Roads, Fords and Bridges (Part 1)

It requires an unusual weather condition to make us give any close attention to the highways along which we travel. True, those motorists who use the three Cole fords on the edge of our district are accustomed to their being closed due to floods, but the closure rarely lasts long. Most of us drive over the bridges that span the Cole without a thought for the brook flowing beneath : we are reminded of its presence when a snow-melt flood submerges the too-low bridge at the foot of Robin Hood Lane, and just once in recent years the deep and wide channel beneath Stratford Road bridge overflowed.

We shall not soon forget that winter of our discontent when freak conditions of frost one morning immobilised the city's wheeled traffic at the foot of every slope ! But such events are rare : though we complain about the traffic, the road-surfaces, and the failure of successive Councils to complete those far-sighted highway plans of forty years ago which the Second World War interrupted, we really have little to bemoan compared with out predecessors hereabout.

The earliest men in the area were shaggy and uncouth enough for any student demo, and did not have to find out for themselves where the safest and firmest crossings of the Coleside bogs were located. Animals had already found them by trial and error. Stone-age hunters had only to follow game-trails down through the woods from the open, drier ridge. Gravel deposits left by post- glacial floods here and there along the valley caused the river to run wide but shallow, with a firm footing.

From earliest times two of these fords, both since Saxon times called Greet (Old English 'greot' meaning grit or gravel) were in regular use on what became Stratford and Warwick Roads, as was Titterford. From the creation of Warwickshire in about AD 1000 by King Edgar Stratford Road was the preferred route to the shire town as far as Hockley Heath. It crossed fewer brooks and its Cole crossings were usually better, from the C 13th at least, because a shallows was created below the dam of Greet Mill - but in flood many a horse and man were swept away. Titterford was probably of equal antiquity, a crossing on the ancient ridgeway that runs north east through Yardley Manor.

After the Romans, whose roads by-passed our district, there were no road-makers, but only road-menders until the C 18th. By statute local residents were responsible for upkeep of the highways, but this meant filling in the worst holes and pulling a harrow over the rest. There was no proper foundation or surface, so that travel in or after wet weather was almost impossible across the clay that is never far below our topsoil. It became law that travellers must tread out a new road when the existing one was unusable. At winter's end the king's highway might well be a wide strip of morass on either side of a gorge down which water flowed. Scribers Lane is still a worn holloway, and Greet Mill Hill must have been much worse.

The first bridges were trees fallen across streams. In the Middle Ages there were rough timber footbridges at the Cole fords - when they had not been swept away by floods.