The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: London to York

Yorkshire, upon which we have now entered, is the largest shire or county in England. In one way it seems almost incredibly large, for it has more acres than there are letters (...

The ascent of Gonerby Hill, where these events took place, is a part of the journey to the North. It begins at the distance of a mile and a quarter beyond Grantham, shortly befo...

Less than a mile down the road is that humble little public-house whose strange sign, the “Ram Jam,” has puzzled many people. Its original name was the “Winchilsea Arms,” and it...

The Archway and the Archway Road were constructed about 1813, following upon the failure of the original idea of driving a tunnel through the hill-top. The Hill is a great outst...

“It is not much flock’d to by People of Quality,” he goes on to observe. Here, at least, he is not out of date. People of Quality do not flock to Islington. The medicinal waters...

In the vanished era, only those who could afford it travelled; in the present, only those who _cannot_ afford it go “first.” Jack is as good as his master—“and a d—d sight bette...

As for Biggleswade itself, it is a town with an extraordinarily broad and empty market-place, a church with a spire of the Hertfordshire type, and two old coaching inns—the “Whi...

Edinburgh, as a matter of fact, even now a far cry, was beyond the ken of most Londoners in those times, and London was to Edinburgh folks a place dimly heard of, and never to b...

THE summit of this convenient Golgotha is the place where the North Road and the Great North Road adjust their differences, and proceed by one route to the North. Not a very ter...

That bridge would have been an exceedingly awkward place for a coach accident. It is picturesqueness itself, and by consequence not the most convenient for traffic. Originally b...

But this white-stuccoed frontage does not hide anything of antiquity, for this is not that original “Red Lion” to which Samuel Pepys resorted. The house he refers to in his diar...

North and South Muskham lie off the road to the right, and are not remarkable, except perhaps for the fact that a centenarian, in the person of Thomas Seals of Grassthorpe, who...

Dr. Vaughan was a bitter opponent of horse-racing, and so was not popular with the sporting element; and as Doncaster is, above everything, given over to sport, this meant that...

Chaplin had in early days been a coachman himself. His career would have delighted that sturdy moralist, Hogarth, painter of the successful career of the Industrious Apprentice,...

But to pray for them alone would not perhaps have been so very admirable, and so the Church took the care of the roads on itself in a very special sense. It granted indulgences...

To coachmen, who were adepts in the art of what the slangy call “spoofing,” and were always ready—in earlier slang phrase—to “take a rise out of” strangers, the Six Hills afford...

“_I expect to pass through this world but once_. _Any good_, _therefore_, _I can do_, _or any kindness that I can show to any fellow-creature_, _let me do it now_. _Let me not d...

{117} He was baptised in the church of St. Bride, Fleet Street, according to a discovery more recently made; and he would thus appear really to have been a Londoner.