Scientific Road-Making 99 



foulness of the roads is occasioned by the standing water 

 which, for want of due care to draw it off by scouring and 

 opening ditches and drains and other water courses, and 

 clearing of passages, soaks into the earth, and softens it to 

 such a degree that it cannot bear the weight of horses and 

 carriages." 



But the result of making roads in the shape of a semi- 

 circle was that the central ridge was speedily crushed down, 

 and ruts were formed along the line of traffic passing over 

 the loose materials used. These ruts, again, defeated the 

 purpose of the original high convexity by becoming troughs 

 for the retention of rain and mud, the latter being rendered 

 worse with each fresh churning up it received from the wheels 

 of waggon or stage-coach. 



The road-maker thus required to be speedily followed by 

 the road-repairer ; and his method of procedure has been 

 already indicated in Arthur Young's description of the road 

 to Wigan, where he says, " The only mending it receives is the 

 tumbling in some loose stones, which serve no other purpose 

 but jolting a carriage in the most intolerable manner." 



The mending of hundreds of miles even of turnpike roads 

 had never gone any further than this. There was no cohesion 

 in collections of loose stones, mainly in their natural and more 

 or less rounded form, and the expectation that they would be 

 crushed and consolidated into a solid mass by extra-broad 

 waggon wheels, in accordance with Acts of Parliament in 

 that case made and provided, remained unfulfilled. The stones 

 were simply displaced and thrown aside by the traffic, the 

 inevitable ruts reappearing in due course ; while, as the rain- 

 water passed readily through them, the roads became elongated 

 reservoirs of water in rainy weather, and were most effectively 

 broken up by frost in winter. 



It was from conditions such as these that Thomas Telford 

 and John Loudon McAdam came to rescue the country. 



There had been one road-reformer before them, in John 

 Metcalf, a native of Knaresboro', where he was born in 1717. 

 Though totally blind from the age of six, he developed abun- 

 dant resources, and became successively fiddler, soldier, 

 chapman, fish-dealer, horse-dealer and waggoner. Taking at 

 last to road-making, he constructed about 180 miles of road 

 in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire and Derby, rendering an 



