Investigating turnpike roads and local travel routes

What turnpike roads were and why they matter

Before railways, parish roads struggled with growing traffic. From the late seventeenth century, Parliament created turnpike trusts: local bodies empowered to improve specified stretches, recouping costs through tolls at gates. By the 1830s, around 1,000 trusts managed some 22,000 miles. They were wound up mainly in the 1870s and 1880s, passing to county councils. For local and family historians, they are a gift. Minute books, accounts, surveys and legal papers name people, places and prices. More importantly, they shaped the routes we still travel, helping you interpret the landscape and trace ancestors who moved goods, kept gates, or paid to pass.

Getting started: maps and the modern landscape

Begin with a map. Large-scale county maps from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mark turnpike roads, toll bars, milestones and inns. Compare them with tithe maps and enclosure awards, which name adjacent fields and landowners. Look for place names: Turnpike Lane, Toll Bar, Gatehouse, Pike Road, Milestone Cottage. Straight stretches, deep cuttings, wide verges and isolated tollhouses are physical echoes. Walk or drive a suspected route. Note where it bypasses a village or cuts through an estate: trustees often rerouted roads to avoid steep hills or awkward bends, leaving old lanes as quiet backwaters. Your local record office or library will hold relevant maps, and many historic maps are now online through archive collections.

The records turnpike trusts left behind

Surviving records can be surprisingly rich. Search your county record office catalogue for the trust's name, often something like "The [Place] Turnpike Trust". You may find:

• Minute books – decisions about repairs, gates, salaries for surveyors and toll collectors, and disputes with parishes.
• Account books and toll receipts – income and expenditure, revealing traffic levels and material costs.
• Toll books – sometimes record individual travellers, vehicles, goods and animals, though many are daily totals.
• Surveyor's reports and plans – widths, gradients, bridges and proposed diversions.
• Legal papers – Acts of Parliament, deeds, conveyances and mortgages.
• Newspaper notices – meetings, letting of tolls, accidents and improvements.

Acts of Parliament are held in parliamentary archives, with copies in local studies libraries. Some trust records ended up in national archives. Always check both county and national catalogues.

Finding your family in turnpike records

Your ancestors may appear as toll collectors, gatekeepers, surveyors, trustees, labourers, or travellers. Search census returns and directories for occupations such as "toll collector", "pikeman", "turnpike keeper" or "gatekeeper". Tollhouses often survive as cottages, so a census address like "Toll Bar Cottage" is a direct link. Trustees were usually local gentry, merchants, clergymen and professionals; their names appear in minute books and Acts. If your ancestor was a carrier, innkeeper or shopkeeper, turnpike roads shaped their livelihood. Look for exemptions (agricultural carts, mail coaches, pedestrians) and fines for evasion. Newspapers may report accidents, meetings, or the letting of tolls to the highest bidder – a system that sometimes produced unpopular gatekeepers.

Interpreting what you find: travel, trade and communication

Turnpike records reveal more than routes. Toll rates show what was carried: cattle, sheep, corn, coal, cloth, timber and passengers. A sudden drop in receipts might reflect a new railway, a bad harvest or a rival road. Stagecoach and mail coach timetables, often printed in newspapers, show journey times and frequencies. You can reconstruct a trip: from one tollgate to the next, noting milestones and inns where coaches changed horses. This helps you understand how news, letters and goods moved. Turnpike roads also provoked opposition – riots, gate-breaking and pamphlets – because tolls fell heavily on the poor. By studying a trust, you trace the economic and social life of your area, not just its transport.

Practical steps for your own investigation

Choose a route between two places you know, ideally a market town and a port or another town. Find the turnpike trust responsible by looking at old maps or trade directories. Then:

• Search the county record office catalogue for the trust's records and related maps.
• Look for the relevant Act of Parliament in local studies or parliamentary archives.
• Check local newspapers for notices, meetings and accidents.
• Walk the route, noting surviving milestones, tollhouses, boundary stones and straight alignments.
• Cross-reference with tithe and enclosure maps to see land use and ownership.
• Keep a research log with dates, sources and observations.

Turnpike trusts overlap and change over time; don't expect one neat set of records. But by combining maps, documents and fieldwork, you can bring your area's travelling past to life – and perhaps find a gatekeeper or surveyor in your own family tree.