Tower and Town, June 2016 (view the full edition)Turnpikes And The Great Bath RoadThe origins of the turnpike system are well known. By the end of the seventeenth century the condition of the roads had become so dreadful that it was clear something had to be done. In 1688 it took Samuel Pepys in a coach three days to travel from Bath to London. Making the parishes through which major routes passed responsible for their maintenance was clearly failing. The forced labour of unskilled villagers on work from which they derived no benefit was making conditions worse. So in the early eighteenth century the first trusts were set up to improve the worst sections of road - typically the steep hills. Local worthies were the trustees and they employed gatekeepers ('pikies') to collect tolls from the road users and carry out the upkeep. Hopefully the repairs could be done and the trusts wound up; but sadly this proved impossible as upkeep was an endless task. On our road this first happened in 1706 on Kingsdown Hill - The turnpikes and the pikies were always unpopular among local people who had to pay to use roads that had previously been free. The low road to Hungerford through Minal and Ramsbury still had its devotees after the forest road through Savernake - the present A4 - was turnpiked and improved in 1726. But as the railway network spread in the mid-nineteenth century the turnpike trusts fell off a financial cliff as all their through traffic disappeared and most trusts became insolvent. Under the Local Government Act of 1888 their assets and responsibilities were passed to the county councils, but disappointingly there was no requirement for any of their books and ledgers to be preserved, so almost all were destroyed. Piecing together their work is a matter of detection and inference. Alexander Kirk Wilson |
now a quiet residential road leading down from Batheaston eastwards towards the village of Gastard a little to the south of the present A4. Queen Anne had returned from a visit to the not-at-all fashionable city of Bath and her slow, heavy coach stuck dangerously on the hill only by good fortune avoiding an accident. In the following decades other particularly bad stretches of road were taken in hand by new trusts. By about 1760 the whole route we would recognise as the A4 had been turnpiked, though improvements continued to be made until the 1840s.