The Holyhead Road: The Mail-coach Road to Dublin. Vol. 1

Here, as side-shows away from the horses, are the boxing-booths, the swings, and the trumpet-tongued merry-go-rounds, roaring like Bulls of Bashan and glittering with Dutch meta...

Beyond his half-guinea a week, an annual suit of clothes, and a superannuation allowance of seven shillings a week, a mail guard had no official prospects. Occasionally some cru...

The town is left behind by way of a long causeway and a bridge spanning the Ouse, in succession to the “street ford” that once plunged through it. Once across the river and the...

It was on this stretch of road, between St. Albans and Hockliffe, that the gay and mercurial highwayman, “Gentleman Harry,” did his last stroke of business, in the spring of 174...

It was here, in 1686, that Jonathan Simpson robbed Lord Delamere of 350 guineas, and “innumerable drovers, pedlars, and market-people,” all the way to Barnet. Jonathan was execu...

Even the humble turnpike men were liable to be informed against for not giving a ticket, for taking too much toll, or for not having their names displayed over their doorways.

Many soldiers lie in the crowded churchyard round the ugly church, jammed in an angle between railway and canal: the trains rushing by on a lofty viaduct that looks down upon th...

By 1830 the Hobby Horse had disappeared, and it was not until 1839–40 that the first machine with cranks was invented by a Scots blacksmith, Kirkpatrick Macmillan, who produced...

Whips were made at Daventry a hundred years ago, but it is now a boot-making town, not altogether unpicturesque, in the slatternly sort. Besides its “Wheatsheaf,” there are the...

London then ended at Islington. Where does it now end? At Highgate; at Whetstone, where the boundary of the Metropolitan Postal District is crossed; or beyond South Mimms, where...

Towards the middle of the tenth century, those ruins in the valley were a source of terror to the good folks of the rising town of St. Albans. In them lurked those outlaws—robbe...

Beyond Weeford, the next landmark, the Watling Street goes straight for three and a half miles, and then brings up against another dead end, where it is crossed by the Lichfield...

Meanwhile, stage-coaching had also been revolutionised. The growth of Birmingham and the great commercial industries of the Midlands had rendered the old methods too slow and cu...

In 1702 the “Wolverhampton and Birmingham Flying Stage Coach” was announced, to go once a week to London, in three days, and set out on the return from the “Rose,” in Smithfield...

Produced by Richard Tonsing, Chris Curnow and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by Th...

There were in coaching days no fewer than eight inns and posting-houses of different degrees in Meriden. There are now but two inns: the “Bull’s Head,” formerly a farmhouse, and...