On the (coaching) road again

Loretta reports:

Since a large section of Last Night’s Scandal is a “road book,” you might want to follow the journey using the same guide Olivia does.  Paterson’s Roads lists the coaching roads, distances, and towns en route.

It marks the main coaching stops and the turnpike/toll gates as well as including descriptions of notable houses and sights along the way.  It’s fascinating (at least to Nerdy History Girls & Boys), but not easy to follow.

What with alternative routes and cross roads, etc., not to mention changes in Royal Mail routes, it wanted a lot of thumbing back and forth to plot out the route from London to Edinburgh at the time of my story.  Then I had to time the journey by coordinating with info from another book, because Paterson’s doesn’t list the mail coach arrival and departure times.  I used the Royal Mail schedule as a rough way of calculating how long it would take Olivia’s carriage to get from one place to the next, depending on how much of a hurry she was in.  I ended up making a spreadsheet to keep things straight.

(You will easily imagine my feelings when a copy editor questioned my timing, and thought my characters ought to be traveling at the pace of 50 years earlier (!!!!)—long before the roads were macadamized.  But I digress, as Authors often will when the subject of copy edits arises.)

Here’s St. Leonard’s, aka the Shoreditch Church, from which the distance from London was measured.  Getting out of London in those days was very much like getting out of any large city today.  The difference was, one hadn’t as far to go.  The urban sprawl hadn’t yet sprawled even as far as the Regent’s Canal.  At right is an early map of the tollgates around town.

The first Road Incident occurs at the Falcon Inn, in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire. http://www.hertfordshire-genealogy.co.uk/data/places/places-w/waltham-cross.htm (lots of interesting pictures at this site).

If you want to do more sightseeing with the characters, watch this space and Loretta Chase In Other Words in coming days.