A Historical Perspective
If you think the state of our roads is bad at the moment, spare a thought for those who had to negotiate the lanes of South Hill in the past. It was not until 1894 that local councils became responsible for maintaining minor roads, such as those which criss cross our parish, and even then local roads were not surfaced with tarmac. Before the 1890s, only the main ‘turnpike roads’ between towns would have been maintained in a condition which would have enabled wheeled carts or coaches to travel along them. South Hill parish contained no turnpike roads.
Given the speed with which some of our local roads are deteriorating at the moment, it doesn’t take much imagination to realise that our predecessors would not have found travelling around the lanes of South Hill very easy. In 1555 things had become so bad in the country as a whole that an act was passed requiring the churchwardens in every parish to appoint two ‘surveyors of the highways’ each Easter. These men (and they would always have been men) had to choose four days in the year when all parish residents, rich and poor, were required to go out repairing the roads, under the supervision of the surveyors or ‘overseers’. Wealthier residents also had to provide carts and oxen or horses to pull them. In 1563 Elizabeth 1 increased the days of ‘statute labour’ to six per year but according to William Harrison, a traveller to Cornwall in 1577, the obligations were “much evaded”. He wrote that “in the clay or cledgy soil the roads are very deep and troublesome in the winter half” – they probably wouldn’t have been much better in a dry summer either when the deep ruts would have dried solid. Nevertheless, the local obligations an
d amateur road mending imposed in the sixteenth century remained the basis of road maintenance for the next three hundred years. I have so far been unable to check exactly when our parish roads were first surfaced with tarmac but it is unlikely to have happened before the early years of the twentieth century. Does anyone know when tarmac first arrived in the parish?
With three or four exceptions, all the lanes in our parish are probably of very ancient origin and would have emerged in an unplanned way, according to the needs of the inhabitants of the area. Originally the lanes probably started as trackways enabling farmers to get animals out to the common land on ‘Golberdown’ and ‘Redmoor’ or linking the various small hamlets or ‘Trevs’ such as Trewassick, Trevigro, and Trewolland. As the early farmers cleared the ground of stones, they moved the large ones to the edges and built them up to form the boundaries of the fields they were reclaiming from the ‘waste’. Once the walls were high enough earth and turf were placed on the top and bushes and trees gradually grew on them over the years to produce the classic Cornish lanes which we know today.
The actual layout of the roads in the parish seems to have changed little since the Middle Ages and most of the lanes were probably in place long before then. With the exception of Golberdon, which was not an established settlement until the nineteenth century, most settlements in the parish almost certainly pre-date the Norman Conquest and the tracks between them would have come into being around the same time as the settlements. Although a few ancient lanes have fallen into disuse, or exist only as ‘green lanes’ or footpaths, many of these were still in regular use as late as the mid nineteenth century and can easily be seen on the 1841 Tithe Map in the County Record Office in Truro. The only ‘new’ roads which I know of are the commons enclosure roads (see below), which may themselves have followed ancient downland trackways, and the short section of road from the crossroads by St Sampson’s church up to the entrance to Glebe Farm.
The other three ‘new’ roads are the result of enclosure of the parish common lands and commons enclosure is the reason why the roads west and south from Golberdon, and the road out of Maders towards Callington, are wider and straighter than most other parish roads. Unlike the lanes through farmland, tracks across open common land were never hedged. Those of South Hill remained open trackways until 1883 when Golberdon and Redmoor Commons were enclosed and new “public carriage roads or highways of the width of thirty feet” were created across the edges of the commons. These would have been the first reasonably well surfaced roads in the parish A long stretch of straight road with wide verges on either side suddenly emerging from narrow winding lanes is
often an indication that it was created during the commons enclosures of the nineteenth century and this is certainly the case in South Hill. The map relating to the Golberdon & Redmoor Enclosure, and the surveyor’s instructions about road width, can still be seen in the County Record Office. South Hill History Group members have copies of the map and also a digital copy of the tithe map. Comparison with the current edition of the Ordnance Survey map is fascinating.