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."

In Scotland, about the same time, the roads were no better. The first four miles out of Edinburgh, on the road towards London, were described in the Privy Council Record of 1680 to have been in so wretched a state that passengers were in danger of their lives, "either by their coaches overturning, their horse falling, their carts breaking, their loads casting and horse stumbling, the poor people with the burdens on their backs sorely grieved and discouraged; moreover, strangers do often exclaim thereat." Nor does there appear to have been any considerable improvement in the state of the roads in the northern kingdom for long afterwards, as we find that in 1750, according to Lang's 'Historical Summary of the Post-office in Scotland,' "the channel of the river Gala, which ran for some distance parallel with the road, was, when not flooded, the track chosen as the most level and the easiest to travel in." The common carrier from Edinburgh to Selkirk, a distance of thirty-eight miles, required a fortnight for the journey, going and returning; and the stage-coach from Edinburgh to Glasgow took a day and a half for the journey. A Yorkshire squire, Thomas Kirke, who travelled in Scotland in 1679, gave a better account of the roads; but his opinion may have been merely relative, for travelling showmen to this day prefer the roads in the south of Scotland to those in the north of England, on account of their greater hardness; and this derives, no doubt, from the more adamantine material used in the repair of the Scotch roads. This traveller wrote: "The highways in Scotland are tolerably good, which is the greatest comfort a traveller meets with amongst them. The Scotch gentry generally travel from one friend's house to another; so seldom require a change-house (inn). Their way is to hire a horse and a man for twopence a mile; they ride on the horse thirty or forty miles a-day, and the man who is his guide foots it beside him, and carries his luggage to boot." Another visitor to Scotland in 1702, named Morer, thus describes the roads: "The truth is, the roads will hardly allow these conveniences" (meaning stage-coaches, which did not as yet exist in Scotland), "which is the reason that the gentry, men and women, choose rather to use their horses. However, their great men often travel with coach-and-six, but with so little caution, that, besides their other attendance, they have a lusty running footman on each side of the coach, to manage and keep it up in rough places."1 It might be supposed that the roads leading from Windsor, where one of the royal residences was, would have been kept in a tolerable state, so as to secure the Sovereign some comfort in travelling. But their condition seems to have been no better than that of roads elsewhere. An account of a journey made in 1703 by Prince George of Denmark, the husband of Queen Anne, from Windsor to Petworth, runs as follows:— "The length of way was only forty miles, but fourteen hours were consumed in traversing it; while almost every mile was signalised by the overturn of a carriage, or its temporary swamping in the mire. Even the royal chariot would have fared no better than the rest had it not been for the relays of peasants who poised and kept it erect by strength of arm, and shouldered it forward the last nine miles, in which tedious operation six good hours were consumed."

Yet later still, and in close proximity to London, a royal party had a most unsatisfactory journey, owing to the miserable state of the roads. It happened that in 1727 George II. and Queen Caroline were proceeding from the palace at Kew to that at St James's, when they had to spend a whole night upon the way; and between Hammersmith and Fulham they were overturned, the royal occupants of the coach being landed in a quagmire. A year or two after this, Lord Hervey wrote that "the road between this place [Kensington] and London is grown so 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."

No part of the country could boast of a satisfactory condition of the roads, these being everywhere in the same neglected and wretched state, and travellers who had the misfortune to use them have recorded their ideas on the subject in no gentle terms. Arthur Young, who travelled much in the middle of last century, thus alludes to a road in Essex: "Of all the cursed roads that ever disgraced this kingdom in the very ages of barbarism, none ever equalled that from Billericay to the King's Head at Tilbury. It is for near twelve miles so narrow that a mouse cannot pass by any carriage. I saw a fellow creep under his waggon to assist me to lift, if possible, my chaise over a hedge. To add to all the infamous circumstances which concur to plague a traveller, I must not forget the eternally meeting with chalk-waggons, themselves frequently stuck fast, till a collection of them are in the same situation, and twenty or thirty horses may be tacked to each to draw them out one by one." In a somewhat similar way he describes the road from Bury to Sudbury in Suffolk. Here, he says, "I was forced to move as slow in it as in any unmended lane in Wales. For ponds of liquid dirt, and a scattering of loose flints just sufficient to lame every horse that moves near them, with the addition of cutting vile grips across the road under the pretence of letting the water off, but without effect, altogether render at least twelve out of these sixteen miles as infamous a turnpike as ever was beheld." In one of his journeys, Young proceeded to the north by the great north road, thence making branch trips to the various agricultural districts. Of many of these roads he gives a sorry account. Thus: "To Wakefield, indifferent; through the town of Wakefield so bad that it ought to be indicted. To Castle Howard, infamous; I was near being swallowed up in a slough. From Newton to Stokesley in Cleveland, execrably bad. You are obliged to cross the moors they call Black Hambledon, over which the road runs in narrow hollows that admit a south-country chaise with such difficulty, that I reckon this part of the journey made at the hazard of my neck. The going down into Cleveland is beyond all description terrible; for you go through such steep, rough, narrow, rocky precipices, that I would sincerely advise any friend to go a hundred miles to escape it. The name of this path is very judicious, Scarthneck—that is, Scare-Nick, or frighten the devil.

"From Richmond to Darlington, part of the great north road; execrably broke into holes like an old pavement, sufficient to dislocate one's bones."

"To Morpeth; a pavement a mile or two out of Newcastle; all the rest vile.

"To Carlisle; cut up by innumerable little paltry one-horse carts."

One more instance from the pen of Young and we leave him. In the course of one of his journeys, he makes his way into Wales, where he finds his bête noire in the roads, and freely expresses himself thereupon in his usual forcible style: "But, my dear sir, what am I to say of the roads in this country? the turnpikes, as they have the assurance to call them, and the hardiness to make one pay for? From Chepstow to the half-way house between