title: Thomas Telford's Holyhead Road
title: The A5 in north Wales
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Turner, Rick
name: Quartermaine, Jamie
name: Trinder, Barrie
Publisher: name: Archaeology Data Service
Year: 2020

description: Council for British Archaeology Research Reports, 135
description: This book documents what was arguably the most significant achievement of Britain's greatest civil engineer, Thomas Telford, - the London to Holyhead Road. It presents the results of a survey of the 83 miles (133km) of the Welsh section of the road from Chirk to Holyhead undertaken in 1999 and 2000 and also the 14-mile (23km) spur road between Bangor and Conwy that forms part of the Chester Road. The building of the Holyhead Road originated with the passing of the Act of Union between the Irish parliament in Dublin and the British parliament in London in 1801. This prompted the need for fast and reliable communication between the two capital cities of the UK, but the turnpikes of the period, particularly through north Wales, were well short of adequate. This resulted in the granting of Acts of Parliament for the first major road-building programme financed by civilian government. This involved the improvement of existing turnpikes and the creation of new roads on a route that passed trough the mountainous topography of Snowdonia. Work on the road began in the autumn of 1815 and was to continue until 1826 with the opening f the Menai Bridge. While Telford's road was built to a very high standard for the period and was far superior to those of his contemporary MacAdam, it was much more expensive. His principal aim was to construct a road with gradients no worse than 1:30, a bold aim given the extreme topography of north Wales and the fact that the earlier turnpikes were as steep as 1:6.5 in places. To achieve his aim he constructed numerous embankments including the major embankment of Nant Ffrancon in Snowdonia, the large Ty-Nant embankment constructed along an almost sheer-sided gully, and the 1300yds-long (1187m) Stanley embankment across the Stanley Sands to gain access to the Holy Island. Telford's numerous stone bridges were built to a simple but rugged design that enabled the uninterrupted movement of traffic across them. His road is, however, best remembered for its major bridges, such as the arched cast-iron Waterloo Bridge at Betws-y-Coed and the suspension bridges at Conwy and most notably across the Menai Straits. The Menai Bridge (at the time the largest suspension bridge ever built) was considered by Telford to be his greatest single engineering feat. Alongside the road he also constructed the supporting infrastructure - depots for storing road surface materials, milestones, toll houses, and also coaching inns, notably the New Inn at Mona on Anglesey. Of the road and its furniture there is now variable survival. The road surfaces are for the most part buried under more recent surfaces and although the roads and bridges typically survive, they have often been expanded to accommodate later 20th-century traffic. Remarkably the majority of depots, milestones, and toll houses remain, albeit in variable condition. Many of the toll house gates survive but are no longer in situ. The roadside walls also often intact, but have been altered considerably by ongoing maintenance. The heyday of the Holyhead Road during the late 1820s and 1830s was short lived, as Telford's great achievement was to be superseded by technological change with the coming of the railways. Between 1837 and 1850 the successive opening of railways between London and Holyhead resulted in a steady decline in traffic along the road, to the extent that in some sections of the road grass was observed to grow in the centre. In the 20th century, however, the road enjoyed a new lease of life with the development of the motor car and the influx of tourist traffic to north Wales.