Street Tales: Mansfield Road

Illustration: Mike Driver

From leaving Nottingham’s medieval town gate, the old road travelled almost due north through the wilds of what was once Sherwood Forest. The importance of this road is confirmed by the Domesday Book of 1068 where it is declared as being a ‘King’s Highway’. Such roads were governed by Royal Decree, with their own laws, one of which forbade “ploughing or the making of a ditch within two perches of the road, on pain of a fine of £8,” – that’s a hefty charge, at around £5,000 in today’s money.

The compliance of this law meant that all of the early settlements within the Forest – like Arnold – were built well back from the road, making it lonely and dangerous to travel alone. However, there was some comfort along the route in the form of The Hutt, which sat opposite the gates of Newstead Abbey, a landmark still familiar to today’s traveller. The Hutt was built sometime in the twelfth century as a garrison for ‘men-at-arms’ to guard the highway through the Forest. It also became a point for solitary travellers to wait until there were sufficient numbers to take on the journey through the notorious and aptly named, Thieves Wood.

Mansfield Road in the 1700s was a busy highway, the aforementioned Hutt had become a coaching inn, and there were also a number of taverns, inns and alehouses on the short section of road through Arnold to Red Hill. A familiar sight along the road was the Leeds Mail, with four and six horse coaches – with exciting names such as The Champion, The Royal Hope, The Old Robin Hood, The Express, The Brilliant, and The Rapid – departing from Nottingham for Leeds twice daily at 6am and 6pm.

It was not just the state of the road that made it a difficult route, bad weather – particularly snow – made matters worse. On 11 February 1772, a bitterly cold day saw the ground covered in thick snow. Two men, Thomas Rhodes and John Curtis, were leading a team of six horses back to Mansfield. Somewhere around The Hutt, one of the men spotted a splash of scarlet against the white snow. This proved to be the jacket of a half-frozen soldier lying in a deep snowdrift. They managed to revive the man and set him on a horse to Mansfield. The two samaritans had committed a fatal error, though, unwittingly setting the man on their lead horse, making the others difficult to handle.

The soldier arrived safely in Mansfield and made a full recovery. Rhodes and Curtis were not so lucky – they had only managed to make it a few hundred yards before collapsing. Both were later found frozen to death on the spot where they had fallen. One left a widow and eight children.

Even by the early 1800s, the weather was a factor that prevented mail from getting through. On 28 January 1814, the Leeds Mail left Nottingham at its usual time of 6pm. By 9.30pm it had only managed to get about eight miles due to the snow being so deep. At a point just past Seven Mile House, the outside passengers were about to go inside for the night, when one of their number spotted a body lying by the road. It proved to be that of a seventy-year-old man named Allison who, returning home, was overcome by the storm.

A slightly happier ending than the previous tale, Allison was revived by the passengers, but the coach was axle-deep in snow. Allison and his rescuers spent the night at a nearby farm, while the coach was forced to return to Nottingham.

Nottingham Hidden History website