake-shames, in contesting for the way, too often proved mortal, and certainly were of very bad consequences to many." He recommended a quick and prompt punishment in all such cases. " No man," said he, " should be pestered by giving the way (sometimes) to hundreds of pack-horses, panniers, whifflers (i.e. paltry fellows), coaches, waggons, wains, carts, or whatsoever others, which continually are very grievous to weary and loaden travellers ; but more especially near the city and upon a market day, when, a man having travelled a long and tedious journey, his horse well nigh spent, shall sometimes be compelled to cross out of his way twenty times in one mile's riding, by the irregularity and peevish crossness of such-like whifflers and market women ; yea, although their panniers be clearly empty, they will stoutly contend for the way with weary travellers, be they never so many, or almost of what quality soever." " Nay," said he further, " I have often known many travellers, and myself very often, to have been necessitated to stand stock still behind a standing cart or waggon, on most beastly and unsufierable deep wet wayes, to the great endangering of our horses, and neglect of important business : nor durst we adventure to stirr (for most imminent danger of those deep rutts, and unreasonable ridges) till it has pleased Mister Carter to jog on, which we have taken very kindly."