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method involved a departure from the bad old practice of forming 
the road by excavating until the rock was reached, and then 
spreading on the rock loose earth and soft materials with a huge 
crown in the middle of the road. He told the committee that 
he would as soon build a road on a bog as not. And his 
principal improvement was in the use of the materials. He 
pointed out that angular fragments of hard materials, such as 
limestone, sufficiently reduced in size will coalesce or bind 
without other admixture into a compacted mass of stone, nearly 
impenetrable by water, which being laid almost flat so as to 
allow of carriages passing freely upon all parts of the road will 
wear evenly throughout, not exhibiting the appearance of ruts 
or other inequalities. The adoption of this idea, coupled with 
the widening and levelling of the old roads, wrought a change 
which was beneficent indeed. Unfortunately, however, Mr. 
Mc.Adam’s name has often since then been taken in vain, and 
many a road has been said to be macadamized which Mc.Adam 
would have denounced with all his north country directness. 
Some of our own local turnpikes are even now made with such 
materials and in such a manner that it isa slander on Mc.Adam’s 
name to call them macamadized roads. 
The general disturnpiking of the roads about the year 1870, 
raised important questions. It was felt that to throw upon the 
rural townships the cost of the maintenance of trunk roads used 
and broken up by the through traffic between great towns would 
be an injustice, and would, besides, result probably in ruin to 
the roads themselves. Hence the Highways Act of 1878 was 
passed, which provided that roads disturnpiked after 1870, 
should be called main roads, and one-half the cost of repairs was 
to be borne by the county and one-half by the local highway 
authority. Parliament also made a grant of one-fourth to the 
highway authority annually. This Act should have greatly 
relieved us in Burnley from the cost of the repairs of our main 
thoroughfares, all of which were parts of the old turnpike roads ; 
but we never got the full benefit of the Act until it was almost 
too late, and we have just now some interesting questions at 
issue with the Administrative County of Lancaster and the 
County Boroughs with respect to this matter. 
I have referred once or twice to old methods of travelling. 
For the purposes of my paper, I have made enquiries from old 
people in Burnley as to the ways of travelling in their young 
days and in the days of their fathers, but the information is not 
very definite. Before the great improvement of the roads, the 
pack-horse must have been the principal means of conveyance of 
goods, and it can still be recollected that trains of pack-horses 
carried to Halifax by the Long Causeway the woollen purchases 
of Messrs. Massey & Co., of Sandy Gate, and the cotton goods 
