A Coaching Puzzle

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Corse Lawn House Hotel, between Ledbury and Gloucester. (Beautiful location, good food and atmosphere, so worth a visit if you’re passing that way.)

On its website http://corselawn.com/ the hotel says this about the house itself:

“Corse Lawn House is an elegant Queen Anne Grade II Listed building set back from the village green and fronted by an unusual ornamental pond (originally built as a coach wash into which you could drive and turn a stage and four horses).”

Now that’s a fascinating statement, isn’t it?

I went to have a look at this coach wash. Sure enough, there is a ramp leading down into the pond. It’s paved with granite setts and looks old. If you peer at the photograph, you may just be able to make it out under that huge willow tree.

There is certainly room for a stage and four to be driven round inside the pond. So there would have been room to wash both the stage and the horses. I hadn’t heard of such a thing before, but it sounds practical enough to be true.

However, there’s a puzzle.

Bang in the middle of the ramp, there’s quite a large and solid stone block, about half a metre high and 25 cms across. By the look of it, the block is about the same age as the rest of the ramp. What on earth was it for?

Judging by the prints of coaches that I have, the block would have caught the axles of most stage coaches or mail coaches. Look at this one here, in a mail coach print from 1827. The axles, particularly the front one, are quite low to the ground.

When I got back home, I started to research my puzzle. And I got nowhere.

The hotel was originally the manor house of Corse Lawn. Neither the hotel, nor even the village, is mentioned in my 1806 copy of Cary’s New Itinerary. According to Cary, the principal road from Gloucester to Ledbury went through Staunton, which is the next village to Corse Lawn and which had an inn called The Swan. That suggests that the coaching road went through the village of Corse Lawn but that the Corse Lawn Hotel was not a coaching inn at that period. So why would it have a stagecoach wash? The website definitely refers to “stage” and not to “carriage” which implies mail coaches or stagecoaches etc rather than private carriages.

Curious.

Cary’s Itinerary also lists the noblemen and gentlemen’s seats “situate near the Roade” and the Corse Lawn Manor House isn’t listed there, either. Whoever was living there at the time doesn’t seem to have rated a mention by Cary.

Curiouser and curiouser.

The mundane answer is possibly that the stone block was added to the ramp much later, in order to stop people driving coaches (or even cars?) into the pond. The fact that the block looked extremely old doesn’t prove anything, of course. The house owner could have used an old block so that it was in keeping with the rest of the ramp.

Which would be a shame, I think. I’d much rather there was a quirky, romantic reason for the existence of that stone block in the middle of the ramp. Maybe you can think of one?

Joanna

On the Road

Like many historical authors I spend a lot of time puzzling over how long journeys would take, how people got from A to B and how much it would cost.

Imagine my delight when I found an expenses claim from a lawyer called Jonathan Oldman to Sir John Musgrave of Edenhall, near Penrith, for a journey from Edenhall to Kempton Park via London in December 1795.

Helpfully, Mr Oldman took a variety of conveyances – the stage, a post chaise, the Mail and hackney carriages in London - so I was able to discover that a post chaise, its driver, the turnpike charges and food along the way cost £6 14s from Edenhall to York. He then changed to the stage coach to London which cost 3 guineas plus 4s 6d for tipping the drivers and 5s 6d for his luggage with 11s 6d for food along the way.

It is difficult to pick out the detail of his expenses in London because he lumps some of them together, but a night at the White Horse, Fetter Lane cost 6s and he then tipped the chamber maid, the waiter, paid for shaving water and caught a hackney to the Chertsey stage and that cost him 4s 11d in total.

The stage coach and driver’s tip from London to Kempton Park was a mere 5s each way.
On his way back he incurs £1 14s 8d in “sundry expenses” which suggests that perhaps he took the opportunity for a little fun – or perhaps I am maligning a sober lawyer. Certainly his laundry wasn’t included in that – it cost him 5s 6d.

Jonathan Oldman took the Mail home, travelling from London to Penrith at a cost of £5 with £1 for luggage and £1 7s 9d for tips and food. Overall his employer was out of pocket to the tune of £17 19s for his expedition.

I’d love to know what necessitated the journey and it is fun to imagine what a Cumbrian lawyer would have thought if he knew that a romance author would be poring over his expenses claim over two hundred years after he submitted it.

Louise Allen