Early Days on the Road

The stagecoach has a long association with Bourne because the town was on the main route between London and the north and so passengers travelling between London, Lincoln, York and even Scotland, passed through. The Angel Hotel was a well known posting house where the horses were stabled and travellers given overnight accommodation and records reveal that more than one baby was born there when lady passengers went into labour during the journey.

The roads became suitable for stagecoaches during the 18th century when the main highways through Bourne were brought under the care of turnpike trusts, as was happening in other parts of the country. The turnpike was a road having tollgates or bars on it, called turns, and these were constructed in the middle of the 18th century when interested farmers, landowners and businessmen subscribed among themselves for the repair of various roads and then recovered their outlay by extracting a toll for the privilege of using the road. There was a popular resistance to the payment of tolls and this led to the passing of Acts of Parliament to regulate the system.

The road from Lincoln to Peterborough was turnpiked by Act of Parliament in 1756, as was the road from Bourne to Colsterworth, while the road to Stamford was turnpiked in 1749 and a Turnpike House is mentioned in the Enclosure Award of 1770, situated on Stamford Hill where the two roads diverge. There was also a toll bar with a house on the northern edge of Bourne on the road to Lincoln, now the A15. On the top rail of the gate at this bar was a notice saying: "Take a ticket to Graby Bar", this presumably being the next toll bar on the route. Pedestrians normally passed through this gate free of charge but tolls were levied on animals and vehicles. A board outside the turnpike house on North Road in the 19th century, pictured below, circa 1880, announced that the price for a horse and trap to pass was 6d.

But the payment of these tolls was extremely unpopular and there is a story that a resident of Dyke who frequently objected to paying at the Bourne toll bar had a pony which shared his master's sentiments and whenever the animal approached the gate it would rear up on its hind legs and then push through without payment being made.

Turnpiked roads however, were a considerable improvement on those which existed previously although Arthur Young was not impressed with the road surfaces he found when travelling through Lincolnshire in the late 18th century. He was particularly indignant about the so-called turnpike from Grimsthorpe to Colsterworth which, he said, "was either a morass of mud or a bone-shaking sequence of bumps over the pieces of rock which had supposedly been used to mend the road". It was not until 1820 when the famous Scottish road engineer John Macadam (1756-1836) worked as a surveyor in the Bourne area that the turnpikes became satisfactory for wheeled transport.

One of the main difficulties was the availability of suitable materials for the building and maintaining turnpike roads which were usually made from crushed stone bound with gravel and raised sufficiently to improve drainage. In the fen area around Bourne, the only local material was silt which was dug from pits or from ground set aside by the Enclosure Commissioners although gravel from various places such as pits near Horncastle was also used. Granite was later introduced and towards the end of the century, all main roads were being covered by granite chippings. The introduction of tar enabled road surfaces to be consolidated and strengthened and the macadamising of road surfaces soon became the general practice while the arrival of the steam roller in 1890 brought further efficiencies in road construction.

A map of 1825 shows that the turnpike road running southward from Bourne did not leave the town by its present day route but ran down part way of what is now the Austerby before turning once again towards the south. This is probably why there is no reference to the Austerby in the enumeration of roads in the Enclosure Award of 1770 because part of it would be the Bourne to Peterborough turnpike while the road from Bourne to Spalding hardly existed in the 18th century. Bourn Outgang only ran down into the fen and was never mentioned as a through road and it was not until 1822 that the road from Bourne to Spalding was turnpiked.

Better roads meant a rising popularity in wheeled transport and the movement of passengers long distances by stagecoach. The first coach in England was made by Walter Rippon for the Earl of Rutland in 1555 and nine years later he made one for Queen Elizabeth I. This mode of travel soon became popular and was much used as a public conveyance from the 18th century onwards but fares were high because the pace was slow. Passengers at first only travelled inside but outside seats at reduced rates were introduced to increase business and soon coaches were running on regular routes throughout the country, the faster, lighter vehicles being known as "flying coaches".

The Lincoln mail coaches, for instance, left the Great North Road at Peterborough, passing through Market Deeping, Baston and Bourne, and the Lincoln Flyer which operated between 1785 and 1871 had dark- blue painted bodywork with a canary yellow top section and the drivers wore long, yellow waistcoats to distinguish them. In 1766, a coach left Bourne weekly to connect with the Stamford Flyer that would take passengers to London, inside at 18s. with 40lbs. of luggage, leaving at 10 o'clock at night and arriving in London the following morning. The Lincoln Flyer had a similar reputation. It left Lincoln at 2 pm and connected at Market Deeping with coaches from Stamford and Spalding with stabling for 100 horses at three local inns. The coach reached Peterborough at 9 pm and continued down the Great North Road to reach the Spread Eagle hostelry in Gracechurch Street, London, at 5 am next morning.

In 1743, eight stagecoaches passed through Market Deeping each day and although this was the pick up point on several stagecoach routes, it never had its own service based in the town. The Express called here as it galloped between London and Barton-on-Humber, as did the Royal Mail coach while The Perseverance stopped here on its journeys to and from London and Boston and Jackson's stagecoach went through the town on its daily runs between Boston and Stamford. A daily service also passed through Bourne and in 1842, for instance, a mail coach left the Bull Inn [now the Burghley Arms] for London at 7.20 pm each evening while one also ran in the opposite direction leaving at 6 am bound for Hull. Another coach called The Tally-ho ran between Lincoln and London, and calling at Bourne once daily in each direction. The trip between the two centres took ten hours with horses being changed every nine to 19 miles, according to the posting inns on the route.

In addition, a van left the Six Bells in North Street for London on three alternate days each week and a wagon once a week. Two carriers also operated local services to Stamford, Spalding, Sleaford, Peterborough, Grantham and Billingborough. When the railway began to penetrate the district, but before Bourne had its own rail connection, road services were introduced to link the town to the nearest available trains and by 1857, an omnibus was leaving the Angel Hotel every morning except Sundays at eight o'clock to connect with the railway station at Tallington on the Great Northern line. The carriers were now more numerous than in 1842 and among them was George Pink who ran a van daily to Peterborough in connection with the railway company.

The use of stagecoaches for public travel began to decline with the coming of the railways in 1840 although it continued for many years afterwards in some rural districts that the permanent way had not yet reached, and as an amusement for the richer classes. But the expansion of the railways did not immediately reduce the number of local carriers and in 1896 there were still several men in Bourne operating weekly or twice-weekly services between the town and fourteen other towns and villages in the neighbourhood and several of these continued well into the 20th century until motor transport finally took over.

Stagecoach travel is now little more than an echo from years past but is still remembered and despite its obvious discomforts, continues to command a place in our affection through paintings, literature and films, as a symbol of an England long gone.

Those colourful days on the road were revived in the summer of 2002 with a series of stagecoach weekends in Lincolnshire. The refurbished 1832 Gay Gordon coach can carry eleven passengers and on selected Sunday mornings, leaves Grimsthorpe Castle for a round trip through the country roads to discover how things were in times past. The coach once trundled its way up and down the Great North Road between London and Edinburgh, a journey that took ten days and cost £10 first class, sitting inside the 4ft by 3ft wood-panelled cabin with room for six, or £3 10s. second class, sitting on top. It is owned and driven by Caroline Dale-Leech, whose father bought and restored it in the 1930s and now runs on regular trips from her Red House Stables Working Carriage Museum at Darley Dale in Derbyshire. 

See also the Angel Hotel     Bourne Civic Society

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