Description
This book is the standard work on Saddleworth’s roads and trackways. Bernard Barnes’s study starts with a review of ancient packhorse routes through the district, with particular emphasis of the regional trans-pennine route, successor to the Roman road, linking the Yorkshire towns with Manchester and beyond. Other major through routes connecting Saddleworth with Rochdale, Cheshire and Derbyshire are also described. But the main focus of the book is the emergence of the elborate turnpike road network through Saddleworth, a network that evolved over the century following the opening of the first turnpike in 1760 and which invoved eight seperate turnpike trusts set up by eight seperate acts of parliament. They were financed by merchants and manufactureres both within Saddleworth and from the neighbouring textile centres on both sides of the Pennines. The book explores the background to each new road, the men behind them, their surveying and the surveyors, the way they were constructed by local landowners and local labour and the collection of tolls. Bridges, a county responsibility are also explored and the way in which their improvement went hand in hand with the turnpiking of earlier packhorse routes. Ten appendices give details of the men behind the turnpikes, their financing and their profitability. There is also a brief review of enclosure roads and stage coaches which offered regular services to Manchester, Huddersfield, Halifax and beyond.
