More Detailed Research on the Telford Milestones

Just as hunting for milestones became a bit of a distraction from other activities on the walk itself, so completing the follow-up research on them has also taken me away from writing up the whole of the walk. However, I feel I have now reached, ahem, a milestone, with the research.

I've got to the point of being able to say something definitive about the original milestones from Thomas Telford's time, not just between Holyhead and Shrewsbury, but also a few in Southeast England and in Ireland. It was nice realising that the contemporary documentary sources allow them to be dated almost to the year: 1825-26 on Anglesey, 1826-27 the rest of the way to Shrewsbury, more specific than any modern lists. They are all Carboniferous Limestone from Red Wharf Bay, the same stone as the Menai Bridge: including, even, two milestones in St Albans. I'm confident enough now to start making representations to the various authorities to amend or update their records. I won't go into it all here: there's an article about it in the pipeline!

Telford's Depots

When Thomas Telford built the Holyhead road he arranged that there were 'depots' along the way. These were alcoves in the side wall to store graded broken stones - all there, so that a man with just a shovel and a wheelbarrow could patch up any potholes quickly. These were built every few hundred yards, more of them where road conditions meant more wear and tear. I reckon there could have been about 800 depots originally between Chirk and Holyhead.




How many still survive? I tried to make a note, and take a
photograph, of all that I saw along the way. I counted up each day and the total of those reported here was 270. Now, I have gone back through the notes and photos in more detail and found I had more. On the first count there were 308 but that included a number of 'possibles'. 'Possible' either because there was so much overgrown vegetation that I really couldn't see the depot shape in the wall, or because it seemed the wrong size. I have reviewed these again, mainly by reference to whether I could find a depot marked at that point on the early (usually 1880s) large scale OS maps. This review led to revising my number of depots to exactly 300.



This compares with 333 found in the Quartermaine, Trinder and Turner survey in 1999. Why the difference? I was conscious that these weren't always that obvious, especially when overgrown, and fairly strict that I had to see traces of the back wall to be sure (or, as above, could find the depot on an old map), and it's entirely possible that I missed a few. Quartermaine et al may have counted some which I ruled out, and it would have been easier for them to find depots in a few stretches of road that have been closed off since their survey and the old road has all been overgrown, such as at Dinmael. It is of course entirely possible that some depots have just disappeared in the meantime, in the course of works by adjoining landowners or the highway authorities. However, it is fair to say that these depots are now, by and large, respected and preserved. At least 22 of them have been entirely rebuilt with modern walls (I've still counted these, on a Trigger's Broom axiom). The depots have survived better in the countryside because properties built up along the road in the urban areas have inevitably created new roadsides. It's actually quite amazing that as many as 300 survive when these are 200 years old; they now form one of the distinctive features of the A5 across North Wales.


What do they do now? I counted 34 which house road signs. There are 12 telephone poles, 4 bus stops and various other bits and pieces of street furniture. Betws-y-Coed makes very good use of them for benches and pot plants.  None is used for its original purpose, except perhaps temporarily.

Many are well preserved, especially through Snowdonia and on Anglesey. My pictures above are just a few of the better ones.

Others are tumbling down, overgrown, or both. In the interest of balance, I include below a few pictures of these, too.

Some Thoughts on the North Wales milestones

So at last I have gone through all my pictures, filled in a few gaps, and put up all the North Wales milestones on the blog. The great thing is that there are so many of them on this leg of the route - not quite one per mile, but very nearly.

This is partly because, after the Quatermaine book, and the Welsh Government deciding they wanted to preserve the historic road, steps were taken to replace missing stones with new ones. In total, there should be 83 milestones, of which 79 of the original limestones are still standing (not necessarily in their original location - that's a further complication which I may address later). Of these, 42 have the original cast-iron plates with the mileage to Holyhead and the next coaching stop either way. The rest have reproduction plates, cast as closely as possible to the originals but additionally with '2003' shown in smaller letter, so we know they're later. A further three milestones have reproduction plates in reproduction stone, where the original stone had been lost or was irretrievably broken.

This leaves just one location - 2 miles to Holyhead - where there is no milestone at all. This might be because the original milestone would have been under what later became the Anglesey Aluminium works, and the road was diverted round it, although I find that a poor excuse not to have replaced it when all the others were done.

In relation to what is officially classed a listed building or structure, the general rule adopted seems to be that only those with the original plates should be protected in this way. This seems a reasonable enough criterion, except that I found that they haven't always followed the rule - some with an original plate are not listed, and some with a reproduction plate are listed - and no obvious justification for that. I will take it up with Cadw.

Considering it was nearly twenty years ago when these milestones were addressed and replacements made, I wanted to see how well they've lasted, and whether the effort put to their conservation can still be seen. There is some variation in their condition and accessibility, as my pictures show. A good number are in very good condition and stand proud by the roadside so that even the casual passer-by would have little doubt what they are. The best stand in front of an arch built into the side wall of the road, probably preserving in this a feature of the original wall.

Some were obscured by vegetation and were as a result hard to find. Sometimes I managed to pull away the ivy or whatever it was before taking a picture, but it wasn't always safe to do so, so they have remained as they were. Some are just dirty (and some of the blurrier pictures of mine were just taken in the rain).

There's a lot of variation in how the paint has lasted, with a lot of rust showing through even in some of the new replacement plates. I often found myself thinking, wouldn't it be nice if local people got together to look after their milestone and ensure it could be seen (subject of course to safety on the road). This has indeed happened, in the case of the paint, for at least two milestones, at 8 and 83 miles to Holyhead:

However, I found myself a little ambivalent about this development, for although in each case the milestone is better looked after, they've changed the painting scheme. At 83 miles, it's black letters on a white background when all the others in Wales are white letters on a black background (Telford's original painting scheme, for better visibility in snow, according to Bob Daimond). Granted this is the first one in Wales and therefore the same scheme as 84 miles, the next one along over the border in England. The 8-mile changes are more subtle: painting the bolts white and painting the bevel of the stone, in addition to the plate, black. It looks nice, but it's not the same as the others; again I'm worrying about authenticity.

Finally, this milestone is not in a particularly good condition, and is one with a reproduction plate, but it stands on a length of the old road which is now just a footpath - in this case just south of the A55 and north of Lon Isaf Tollgate. This means it can be readily accessed, so I could cut away the vegetation at leisure,  and more to the point the authorities have raised it so that it now stands at something like the original height of the milestones above the roadway - in other cases, successive layers of tarmac have built the road up the front of the stone. Here alone you get the idea what it looked like when first placed.

North Wales A5 Milestones pictured

Pont Rhyd Goch and authenticity

For once I had been able to get off the road and take a picture with a good view of a bridge. This is Pont Rhyd Goch, very close to the summit of the entire road. Isn't this a lovely bridge and a classic example of a Thomas Telford bridge? Well, yes and no.

The design you see is Telford, but look carefully under the arch and you can see where the carriageway has been widened with a modern reinforced concrete arch. After that, the outer wall was replaced just as it was, a bit further out, by skilled conservators. So we are seeing what it was supposed to look like, but put back later.  As the purpose of the walk was to seek out the visible signs of the road's history, this, and other artefacts along the way,  poses the question of authenticity. Am I really seeing the history I had set out to see, or is it a pastiche?

The historical legacy of the road is very much respected by the fact that the conservators have needed to do their work. I've seen features along the way, such as depots, which are still there, not because they perform a useful function (although some do, incidentally) but because the highway authorities have chosen to keep them as a reminder of the forebears' work. Nowadays, legislation protects many historic buildings and structures, but they're only still there because landowners and public authorities chose to protect them before there was legislation. At the end of the day, I see and enjoy things that have been deliberately preserved and conserved over the years, when the originals that have not been so well looked-after are tumbled down or overgrown. I conclude (concede?) that the nice looking bits of history are not quite authentically as built.    

At Pont Rhyd Goch, I can't even be sure about the name. New bridges don't seem to have been officially named, but just acquired the names that local people gave them, usually describing what they were near - the river or a nearby building - or, occasionally, what they replaced.  So a name Pont Rhyd Goch (Red Ford Bridge) is typical, suggesting that the bridge was close to, or replaced, a ford where maybe rocks were reddish. The difficulty is that Telford's route for the road here was brand new, the older road, still very clear today as a track and public path, being just across the valley. Having regard to few buildings and tracks in this remote terrain, there just isn't anywhere that would need a ford from the old road across the river at this point: it just wouldn't go anywhere. On a map from 1889, the earliest I have found where the bridge is named, it's called Pont Ty Coch, which may be more original, named after a roadside building, and later adapted to the present name.

Reflections on the Shropshire road

How do you describe the something that isn't there? It was easy enough in a tick-box sort of way when I was looking for milestones, when either I saw them or I didn't (and even then, subsequent research has shown that some I didn't see were actually there, nevertheless).

This is about something vaguer - the 'look' of the road. Birdwatchers call it 'jizz' - the way a bird hops, pecks, glides, etc., lets them recognise it, even when they haven't seen the distinctive wingtip flash or whatever that really identifies a species. I think of this when I'm weeding the garden: I have an idea from the shape of leaves which should go and which should stay, although I haven't got the technical vocabulary (which I know exists) that would enable me to describe the difference.

So the question was - does the Shrewsbury to Chirk road look like the Chirk to Holyhead road? I do think that the road all the way from Chirk to Holyhead has a certain look in common, although I would be hard pressed to demonstrate this with a few pictures, given all the changes in landscape along the way. I wanted to know if that look started at Shrewsbury. And, no, it doesn't, although again it's difficult to say exactly why.

So what was the same and what was different?

Gradients - a common approach to avoiding steep gradients by embankments over dips, cuttings through rises and platforms round the side of hills, obviously more pronounced in Wales because the topography calls for it.

Halts - a need to call at certain places for stopping-off points along the way.  The road goes through Nesscliffe in Shropshire because it had the coaching inns, otherwise Telford would have gone the way of the present bypass. In Wales, the route through Corwen and Bangor was dictated in advance - but not at Llangollen or Capel Curig, while Anglesey called for a brand-new coaching inn. So was Telford, County Surveyor for Shropshire, more subject to local pressure there than in Wales?

Tollhouses - the two-storey tollhouse at Montford Bridge looks like an Anglesey tollhouse, and that at Burcot (actually the other side of Shrewsbury) is similar to those in mainland Wales. The 'Gatehouse' by Wolfshead looks nothing like a tollhouse - but may be an earlier turnpike building.

Milestones - a similar, but not identical design. West of Shrewsbry, these are definitely different to those on the London side and the stone itself is the same, suggesting some continuity between Shrewsbury-Chirk and Chirk-Holyhead. The cast iron plate doesn't have quite the same lettering and doesn't follow the policy of naming the next coaching stop either side.
 
Depots and walls - these roadside alcoves are a very distinct characteristic of the Telford road in North Wales, and I really couldn't find any in Shropshire except perhaps one or two just before Chirk. But that leads to the other big difference: you can't really have a depot without there being a roadside wall for the alcove to interrupt. In Wales, the topography leads to a need for a retaining wall one side or another, and sometimes both - but the Telford roadway is usually bounded by a wall everywhere. (of course walls get rebuilt by adjoining property owners or in highway improvements - but it's rare for a wall, once built, to be removed and replaced by a fence). This really was the big difference in Shropshire - the road in the countryside usually had just a fence or a hedge at the side. I couldn't spot the depots because there was no wall for them to be in.

  



 

The big problem with the Camera and Data Card

At 9.38am on 20 September I had a moment of deep despair. Along the walk, I had been taking lots  of pictures as well making notes of what I was seeing. That morning it appeared that I had lost all the pictures I had taken since starting Phase 2 - and as my handwritten notes were no substitute for the images, I didn't know what I could do to recover them.

That evening (fortunately then back home) I realised that I could read all the pictures up to 4.49pm the previous day. Something had happened then, or more exactly halfway through a picture I had taken then, which meant I could not read the remaining files. I had 69 files on the data card which the computer told me were there, and about the right size, but I couldn't read them with any imaging software. There then followed some messages between me and my camera manufacturer's help desk, but having established that the camera worked perfectly well with a different data card, suspicion turned to the card, not the camera. I thought the data had been corrupted because there was apparently something still there, and it could, I hoped, still be recovered. I took it to a local computer-geek place who in turn sent it off to another one.

It turns out that I had been sold a counterfeit card! It claimed to be 32GB, printed on the card but also the firmware inside had been tampered with, so that the camera and computer also thought there was 32GB there. In reality, it was only 8GB, so once that was filled up there was no more room - and the apparent 69 files were just zeroes. I know where I bought it and I still have the receipt, so obviously I am following that up.

I'm dealing with this now because I'm working through my notes and photographs along the way. Having got to this point on the walk, I could work out exactly what was missing - and in the end it turned out to be only about four miles' worth. I have just been back there and with the aid of the written notes, succeeded in retaking the pictures, and one or two more. Fortunately, the trees hadn't shed too many leaves since, and the weather was much the same, so I won't have lost too much continuity. 

My camera phone was my backup for the reminder of the journey. I was lucky to be at home by then, because it meant I could download from the camera daily in order to clear the memory for the next day. That worked, too, although there may be some reduction in image quality.

This problem could have been very much worse.