Odd word that, hospitality it's clearly related to the word 'hospital'. They've been welcoming weary travellers for hundreds of years, long ago nailing the art of hospitality. Talking of civilised, I very much enjoyed staying in coaching inns.
They've been welcoming weary travellers for hundreds of years, long ago nailing the art of hospitality Talking of civilised I very much enjoyed staying in coaching inns. I was tickled by the fact that the museum's outside loos aren't as civilised as the far older Roman ones: they are compostable rather than flushed with running water.
The baths - now a subterranean museum - are nine metres (29ft) beneath the thundering motorway. However, rather than being diverted, the A1(M) motorway was built over the top of Welwyn Roman baths, with the archaeology protected with a steel shell. Similar protection was afforded to a Roman site excavated near Welwyn Garden City. The £318million Dishforth to Leeming section of the A1(M) opened in March 2012 and was realigned not to obliterate either Healam Bridge or the extensive Roman settlement that lies beneath and on either side of the beck crossing. This civilian settlement provided mules for the Cursus Publicus, or Imperial mail service - the ancient version of a petrol filling station, then. Important because the Grade 1 listed Healam Bridge, built in 1796, sits at the centre of what was once a one-kilometre-long Roman settlement along the then equivalent of the Great North Road. This forgotten, fenced-off crossing was once important. He died at the George - beneath his portrait are his walking sticks During his lifetime he was celebrated for his weight. Lambert (1770-1809) weighed 52 stone when he died at the age of 39. I filmed myself from above cycling on this truncated road wedge, imagining the fast-and-furious-for-the-day mail coaches that once trundled over it at the heady speed of 12mph.Ī portrait of Daniel Lambert in the entrance hall of The George of Stamford. Two hundred miles north, close to Leeming, there's an 18th-century bridge spanning a beck that lies sandwiched between the old A1 and the new A1(M). A rickety wooden fence blocks the way, the surface of the old A1 now disappearing under moss. There are cats' eyes skeletons in a rural pub car park near the motorway services at South Mimms, evidence that this quiet cul-de-sac was once the busy A1. These asphalt orphans dotted my journey, but I had to seek them out because nature is steadily reclaiming them. I also launched my eye-in-the-sky to film bypassed parts of the Great North Road that now lie marooned, forgotten. I flew my drone over these stretches, capturing the old next to the new, the forgotten next to the traffic-choked. This is a former route of the Great North Road but diverted through Retford after an Act of Parliament in 1766
#BENEATH A STEEL SKY CONFISCATED PLUS#
The Morgan Plus Four seen through the trees of Rushey Inn wood, near Retford, part of Sherwood Forest. The B197 skirting Stevenage or the B1043 parallel to Stilton are parts of the old Great North Road, but you'd not know it from those boring B numbers. There are lengthy, bypassed stretches of this old A1 made nondescript thanks to numerical downgrades. I thought it was the perfect car for driving along romantic stretches of the Great North Road that used to be the A1 - the road, which was born in July 1921, as it was in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, before it was dualled or it morphed into a motorway. Morgan has been making cars at the foot of the Malvern Hills since 1909 and the Plus Four is the new version of a classic car that Morgan first made 72 years ago. Simpler, but not slower: the four-cylinder engine is capable of getting the Plus Four to 60mph in less than five seconds useful, no doubt, for the race track but, perhaps strangely, this is a fast car that you don't feel the need to drive at speed. With its swooping wings and long louvred bonnet, it's a throwback to simpler times. The Morgan on the Great North Road beside the A1(M), near StiltonĪ Morgan, you quickly start to realise, is no ordinary car.
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