Scientific Road-Making 105 



abundant, of better quality, and labour at least as cheap, and 

 the toll duties are nearly double ; this is because road-making, 

 that is the surface, is even worse understood in Scotland than 

 in England." He mentions that the Postmaster-General had 

 been obliged to give up the mail-coach from Glasgow to Ayr 

 on account partly of the bad roads and partly of the expense, 

 there being ten turnpike gates in 34 miles of road. 



The roads were, in fact, McAdam continued, " universally 

 in want of repair." Ample funds were already provided ; but 

 the surveyors employed by the turnpike trusts were " mostly 

 persons ignorant of the nature of the duties they are called on 

 to discharge," 1 and the money brought in by a continual and 

 apparently unlimited increase of the tolls was " misapplied in 

 almost every part of the Kingdom." In some new roads made 

 in Scotland the thickness of the materials used exceeded 

 three feet ; 2 but, said McAdam, " the road is as open as a sieve 

 to receive water " ; and what this meant he was able to 

 show by pointing to the results of weather conditions on bad 

 roads in the month of January, 1820. A severe frost was 

 succeeded by a sudden thaw, accompanied by the melting of 

 much snow, and the roads of the kingdom broke up in an 

 alarming manner, causing great loss, much delay of the mails, 

 and endless inconvenience. The cause of the trouble was 

 explained by McAdam thus : 



" Previous to the severe frost the roads were filled with 

 water which had penetrated through the ill-prepared and 

 unskilfully-laid material ; this caused immediate expansion of 

 the whole mass during the frost, and, upon a sudden thaw, 

 the roads became quite loose, and the wheels of the carriages 

 penetrated to the original soil, which was also saturated with 

 water, from the open state of the road. By this means many 

 roads became altogether impassable." 



On the 1000 miles of road to which his own system had 



1 It was shown in evidence before the Select Committee of 1819 that 

 the "surveyors" in a certain district included a miller, an undertaker, a 

 car|*?nter, a coal merchant, a publican, a baker, "an infirm old man," 

 and " a bedridden old man who had not been out of his house for several 

 months." Nineteen times out of twenty, it was declared, the appoint- 

 ment was " a perfect job." 



2 McAdam had found the roads at Bristol loaded with an accumulation 

 two or three feet deep of stones, which had been thrown down during a 

 series of years with the idea of "repairing" the roads. Such roads 

 became his quarries for stones to be broken by hand. 



