Roads, Fords & Bridges (Part II)

In 1726 work began on the Birmingham to Edgehill Turnpike (Stratford Road), and the parishioners found to their disgust that they still had to give their statutory eight days labour on the highway each year : it was now to be for others' profit as well as others' ease of travel. The work would be overseen by professional road-makers, and the Company would provide materials : a small concession to local inhabitants was their freedom from tolls at the Cole Bank gate when using the road for journeys within the Parish.

When first opened, the Turnpike was the old highway improved just a little. The route was not altered : at the Cole crossing, where the direct line would involve a long transverse causeway above the riverside bogs, the road bent sharply to make a short cross a right angles - and it still does. The road surface was probably little better in early years. The worst holloway, up from the river, would be partly infilled with hard-core, ditches would be dug on either side of a made-up strip just wide enough for two coaches to pass with care.

Remaking of the road from bedrock upwards was not completed for several decades, and tolls were raised by a half to pay for the work. Graded layers of broken stone were rolled down to provide a firm smooth surface, with gravel on top. Methods and materials were to change little hereabout until this century. Coaches could move fast along the improved Turnpike, but the fine dust into which the gravel was ground by the wheels and hooves was a summer misery for road-side dwellers. No wonder high hedges became popular ! The mud of winter spattered every traveller.

Until the early C 19th there was probably no other bridge than that at Greet Mill. (References to a bridge in Stuart times are most likely to be to a footbridge only, across the millweir.) The flimsy footbridges at other fords were often washed away by floods. Yardley Great Trust provided the pleasing Four Arches Bridge, to link Billesley and Hall Green : designed for walkers and horsemen, it had parapets low enough to permit laden packhorses to cross. Wagons still used the old ford on the bridges' downstream side.

Bridges were built over the leats of watermills, and these had to be maintained by the tenant millers. When a two-arch road bridge was erected at Titteford early last century, the ford went out of use. That at Four Arches continued until the late 1920's, when new houses on Cole Valley Road blocked access from the east side. River action since then has covered all trace of the wide paved ramp that used to slope to the water.

Another crossing which has quite vanished, due to the building of the North Warwickshire Railway embankment, is that formerly near Sarehole Farm. Robin Hood and Webb Lanes were brought together in 1906 so that a single brick arch could be made over a new central lane, instead of two close together. A few years later a wide but too low girded road bridge replaced both the nearby fords, joining the new lane to Old Wake Green Road. Another of the City Council's early improvements, in 1913, was the substitution of a double-arch bridge over a new central channel for the two humped bridges on Stratford Road at the site of Greet Mill.

The counties having taken over road maintenance, the last of the tollgates were removed in 1872. Little was done for the betterment of the highways, which remained narrow and twisting, while the potholed lanes were dangerous : it was all too easy to bump or slide into deep ditches. Yardley R. D. C. did what it could after 1894, but left a huge task to the City : the Town Plan of 1918 provided for the widening of Stratford and Highfield Roads and Robin Hood Lane and the making of two new north-south highways.

One, the lack of which in earlier times testifies to the water-logged state of the Cole Valley for most of its history, was to extend the line of what then was a short street, Sarehole Road, south of Titterford and north to Warwick Road, and the other to go from Cateswell to Tyseley. Cateswell/ Tynedale Road was duly made, as was Cole Valley Road, and by 1928 a dual carriage with central reservation for tramcars had been opened from Four Ways to Shirley : in the 30's unemployed men worked on the widening of Highfield and Fox Hollies Roads. The completion of these and other plans were prevented by the Second World War, and little has been done since its end. The approach ramps for the new bridge at Titterford are ancient monuments, undisturbed since 1939.