TURNPIKE ROADS

The clayland roads were notorious even when all roads were bad; never properly founded, rarely and grudgingly repaired, they were obstacles rather than aids to travel. They lacked surface, rain, and ditch.

Deep and narrow holloways on slopes that became water-courses in rain, strips of morass hundreds of yards wide across valleys, dangerous unpaved fords with a flimsy footbridge at best, these were the traveller's lot; improvement only began with the setting up of Turnpike Trusts, and came but slowly.

The Birmingham to Edgehill Turnpike (Stratford Road) and the Birmingham to Warmington Turnpike (Warwick Road) were created in 1725-6.

Tollgates and keepers' cottages were built at the 'Mermaid', Greet Mill, Cole Bank (School Road Hall Green), and at Acocks Green.

Money and engineers were provided to improve the worst stretches, but for labour local parishioners were still called upon to perform their ancient six days per year stint.

Effective drainage of flood-meadows was still a century away, and it was necessary to build causeways over them, to pave fords and later to bridge them. The gorges had to be filled up and the sharpest turns reduced, or entirely new stretches laid down.

After 1745 milestones had to be provided; on Warwick Road they were sited almost opposite Greet School and on Tyseley Hill (2 and 3 miles from the 'Mermaid'), and on Stratford Road (which was the highway to London until the Telford improvements to Coventry Road ninety years later) the stones showed the distance from the capital - 114 miles on the one opposite the Park gates.

Fifty years after their establishment the Turnpikes were required to make drastic improvements, but tolls were raised by a half to pay for them. In 1780 William Hutton could still report that both roads were 'much used and much neglected'.

However they were to become so much better that by 1836 the journey from Birmingham to London was being completed in 12 hours including stops. In addition to the inns there were smithies en route, by Greet Mill tollgate, opposite Greet Farm, and on Tyseley Hill.

Aris's Birmingham Gazette recorded the dangers of road travel in later Georgian times. Footpads haunted the Turnpikes. One Jones a milliner was beaten and robbed of 22 guineas at Spark Brook, and one Mander, knocked from his horse by a rope stretched across Stratford Road near Formans Lane, was relieved of his purse.

A man unnamed lost £5 to a footpad 'at the bottom of Wake Green', and Mr. Swinburne (the Hall Green school-master) was robbed near Greet Mill. He was lucky, because a horseman pursued the footpad across the Common and caught him.

There is no record of a gibbet on either Turnpike as there was at Washwood Heath to discourage highway robbers. The Gazette printed dire warnings by the lords of Yardley Manor of the consequences of poaching; the Grevises jealously retained their sole fishing rights in the Cole, a trout stream, and their successors, the wealthy Taylors, were no less concerned to maintain their privileges.

In those times before refrigerated meat came from abroad, game and fish were important sources of winter protein to rich and poor alike; the latter risked buckshot, man-traps, and deportation for poaching, but it continued as long as there was anything to poach - and does to this day in other areas.