B) continued from Ch.2: I was keen to find out what the journey from Bath to London felt like and my Great Bath Road Project retraces the route taken by the 18C visitors to and from Bath. Admittedly there are several major differences between then and now. I won’t be travelling by horse or coach however delightful that might have been. I also have better maps. Not only the paper kind but also on my phone. Still there are many similarities. My Cube electric bike goes about the same speed as a horse so it will take me the same time to travel the distance as it did at the beginning of the 18th C. And I only need to feed it electricity! It will therefore take me about the same time to go in either direction and this will be about 3-4 days. I will also be stopping like they did at various Inns along the way for both refreshment and accommodation. I will also be taking the same route. More or less. I will certainly be stopping at the main towns that my 18th Century companions visited on their journey. In fact I would be stopping the night at Avebury, Aldermaston and Windsor/Eton before arriving in London on the 4th day. However before I tell the story of my own trip let’s look at what this adventure was actually like in the 18th C?

Early Tourists: Fortunately great travellers of the 17th and 18th C like Pepys, Defoe, Leland and Fiennes have left us many anecdotes about their journeys and the routes they took. Historically we also know much about the road conditions and government reforms designed to improve the roads. There are also many books about coaching as it is a subject that affected everyone in the country and how they went about their business. England in particular is steeped in coach-lore as it led to the creation of coaching Inns and other pubs many of which still survive. They intentionally keep that heritage alive with horsey-paraphernalia and coaching images or mementos. Coaching is therefore embedded into the very fabric of our culture.

Pepys that great 17th Century diarist and lover of travel (and life in all its exciting variety!) has left us with tales of his trip to Bath in 1668. He got lost on 11th June in Chitterne or rather he ended up there on his way to Bath as he had lost his way. In true Pepys style he recalls that his party had a “merry night at supper” in the local Inn. He was then led to Bath by the landlord the following day. Daniel Defoe a serial ‘ducker and diver’ not only sold stockings, insurance and bricks but wrote the best-selling travel novel ‘Robinson Crusoe’. He also rode through the kingdom and wrote about it in ‘A Tour Through The Whole Island of Great Britain’. He reported that on the whole the roads were pretty terrible, but witnessed and described the rude health of the country. He described Britain as ‘the most flourishing, opulent country in the whole world’.

Various attempts were made to improve the condition of the roads. In 1555 a road mending act gave this responsibility to local parish councils. Statute labour, the method devised to achieve this on the cheap was a hangover from feudalism as it forced parishioners to work for free for 6 days a year. This was not a sustainable long-term solution and there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for this kind of compulsion. As a consequence, Turnpike Trusts were set up individually by acts of parliament and the tolls charged, sensibly transferred the cost of maintenance to the road users. Many of these succeeded in improving the efficiency and capacity of most roads. The first effective Turnpike was set up in 1706 in Bath as the city was ‘a place of very great resort’. It took another 50 years though before the whole London route was improved in this way. The toll houses were situated next to the toll gate and were opened by the Pikeman when the fee was paid. There are many of these toll houses still in existence and one is very near the start of my route from Bath near Kingsdown.

The Pikemen were notoriously rude, but it was an unpleasant job and the gate had to be manned 24 hours. Clearly in a cash business like this there was a lot of corruption and general skulduggery. Eventually there were hundreds of Turnpike Trusts and they were an efficient system that worked well for over 100 years. It enabled the mail coaches to travel fast (when sounding their horns on approaching the gates they needed to be opened freely on arrival) and created an efficient infrastructure on route catering to traveller’s every need. Inns provided not only accommodation but other services like: Horse stabling and welfare, horse hire, coach hire (post chaises to go off route), entertainment (including cock fighting and theatre tickets) and many refreshments of the obvious and not so obvious kind.

So what roads did the 18th c gentry take when going from London to Bath (or vice versa). Unlike today where realistically one only has a choice between 2 main routes (the A4 or M4) 250 years ago there were far more options. Roads were not primarily designed for speed but merely to provide links between towns and villages. The route travellers (as opposed to local farmers say)  took was a matter of personal preference and guided by a number of practical criteria. The weather, what you wanted to see or who you could visit and also importantly the coaching Inn you wished to spend time and money in were all considerations. There was not one route and as long as you headed west from London there was a variety of ways that would get you to Bath. Sometimes roads were impassable or difficult especially in Winter. At Hungerford for instance many travellers took the high road via Ramsbury to avoid the marshy ground. The main road from London to Bath however follows approximately what is now the A4 as far as Beckhampton where it turned off to the south rather than proceeding to Chippenham and Box. After 1745 the improvements made by the Turnpike Act made the road via Chippenham the preferred route. The Great Bath Road before this date went from London via the following towns and villages: Hounslow, Colbrook, Maidenhead, Twyford, Reading, Woolhampton, Thatcham, Newbury, Hungerford, Froxfield, Marlborough, Avebury, Sandy Lane, Lacock, Gastard, Neston, Chapel Plaister, Kingsdown, Batheaston and onto Bath. This was not the only route by any means and there were towns and villages like Devizes and Melksham that provided alternative stops or destinations along the way:

Chapter Four: Your Money or Your Wife!