The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

• 274 • Ian Whyte
The need of industries for water power continued to attract them to remote, sometimes upland,
locations where suitable water resources were available. The eighteenth century saw important
developments in the efficiency of water-powered machinery; late eighteenth-century county maps
and early Ordnance Survey maps show the tremendous density of water power sites in areas like
the Pennine valleys and the southern Lake District, and the remains of many small mills with
their weirs and lades may still be found on the ground. The first true factories, like Arkwright’s
mill at Cromford in Derbyshire, built in 1771, were sited primarily for access to water power.
Such remote communities had to be self-sufficient with shops and other facilities, while
industrialists had to provide good quality housing at reasonable rents to attract and retain workers,
a tradition creating ‘model’ communities like New Lanark, Lanarkshire, and Styal, Cheshire. Only
gradually did the development of steam power start to draw industry on to the coalfields and into
the larger towns.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries quarrying had been a widespread, small-scale activity,
poorly documented and, as yet, little studied. As the demand for building stone became more
specialized, the industry became more localized. Rapid urban growth created a huge demand for
building materials. Roofing slate from the West Highlands, the Lake District and, above all, north
Wales came to dominate, with flagstones from the Pennines and Caithness. Portland stone was a
prestige material for London builders. Granite, especially valued for heavy-duty structures like
piers and lighthouses as well as for its ornamental value, was quarried on a large scale only from
the nineteenth century, when steam-powered cutting equipment was developed. In Cornwall, the
mining of china clay gave rise to one of the most distinctive landscapes associated with mineral
extraction.
TRANSPORT
Transport developments were also a powerful force for landscape change. Road transport remained
essentially medieval in character until the later seventeenth century and beyond, with roads mostly
worn by use rather than deliberately constructed. The statute labour system, instituted in 1555,
was largely ineffective. In upland areas, transport was mainly by pack horse. Narrow pack horse
tracks with laid cobbles were constructed in the Pennines, Lake District and Wales. Narrow pack
horse bridges with low parapets were built while many medieval bridges remained in service.
The great era of turnpike (toll road) construction occurred in the later eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. The roads that were improved or realigned at this time still form the basis
of the modern A and B road network in most parts of Britain. Not every turnpike was well
aligned, well constructed or well maintained, but overall they were a tremendous improvement,
allowing faster, easier and cheaper movement of people and goods, including bulky items like
coal, and generating a great increase in traffic. While the roads themselves have been upgraded,
the milestones and toll houses, often with a characteristic ‘house style’ peculiar to individual
turnpike trusts, are still prominent landscape features. Even more pronounced is the legacy of
bridges from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many still carrying today’s traffic without
alteration. The droving of cattle from Wales, northern England and as far away as the Western
Highlands to London and the industrial towns of England reached its peak in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. The drove roads that they used kept to high ground as far as
possible and remain a prominent feature of Britain’s upland areas today. The stances where
drovers rested their herds each night were often provided with alehouses, some of which survive
today as remote Pennine inns. The droving trade declined rapidly in the 1840s with the
establishment of a national railway network.