ABSTRACT
When Tobias Smollett came south from Edinburgh in 1739 he found that there was ‘no such convenience as a waggon’ between the Scottish capital and Tyneside. Since he was too poor to hire a horse, he made an arrangement with a carrier to ride on one of his pack horses, sitting on a saddle between two baskets of goods.1 No waggons were available in this part of the route to London because the roads were not in a fit condition to bear them and the farmers of the neighbourhood, who grew less wheat than did their contemporaries from the southern counties, consequently had less need to use them to carry heavy loads of grain. From time immemorial such ploughing and hauling as had to be done in the northern counties was performed by oxen as ‘an ox’s hoof splays slightly as it is thrust into the mud, and contracts as it is withdrawn, thus enabling the animal to keep going over soft ground in which a horse would soon be bogged’.2 Whilst these conditions prevailed there was no urgent necessity to provide roads with a metalled surface in this part of the country.
