A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside. Johnny Scott

and in 1911, 1,600 stallions were exported from Britain to various countries. By 1949, there were just eighty horses registered in Britain, and in 1975 the Rare Breeds Survival Trust listed the breed as ‘vulnerable’. Clydesdales have since seen a resurgence in popularity and population, resulting in the breed’s status being reclassified favourably as ‘at risk’, with an estimated global population of just 5,000 specimens.

      At the same time, other landlords, such as the Earls of Chesterfield and Huntington, were developing regional draught horses by importing continental stallions from Zeeland. Later in the century, Robert Bakewell of Derbyshire, the famous improver of cattle and sheep, developed the Improved Black Horse, which was to become world famous as the Shire horse.

      NEW ADVANCES IN GOODS TRANSPORTATION

      As Britain moved into the age of industry, in the middle of the century, there was a desperate need to find some method of transporting bulky raw materials and finished products. The Toll Pike Trusts set up by Act of Parliament in 1706, with powers to collect road tolls for maintaining the principal highways in Britain, were still in their infancy. Most goods were transported by long trains of pack horses or great cumbersome wagons to the nearest port, on roads which in most places had scarcely improved since the Middle Ages. There had been some early attempts to improve inland river navigation in the seventeenth century; the government of King James established the Oxford-Burcot Commission in 1605 which began a system of locks and weirs on the River Thames and was opened between Oxford and Abingdon by 1635. Sir Richard Weston designed and built the Wey navigations in 1635, a canal running 25 kilometres from Weybridge to Guildford, allowing barges to transport heavy goods via the Thames to London. Timber, corn, flour, wood and gunpowder from the Chilworth Mills were moved up the canal to London whilst coal was brought back. The Aire & Calder Navigation, in West Yorkshire, was opened 1703, the Trent Navigation in 1712, the Kennet in 1723 and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation in 1734, which provided a navigable route to Salford and Manchester.

      CARVING OUT THE CANALS

      These were all improvements to existing rivers; but the first artificial canal, a waterway designed on the basis of where goods needed to go rather than where a river happened to be, was built by the Duke of Bridgewater. The Duke commissioned the engineer James Brindley to build a canal which would transport coal quickly and efficiently from his mines in Worsley to the rapidly industrialising city of Manchester. Brindley’s design included an aqueduct carrying the canal over the River Irwell, and this engineering wonder immediately attracted tourists when it opened in 1761. The Duke’s canal proved to be highly successful; barges carrying thirty tonnes of coal were easily pulled by one horse walking along a tow path – more than ten times the amount of cargo per horse than was possible with a cart. Time spent moving goods was cut to a fraction and, because of the massive increase in supply, the Bridgewater canal reduced the price of coal in Manchester by nearly two-thirds within a year of its opening. It was a huge financial success, earning what had been spent on its construction within just a few years – which was a relief to the Duke, who had funded the whole venture himself.

      THE BRIDGEWATER CANAL STARTED A FEVER OF CANAL BUILDING ACROSS THE ENTIRE COUNTRY UNTIL THERE WAS A NATIONWIDE NETWORK OF TRANSPORT COMMUNICATION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND WALES, AND IN SCOTLAND, FROM THE SEA PORTS ON THE EAST AND WEST COASTS. IT WAS AN INCREDIBLE UNDERTAKING.

      The Bridgewater canal started a fever of canal building across the entire country until there was a nationwide network of transport communication between England and Wales, and in Scotland, from the sea ports on the east and west coasts. It was an incredible undertaking. Armies of ‘navvies’ (as in navigators) laboured under engineering geniuses such as Telford, Brindley, Rennie or Dadford, creating aqueducts, boat lifts, tunnels, inclined planes and caisson lifts.

      The new canal system enabled both goods and people to move around the country in a manner that must have seemed incredible compared with the methods of the recent past. Fast ‘Flyboats’, crewed by four men with two working while the other two slept and a system of changing horses, carried urgent cargo and passengers at relatively high speed day and night. Raw materials, fuel and produce could now be moved internally round the country with ease. Heavy cargoes for export, transported along the network linking the coastal port cities such as London, Liverpool, and Bristol, could be exchanged with sea-going ships and imported goods brought back on the return journey. The canals fell into decline as the rail network developed in the mid-nineteenth century, leaving us a legacy of 4,000 miles of waterways, both for recreational use and as a habitat for urban and rural wildlife.

      CHANGING THE HIGHWAYS

      Although intensely unpopular, income raised by the turnpike trusts was radically improving the condition of Britain’s highways. ‘Turnpike’ alludes to the similarity between the gate used to control access to the road and the weapon used by infantry to deter cavalry in the wars of the Middle Ages. The turnpike consisted of a row of pikes or bars, each sharpened at one end and attached to horizontal members, secured at one end to an upright pole or axle, which could be rotated to open or close the gate. The name expressed the resentment of people who had previously used the roads freely suddenly finding them barred.

      During the first three decades of the eighteenth century, sections of the main radial roads into London were put under the control of individual turnpike trusts. The pace at which new turnpikes were created picked up in the 1750s as 150 trusts were formed to maintain the cross-routes between the Great Roads radiating from London. At this time, roads leading into provincial towns, particularly in western England, were put under single trusts and key roads in Wales were turnpiked. In South Wales, the roads of complete counties were put under single turnpike trusts by the 1760s. A further 400 were established in the 1770s, with the turnpiking of subsidiary connecting roads, routes over new bridges and new routes in the growing industrial areas in Scotland. This had doubled by 1800, and in 1825 about 1,000 trusts controlled 29,000 miles of road across the country. The trusts were required to erect milestones indicating the distance between the main towns on the road, many of which still survive as do the old toll houses, such as the one at Stanton Drew, in Somerset, or Honiton, in Devon.

      The improved road system heralded the Golden Age of Coaching, with fast mail coaches and passenger stagecoaches hammering along the new highways at what were considered unbelievable speeds. The excitement of driving a coach and four fascinated members of the Regency set, who competed with professional coachmen in the skill of handling a team of ‘cattle’ and often bribed professionals to let them take over the ‘ribbons’ on one of the regular coach routes, to the alarm and discomfort of the passengers. Most notable among the amateurs were Sir St Vincent Cotton, who bought the stagecoach The Age with the last of a fortune he had gambled away and ran a passenger service between London and Brighton. There was also Sir John Lade, who caused a scandal by marrying the wife of the highwayman ‘Sixteen String Jack’ Rann shortly after he had been hanged for robbing the Royal Chaplain; Harry Stevenson, a Cambridge graduate and a genius with coach horses; Lord Worcester; Lord Sefton; Colonel Berkeley; and Lord Barrymore, known as ‘Hellgate’ for his outrageous behaviour. As the turnpike roads spread across the country, coaching inns became a feature of many villages as the existing ale houses were upgraded to accommodate passengers whilst the coach horses were changed. These survive as the ever-popular village pub.

      A new generation of agricultural improvers emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century with ideas to meet the challenge of a population that had risen to around nine million, the rapid development of industrial towns, expanding colonisation and an army and navy on active service of about 160,000.

      THE BIRTH OF NEW BREEDS

      With improved feeding, livestock were growing better carcase qualities, but Robert Bakewell from Derbyshire experimented with selective breeding to standardise the best characteristic, within a breed. He started with the old Lincolnshire breed of sheep that he turned into the New Leicester. These sheep were big and delicately boned and had good-quality fleece and fatty forequarters, in keeping