Even now, what little was done was done grudgingly. The mail-coach from London which ran through Oxford and Birmingham to Shrewsbury was extended from Shrewsbury to Holyhead, and was met at Llangollen by an express from Chester bringing the cross-post correspondence. Thus matters remained for nine years, when, under pressure which the Post Office could no longer resist, the Coventry route was adopted. The Post Office opposed the change to the last, even though a Parliamentary Committee had recommended it, and an address in its favour had been presented to the Prince Regent. At length Vansittart, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, brought his authority to bear, and in July 1817 a mail-coach by way of Coventry began to run, accomplishing the distance between London and Holyhead in thirty-eight hours.
But in order to facilitate communication between England and Ireland a good deal more was required than to set up an additional coach or to send an existing coach by another and shorter route. The roads of the country were still in a state to make rapid travelling impossible. Much, no doubt, had been done to improve them. Between the years 1760 and 1809 no less than 1514 Turnpike Acts had been passed, and under the turnpike system the roads were better than before. Still the making of them had been entrusted to incompetent hands, and they were constructed on false principles. For the bed or foundation of the roads improper or insufficient materials had been used. Little or no attention had been paid to drainage. Few roads were provided with side channels. Not seldom, indeed, the sides were encumbered with huge banks of mud which had accumulated to the height of six, seven, and even eight feet. Not only had convexity of surface, as a means of carrying off the water, been disregarded, but the road was frequently hollow in the middle and everywhere cut into deep ruts. High hedges and trees were still allowed to intercept the action of the sun and wind, the importance of a rapid evaporation of moisture being as yet unrecognised. Even the roads themselves had been laid out on no fixed principle. Their lines of direction were, almost without exception, identical with the footpaths of the aboriginal inhabitants of the country; and these, doubtless to avoid the bogs and marsh lands, and possibly also for purposes of observation, had invariably followed the hills.
Hence it came to pass that almost every road of any importance was both steep and crooked. Where there were no hills and the roads passed across wet and flat land, they were almost always below the level of the adjacent fields, the mud having been carried away by constant use. While such was the general state of the roads during the first twenty years of the present century, the road between Shrewsbury and Holyhead, over which a mail-coach had been travelling since the summer of 1808, was notoriously one of the worst in the kingdom. "To Kenneage,[88] six miles of narrow road; scarcely room for two carriages to pass, and much out of repair; in winter, the drivers say, the ruts are up to the bed of the coach." "From Kenneage to Capel Curig, road narrow and wants walling to prevent carriages falling down precipices 300 or 400 yards perpendicular." "From Capel Curig to Bangor, side of the road unguarded, and many accidents may happen to passengers by the coach running off the road as the mail passes here in the dark." Thus wrote the assistant superintendent of mail-coaches in 1808, and nothing had since been done to remedy defects.
The mail along this line, of road was now to be carried at a higher rate of speed than before, and, if only on this ground, it would have been necessary at least to remove actual causes of danger. Even before 1817, however, Parliamentary Commissioners had been appointed for the improvement of the Holyhead road; and these Commissioners had summoned to their aid the first of that line of illustrious men who, during the last eighty years, have transformed the face of England. This was Thomas Telford, who had already achieved distinction by the roads he had made in the Highlands of Scotland.
Telford commenced operations in the autumn of 1815; and now for the first time in England, or at all events for the first time since the ancient ways were laid down by the Romans, a road was to be constructed on scientific principles. "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain." This—we say it without irreverence—is what literally came to pass. Easy inclinations, ample breadth, perfect drainings, complete protection, and a smooth and hard surface—these were the distinguishing characteristics of the road which Telford now made between Holyhead and Shrewsbury. A road that had been one of the worst in the kingdom was now the very best. In summer it was not even dusty, and in winter was free from dirt. Frost and rain produced upon it but trifling and superficial effects. To crown all, the Menai Straits were spanned by a noble bridge, where before there had been only an inconvenient ferry.
While Telford was thus raising the business of road-making to the level of an art, John Loudon Macadam was demonstrating of what materials the surface of a road should be made. Macadam had travelled about the kingdom much as John Palmer had travelled about some thirty years before in pursuit of a different object, and, as the result of long observation, he had come to the conclusion that the surface of roads should be made of broken stones; and having in 1816 been appointed general surveyor of roads in the British district he proceeded to put his views into practice. With success to recommend it, the new system spread like wildfire, and "a macadamised road" soon became a household word.
Nor was it to the business of road-making alone that science now lent her aid. What force of traction or power is required to draw carriages over different kinds of road, in what line of direction the power can be best applied—what, in other words, is the proper angle for the traces, and what in the case of hills is the highest inclination up which horses can go at a trot and down which they can with safety be driven at full speed—these were some of the questions which now engaged the attention of the scientific world. Some thirty years before, Walsingham and Chesterfield when postmasters-general had dabbled in matters of the kind;[89] but now they were reduced to the form of mathematical problems and received a mathematical solution.
The excellence of the road constructed between Holyhead and Shrewsbury brought into bold relief the imperfections of the road between Shrewsbury and London. To this road, which, in comparison with the other, had at one time been pronounced good and was now pronounced execrable, Telford proceeded to apply the same principles as before. He raised the valleys, lowered or avoided the hills, and corrected deviations. To give only one instance—an instance taken from the second stage out of London—the old road from Barnet to South Minims ascended three steep and long hills; the new road avoided two of these hills altogether, and at the same time was shorter than the old one by more than 600 yards. And so it was in a greater or less degree all the way from London through St. Albans to Coventry, and thence through Birmingham and Wolverhampton to Shrewsbury.
It should also be mentioned that at this time, while the country roads were hollow in the centre instead of convex, the roads in and about London within a radius of about ten miles were the exact contrary. Here convexity, as a means of carrying off water, had been pushed to so absurd an extent that the road was in the form of a slanting roof, and a carriage, unless kept in the centre, was on a dangerous slope. This, which had been a prolific source of accidents, Telford now altered. The effect of his operations upon the first stage out of London, the Highgate Archway Road as it was called, is perhaps best described in the words of one of the principal mail-coach contractors. Before Telford took this road in hand, he wrote, "It was all we could do to walk up both sides of the archway with six horses, and now we can trot up with our heaviest loads with four."
The road from London to Shrewsbury, in continuation of the one from Shrewsbury to Holyhead, was completed in 1828, and, corresponding alterations having been made in the eight miles of road which connect Howth and Dublin, a line of communication was established between the capitals of England and Ireland such as, until the days of railways, could hardly have been improved. Some few years before, when the Post Office had received orders to accomplish the distance between London and Holyhead in thirty-eight hours, Hasker, the experienced superintendent of mail-coaches, while zealously applying himself to carry the orders into effect, had felt it incumbent upon him as a loyal servant to make a protest in writing against the "extraordinary expedition projected." It would, he urged—and no doubt rightly so as the road then was—be inhuman to horses and dangerous to life. This extraordinary expedition was at the rate of seven miles an hour. Along the Parliamentary Road the distance was accomplished, without hurt to horses and with perfect safety, at the rate of ten miles an hour, and the London and Holyhead coach soon became one of what were known as the "crack" coaches of the kingdom.