NATURAL & MAN-MADE LANDSCAPE FEATURES

This provides firm going for the road to the northernmost of the two Greet fords : beyond it the road has to curve round a steep slope between the Cole and Tyseley Brook, which must have been a real obstacle after bad weather and much use. On the east side of the brook the road makes straight for a small outlying patch of boulder clay, and then goes directly across the main ridge, curving on the farther side of Westley Brook, then continuing south-east out of Yardley.

Coventry Road, first referred to in 1226, was a trail that used the east-west extension of the main ridge and its cap of boulder clay : the convenience of this, 1.5 miles of good going, made up for the trouble at each end. The still-existing holloway beside the road near the top of Red Hill testifies to the condition into which all these clay-slope routes degenerated : presumably the trench was bypassed in Turnpike (1745) reconstruction.

Yardley Green Road, leading to Rotyford, and including the eastern end of Blakesley Road, can be placed in 1383. Some bounding lanes, like Stoney Lane, Belle Walk, Billesley Lane, Gospel Lane, Lincoln Road, Gressel Lane, can be identified in the Boundary Presentment of 1495, and Baldwins Lane is found in 1540. But there are 17 road names in documents to the 16th C which cannot be placed, and the drawing of a road-map for any period earlier than the 18th C must be largely conjectural.

Henry Beighton's Map of Warwickshire, published in 1725, shows most of the Coventry, Warwick and Stratford Roads in Yardley. Intersections are mapped and can be identified, so that a tentative road pattern can be drawn, including lanes serving known farms and mills. The first Ordnance Survey sheets, drawn between 1812 and '17 on a scale of 2 inches to the mile, provide the first accurate maps, showing roads and field boundaries. By 1834 the First Edition of the OS One-Inch Map Series for the region was published and in 1847 the Tithe Map, at 10 inches to the mile, gave the completest detail.

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