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TRAVEL IN WALES (continued)
Contents of this section
Thomas Telford in North Wales
The Menai Suspension
Bridge
Neath in the 1800s
Thomas Telford in North Wales
Many roads had been built by turnpike trusts in north Wales during the second
half of the 18th C.; and Telford's work in the area, which occupied the second and
third decades of the 19th C., was the culmination or 'crowning glory', of this road
making activity in north Wales. But there was a significant difference between Telford's
work and earlier road making in the area. Not only was Telford's work technically
superior to anything that had been done before, but also the impetus for Telford's
programme was essentially national and central, whereas previously road making had
been regarded as purely a matter of local concern.
 The Welsh Turnpike trusts did not generate sufficient
revenue to repair the roads, which ran for the most part over rugged and mountainous
terrain.
Heavy capital expenditure was needed to improve these roads. A turnpike trust was
a statutory authority, which borrowed money from investors for making or improving
a road; and the money was borrowed on the security of the tolls levied on travellers
using the road.
It was to remedy this situation that central government was induced to intervene
with financial aid in 1815. In response to pressure by members of Parliament, in
particular some Irish M.P.s, parliament appointed eight select committees between
1815 and 1822, to investigate the state of communications between London and Dublin
via Holyhead. The name of Sir Henry Parnell was linked with the efforts of these
committees to raise parliamentary funds for the process of improving these roads.
A sum of £20,000 was granted in 1815 towards repairing the roads between London
and Holyhead. By 1830 over £73,000 had been granted for building roads between
London and Dublin, by way of Holyhead and Howth.
Telford had surveyed the Holyhead roads for the government some four years previously,
with a view to possible improvement, but nothing had come of this. Now, the necessary
capital was available. The new Commission for roads wanted Telford to undertake the
work but the great engineer was busy with public works in Scotland in the summer
of 1815. The Commissioners wanted Telford to send an assistant to north Wales to
undertake preliminary surveys and to collect information about the availability of
labour and road making materials, so that operations could be commenced as soon as
Telford himself arrived in north Wales. But Telford refused to put the first general
arrangements concerning the Holyhead road improvements into the hands of an assistant.
'Having for 25 years past been engaged in conducting Canal Works adjacent to and
in north Wales,' Telford wrote to Alexander Milne, the secretary to the Commissioners,
referring to his work on the Ellesmere and Shrewsbury Canals, 'I am more fully aware
of all that regards Workmen, Materials, and Labour than any person I could send from
a distance... I am anxious to have the road properly improved and get suitable persons
for the sundry works, that I dare not delegate this part of the business. If it was
once arranged the Commissioners will not have cause to complain of want of vigour'.
Telford's work in Scotland was finished by the end of August 1815 and in September
he was at work in north Wales. By the end of the month he had completed his survey
of 28 miles of the most difficult and dangerous parts of the road, from Cernioge,
a coaching inn situated about 7 miles from Betys-y-coed in the direction of Shrewsbury,
to Llandygai near Bangor. Telford reported that the roads had been poorly planned
and badly constructed. In places, the 'working part', or that part on which carriages
travelled was as narrow as nine feet in breadth, and for the whole distance from
Cernioge to Llandygai the 'working part' was no more than twelve feet wide.
Telford's chief complaint about the road surface was that it did not rest on a firm
foundation, so that in wet weather the gravel of the road surface tended to sink
into the soil beneath, causing unevenness and rutting (except where the ground beneath
was naturally hard). One of Telford's major principles of highway construction was
that all roads should have a solid foundation of hand set stones. 'Where a road has
no solid and dry foundation,' Telford wrote in his 'General Rules for Repairing
Roads' 'it must be constructed anew. It must be well drained, and put into proper
form. Upon the 18 centre feet of it, stones must be put, forming a layer 7 inches
deep. Soft stones will answer, or cinders, particularly where sand is prevalent.
These bottoming stones must be carefully set by hand, with the broadest end down
in the form of a close neat pavement; the cavities should be filled with stone chips,
to make all level and firm, and no stone should be more than five inches broad on
its face.
This proportion of a solid and level foundation is the most essential point to be
secured in order to have a perfect road...over this bottoming of stones and cinders,
six inches of stones, of a proper quality, broken of a size that will, in their largest
dimensions, pass through a ring of two and a half inches in diameter, must be laid.
The six feet of road on either side of the 18 feet centre (making 30 feet) when formed
of a proper shape may be covered with six inches of good clean gravel or small stone
chips.
The major difference between Telford's method and that of his contemporary Macadam
, was that the latter would have nothing to do with the laying of a hand set foundation.
Macadam's practice was to form and camber the ground, drain it, and then spread layers
of broken stones to a depth of ten inches above the prepared ground. This simplified
method enabled Macadam to build roads at half the cost of Telford's. But Telford
never abandoned the practice of constructing his roads in the Roman tradition, with
the emphasis on solid foundation, building them it seems, to last 'not for an age,
but for all time!'
Having completed his survey of the road in Snowdonia, Telford selected four particularly
bad sections for improvement. The contracts were undertaken by John Straphen, a Shrewsbury
builder, and Thomas Stanton, who had worked under Telford on the construction of
the Ellesmere Canal. Messrs Straphen and Stanton and the other contractors employed
by Telford in north Wales between 1815 and 1830 were, with two exceptions, first
class road builders, and Telford was well pleased with their work. But with those
whose work did not reach the required standard, Telford had little patience. The
first of these, Thomas Roberts of Bryn Selwrn, Merioneth, was deprived of his contract;
and the other, John Jones of Bangor, was obliged to remake his section of the road,
near Llandygai, time and time again. It was clear that as far as Telford was concerned
'the good old days' when it had been assumed that anyone could make a road, had gone.
Road making had become a respectable profession. Telford's application of scientific
principles to highway construction was virtually a new departure, for no one had
done this on any extensive scale since the Roman occupation of Britain. The attitude
that road making was not sufficiently serious work to warrant the attention of a
civil engineer persisted until Telford came on the scene.
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The Menai Suspension Bridge
Telford's Masterpiece -
Thomas Telford owed nothing to rank or wealth: he was born in 1757, the son of
an Eskdale shepherd. His genius as a builder of canals, roads and bridges, carried
him to the top of his profession, and in 1820 he became President of the newly formed
Institute of Civil Engineers in London. His was the brain behind dozens of roads,
embankments, bridges, canals, aqueducts and harbours throughout Britain; but he had
relatively little to do with railway construction for he belonged essentially to
the pre-railway age. On his death in 1834, he was buried with the most famous of
the land in Westminster Abbey.
It was the geographical proximity of north Wales to Ireland, which brought Telford
to north Wales in 1815. His task from 1815 to 1830 was the reconstruction of the
road from Shrewsbury through Snowdonia to Holyhead, the nearest British port to Dublin.
The improvement was undertaken by the British Government to placate the Irish M.P.s
who had long complained about the state of roads generally between London and Holyhead.
The Holyhead Road, which came to be called the Great Irish Road, was to Dublin what
the Great North Road was to Edinburgh. While the reconstruction of the Shrewsbury-Holyhead
Road was in progress, Telford also undertook the improvement of the north Wales coast
road from Chester to Bangor.
Telford's Great Irish Road led from Holyhead island, over the Stanley Sands embankment
which he built in 1822-23 across Anglesey to Gwalchmai and Llanfair Pwyllgwyngyll,
to his great suspension bridge over the Menai Straits which he built between 1819
and 1826 to supersede the Bangor ferry. In Anglesey Telford abandoned the existing
road to Holyhead altogether, and built an entirely new highway across the island.
The stonework of the Menai Suspension Bridge is original masonry, but Telford's suspension
chains and carriageway were replaced when Sir Alexander Gibb renovated the bridge
in 1938-40. Few would disagree with the view that the Menai Bridge still has the
power to impress very greatly. The size of the bridge, quite apart from its architectural
merit made a great impression on Telford's contemporaries. The invention of the process
known as 'puddling' by Henry Cort in the 1780s made possible the large scale production
of wrought iron by means of coal fuel. Cast iron is hard and brittle, while wrought
iron is malleable and has a higher tensile strength,
From the Menai Suspension Bridge, the road continued to Bangor, and then went to
Landygai, up the Ogwen valley, through were Bethesda now stands, past Ogwen Bank
through Nant Ffrancon, then passing Llyn Ogwen, on to Capel Curig. From Capel Curig
the road continued past the Swallow Falls, to Betwys-y-coed; then on through Pentrfoelas,
Cerrigydrudion, Corwen, Llangollen, Chirk, Gobowen, Oswestry, Queen's Head, West
Felton, and Nescliff to Shrewsbury. From Shrewsbury the road went through Wellington,
Shifnal, Wolverhampton, Bilston and Wednesbury to Birmingham; then it continued through
Stonebridge, Coventry, Dunchurch, Daventry, Towcester, Old Stratford, Stony Stratford,
Hockcliffe, Dunstable, St. Albans, and it finally entered London through Highgate.
Telford's road was the route used by the Royal Mail coaches conveying the correspondence
of London and the South to Dublin in the pre-railway age. The Irish Mail from the
growing industrial centres in the North was conveyed to Holyhead along the road that
Telford had improved leading through Chester to Llandygai village near Bangor where
the coast road joined the main London-Shrewsbury-Holyhead road. The improvement of
the coast road involved the construction of the Conwy Suspension Bridge and its embankment,
to supersede the Conwy ferry. This route took the Irish mail from the north of England
from April 1820 until the end of August 1826. Ironically it was diverted from this
route after only two months after the completion of Conwy Bridge due to the introduction
of Post Office steam packets from Liverpool, which were faster and more powerful
than those from Holyhead.
As Telford was reconstructing the road, he became convinced that the responsibility
for maintaining the new parts should be taken out of the hands of the local turnpike
trusts. Under their Act of 1815, the Holyhead Roads Commissioners were bound to 'hand
over' all reconstructed parts of the road to the local trusts for maintenance. This
was obviously unsatisfactory for it was the ineffectiveness of the trust that had
necessitated the establishment of the Improvement Commission in the first place.
Telford wanted to see the creation of a new, single turnpike authority to maintain
the new road, but he did not like the idea of having to negotiate with six existing
turnpike trusts between Shrewsbury and Bangor, to persuade them to surrender control
of their sections of the Holyhead Road. Sir Henry Parnell came to Telford's rescue,
and successfully undertook the task. In 1819, a new trust was created to maintain
the whole of the Holyhead Road from Shrewsbury to Bangor; and in 1823 when the new
road across Anglesey was completed, the authority of the trust was extended to Holyhead.
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Neath in the 1800s
There is no doubt that the affluence generated by the increase in trade both
at home and abroad brought benefit to shopkeepers and tradesmen in the towns. As
evidence of this a Directory published in Neath in the 1830s shows a very representative
spectrum of available craftsmen and services.
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Neath in 1830
From Pigot's S.Wales Directory
| Nobility, Gentry & Clergy |
|
Esq |
17 |
Rev |
4 |
Earl |
1 |
Naval Officer |
2 |
Barrister |
1 |
Mrs 2 |
| Free Schools |
2 |
Stone Masons |
14 |
| Boarding School |
1 |
Straw Hat Makers |
2 |
| School Masters |
4 |
Surgeons |
3 |
| School Mistresses |
1 |
Tailors |
5 |
| Attorneys |
7 |
Tallow Chandlers |
3 |
| Auctioneers |
2 |
Tanners |
2 |
| Bakers & Flour Dealers |
3 |
Taverns, Inns & |
37 |
| Bankers |
1 |
Public houses |
|
| Blacksmiths |
7 |
Timber Merchnt |
3 |
| Booksellers & Stationers |
2 |
Tin Works |
3 |
| Boot & shoe makers |
5 |
Watch & Clk Mkr |
4 |
| Builders |
3 |
Wheel Wright |
2 |
| Butchers |
8 |
Weaver woollen |
7 |
| Cabinet Makers |
6 |
Misc |
|
| Carpenters & Joiners |
7 |
Block & pump mkr |
1 |
| Chemists & Druggists |
2 |
Eating hse kpr |
1 |
| Chemist- Manufrg |
1 |
Tin plate wkr |
1 |
| Coal Merchants |
3 |
Copper smelter |
3 |
| Coal, stone-coal Merchnt |
4 |
Lime burners 2 |
|
| Coopers |
2 |
Spinners & carders |
3 |
| Curriers |
2 |
Grocers & Tea Dlrs |
23 |
| Fire & Office Agents |
3 |
|
|
| Fire brick makers |
1 |
|
|
| Maltsters |
3 |
|
|
Iron & Brass Founders
(inc Steam Engine Mkrs) |
2 |
|
|
| Spirit Dealers |
3 |
Custom Hse |
|
| Merchant |
1 |
Principal Coast Offcr |
|
| Milliners & Dress makers |
7 |
Harbour Master |
|
| House & Sign painters |
2 |
Colltr Harbour Dues |
|
| Plasterers & Tilers |
4 |
|
|
| Plumbers & Glaziers |
3 |
|
|
| Printers-letter press |
2 |
|
|
| Saddlers |
3 |
|
|
| Skinners |
3 |
|
|
| Slop sellers (?) |
2 |
|
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