Charles G. Harper

“ Every moment are shouted aloud by the post-office servants, and summoned to draw up, the great ancestral names of cities known to history through a thousand years—Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stirling, Aberdeen—expressing the grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of the mail establishment by the diffusive radiation of its separate missions. Every moment you hear the thunder of lids locked down upon the mail-bags. ”

“ Weston, a village at a bend and dip of the road, stands by what was once Scarthing Moor, whose famous inn, the “Black Lion,” is now, like the old-time festivities of Sutton-on-Trent, only a memory. The farmers and cottagers of Sutton-on-Trent long preserved the spring-time custom of welcoming the coaches, and freely feasting guards, coachmen, and passengers. It was an annual week’s merrymaking, and young and old united to keep it up. ”

“ Night and day the coaches kept Stilton awake, and if for a few minutes there was no coach, the post-chaises at one end of the social scale, and the fly-wagons at the other, kept the inns busy. Stilton buzzed with activity then. From the far North came the drovers, doing twenty miles a day, with their sheep and cattle, their pigs and geese; animal creation marching, martyrs in their sort, to Smithfield. At Stilton they shod the cattle, like horses, and one blacksmith’s business here consisted of nothing else than this. ”

“ This white-painted frontage marks the close of Bawtry’s busy days. Soon afterwards the place ceased to live a pulsing everyday life of business and activity, and began to merely exist. There are shops here—old bow-windowed, many-paned shops—which have long seen their best days go by. They came into existence under the influence of the beatific Law of Demand and Supply, when all the inns were full of travellers who wanted the thousand and one necessities of civilisation. They did a brave trade in those times, and continued it until the railway snuffed it out in 1842. ”

“ The moment he arrives where the horses are to be changed, he throws down the reins with something of an air, and abandons the cattle to the care of the ostler; his duty being merely to drive from one stage to another. When off the box, his hands are thrust into the pockets of his great-coat, and he rolls about the inn-yard with an air of the most absolute lordliness. ”

“ Thus came the young Duke of York at the head of his victorious army, after the crowning victory of Towton; the first thing to meet his gaze his father’s head, fixed on the topmost turret, and crowned in mockery with a paper crown by the fierce Lancastrians under whose swords he had fallen at the battle of Wakefield, three months before. Filial piety could not in those times rest content with removing the head from its shameful eminence, and so the Duke caused the Earl of Devon and three others among his prisoners to be immediately beheaded and their heads to be placed there instead. ”

“ In these volumes we shall consistently keep to the Great North Road; starting, however, as the record-making cyclists of late years have done, from the General Post-office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, to or from which, or the neighbouring old inns, the coaches of the historic past came and went.
We travel with a light heart: our forbears with dismal forebodings, leaving duly-executed and attested wills behind them. ”

“ The majesty of Newark’s less lofty spire is greater than this of Grantham, and indeed it may be questioned whether a Decorated spire, comparatively so attenuated and with its purity of outline broken and worried by an endless array of crockets is really more admirable as a thing of beauty, or as a daring and successful exercise in the piling up of fretted stones in so apparently frail a fashion. ”

“ From this point of view Selby is distinctly disappointing. The glorious Abbey, now the parish church, is all, and more than, one expects, and the superlatively cobble-stoned Market-place, painful to walk in, is picturesque to look at; but the rest is an effect of meanness. Mean old houses of no great age; mean new ones; mean and threadbare waterside industries; second-hand clothes-shops, coal-grit, muddy waters and foreshores of the slimy Ouse, shabby rope-walks, and dirty alleys: these are Selby. ”

“ Welwyn lies in a deep hollow on the little river—or, more correctly speaking, the streamlet—of the Mimram. Street and houses face you alarmingly as you descend the steep hillside, wondering (if you cycle) if the sharp corner can safely be rounded, or if you must needs dash through door or window of the “White Hart,” once one of the two coaching inns of the village.
The “White Hart” at Welwyn was kept in the “twenties” by “old Barker,” who horsed the Stamford “Regent” a stage on the road, and was, in the language of the coachmen, a “three-cornered old beggar.” ”

“ People of Quality do not flock to Islington. The medicinal waters are all gone; and that Islington is, even now, not in any great degree a resort of fashion is an incontrovertible fact.
Between this and Highgate, the road leading to what the poets call the “true and tender North” is by no means happy. Any other of the classic highways of England begins better, and however delightful the Holloway Road may have been in the coaching age, it is in these crowded days a very commonplace thoroughfare indeed. ”

“ Quiet, because the locomotive and carriage-works of the Great Northern Railway are a little way outside; inoffensive, because it is unpretending. At the same time it is just as singularly devoid of interest. Almost its oldest houses are those on Hall Cross Hill, as the traveller passes the elm-avenue by the racecourse and enters the town from the direction of London; and they are scarce older than the days of the Prince Regent. Very like the older part of Brighton, this southern end of Doncaster is the best the town has to show. ”

“ To leave Selby for York, one must needs cross the Ouse bridge, one of thee few places where tolls still survive. Foot-passengers and cyclists are on an equality, paying one penny each.
Level-crossings again have their wicked will of the road, and are indeed its principal features, through Barlby and Riccall. ”

“ By Beast Market Hill, past the castle and over the bridge, one leaves Newark for the north. Level crossings of the railways now and again bedevil the way, which is flat so far as the eye can reach—and much farther, and the meadows on either side are intersected by runlets and marshes, the road carried over them by a succession of red-brick bridges. At a distance of one and a half miles, the true Trent is crossed by a wooden bridge, and South Muskham reached, where the level-crossing gates take the place of the old turnpike. ”

“ It is not enough to have been wafted between London and Edinburgh by express train—even although the wafting itself takes seven hours and a half—for one to gain a good idea of the distance. We will not take into consideration the total mileage between Dover and Cape Wrath, which tots up to the formidable figure of eight hundred miles or so, but will confine ourselves in these pages to the great road between London and Edinburgh: to the Great North Road, in fact, which measures, by way of York, three hundred and ninety-three miles. ”

“ The initial expenses of a railway are immense, the upkeep of lines and buildings large; but the actual cost of steam-power as against horse-traction is absurdly little. Railways, of course, pay passenger duty, and immense sums in the aggregate for rates and taxes; but they are not burdened as the coaches were. If it cost from £3 10s. to £6 15s. to travel “outside” or “inside” by ordinary stage-coach between London and Edinburgh, those high figures were the necessary results of Government exactions and turnpike imposts. ”

“ For some twenty miles the Great North Road runs through this broad county, the land of the “yellow-bellies,” as Lincolnshire folk are named, from the frogs and eels that inhabit their fens and marshes. North and South Witham, giving a name to Witham Common, lie unseen, off to the left, and the once famous old “Black Bull” stands, as it always has stood, solitary beside the road, out of sight from any other house. It consists of two separate buildings, at right angles to one another and erected at different times. ”

“ If it happened that they did not want any for themselves, they were usually charged by friends with commissions to purchase as they passed through. Smiling waiters and maidservants, Miss Worthington herself, rosy, plump, benevolent-looking, asked travellers if they would not like to take away with them a real Stilton cheese. Miss Worthington, the kindly, whose lavender-scented beds were famed along the whole length of the Great North Road—there she stood, declaring that they were real Stilton cheeses! Nor were travellers for a long while any the wiser. Stilton folks kept the secret well. ”

“ Suburban villas had begun to sparsely dot these northern heights of London with the coming of the new era, but the New Police had not yet been brought into being; and so belated dwellers in these wilds afforded fine sport for the footpads, who, hunting in couples, and armed with horrible pitch-plasters, attacked the mild citizen from behind, and, clapping a plaster over his mouth, reduced him to an enforced silence, while they emptied his pockets at leisure. It was late one night in 1807 that Grimaldi, the most famous of all clowns, was robbed on Highgate Hill by two footpads. ”

“ Stevenage is the first of the many wide-streeted towns and villages whose emptiness proclaims the something missing that was provided for by all this vast roominess. Its one street, lining the old road, was originally laid out so spaciously for the purpose of affording room for the traffic for which, once upon a time, it was not too spacious. It is all too wide now that the intercourse of two nations proceeds by rail, and many of the old inns that once did so famous a trade are converted into private residences. ”

“ The brick wall of the park that gave the gate its name is still there and a very old, substantial, and beautifully lichened red-brick wall it is—but the gate and the toll-board and the toll-house have all vanished. Digswell Hill is beautiful, and so is Ayot Green, at the summit, with its giant trees and humble cottages stretching away on the left to the Ayot p. 88villages. Not so the “Red Lion” close by. More beautiful still—and steeper—is the descent into Welwyn, beneath over-arching trees and rugged banks, down from which secluded rustic summer-houses look upon the traffic of the highway. ”

“ Even the roomy old church away on the other side of the broad road seems on too large a scale for Tuxford, as it is, and the stone effigies of the Longvilliers and the mouldy hatchments of later families hanging on the walls of its bare chapels tell a tale of vanished greatness. ”

“ We cannot say whether the Romans appreciated scenery. If a love of the wildly beautiful in nature is dependent upon the safety of those who behold it, and upon the ease with which those scenes are visited, perhaps only the later generations of Roman colonists could have possessed this sense. The earlier Romans who made their splendid system of roads were, doubtless, only military men, and, well aware of their dangers, found nothing beautiful in mountain ranges. ”

“ The tiny hamlet of Hardwick, dignified with mention on the Ordnance map, is passed without its existence being noticed, and the road, flat as though constructed with the aid of a spirit-level, proceeds straight ahead for the town of Huntingdon, swinging acutely to the left for York. Beyond, at the cross-roads, stands Brampton Hut, the modern vivid red-brick successor of the old inn of that name. Brampton village lies down the cross-road to the right, and is the place where Samuel Pepys, it is thought, was born in 1632. ”

“ Indeed, the Holloway Road, into which they came, from the last outposts of civilisation, was, as it were the ante-chamber into that direful territory of highwaymen and footpads, the veritable Alsatias of Finchley Common and Whetstone. ”

“ It is sufficient to read the old travellers’ tales, to realise what discouragements from leaving one’s own fireside existed then. There was, for instance, toward the close of the seventeenth century, and well on into the eighteenth, an antiquary of repute who lived at Leeds, and journeyed very frequently in the Midlands, Ralph Thoresby was his name. He travelled much, and in all weathers, and knew the Great North Road well. In his day the coaches were often, through the combined badness of the roads and the severity of the weather, obliged to lay up in the winter, like ships in Arctic seas. ”

“ A great gap stretches between the time of our road-making hermit and that of Telford—a gap of four hundred and fifty years. Yet, although Highway Acts were from time to time devised for the betterment of the roads, their condition remained bad, and there was always, since 1386, the crest of Highgate Hill to surmount.
Unless we take this hill-top route to the left we shall not have seen Highgate; nor, in truth, is there much to see, now that the old Gatehouse Tavern is gone, and with it the last outward and visible connection with the days of yore. ”

“ Of bygone sporting figures with which, in imagination, to people the way we have a crowd. There has always been something in the great length of the road to York, and of its continuation to Edinburgh, that has appealed to sportsmen and all those interested in the speeds of different methods of progression. Pedestrians, horsemen, and coaches—and in recent times cyclists—have competed in their several ways, from an early period until our own day, and the rival railways even have had their races to Edinburgh. ”

“ The village itself bears nothing on its face telling of great events, and is of a placid dulness, a character shared by Escrick and Deighton, on the way to York; the road itself gradually becoming an abomination of desolate fields until the village of Gate Fulford is reached. The Great North Road is a businesslike highway. It goes as direct as may be to its destination, and gets there quite regardless of scenery or interest to right or left. ”

“ Every summer, every autumn, sees large numbers of touring automobiles on the way to Scotland and the moors, filled with those who prefer the road, on such terms, to the railway. From being something in the nature of a lonely highway, the Great North Road has thus become a very much travelled one. ”