Wednesday 23 May 2012

Hulverstone tollhouse

I have completed the individual page for the Hulverston tollhouse.



I managed to find a site about the history of the local area and linked it from the page.

The Newport tollhouse is next

Monday 21 May 2012

Isle of Wight tollhouse page

I have made the county page for the Isle of Wight at my site, here. One of the tollhouses is a bit speculative as it is a bit modern but looks like it might be the place you are meant to pay for the chain ferry between the Coweses.

Individual pages for each tollhouse coming soon.


Monday 7 May 2012

Collecting Isle of Wight tollhouses

Location: 4 Highwood Ln, Rookley, Ventnor, Isle of Wight PO38 3NN, UK
We spent the weekend on the Isle of Wight, mostly being wet and cold but also collecting as many of the island's tollhouses as we could find.

The map below shows what we managed to do.

Green dotted pins are tollhouses in the national database that we managed to photograph. The undotted green pin is a building that I believe is a toll house and photographed, but it is not in the national database. The red pin is a possible tollhouse, not in the database, but we didn't manage to stop and photograph it (streetview can be used to see it). The yellow pins are the two tollhouses we didn't manage to get to. The Yarmouth one I am not sure which building at the junction is the tollhouse, the St Lawrence one we just didn't manage to get to.

All the photos will be posted online over the next few days.


View Isle of Wight tollhouses in a larger map

Wednesday 25 April 2012

Hampshire turnpike information

I have found a very informative page hosted by the University of Portsmouth here. The page contains many extracts from a report on the turnpikes of Hampshire submitted to parliament in 1852 by Sir George Grey.

Of particular interest is the attached map of the Hampshire turnpike network. There doesn't seem to be any mention of the Basingstoke to Reading road though, the one I used to live alongside.


I will have a go at using this map to produce a set of routes on GoogleEarth showing how the old turnpikes relate to the modern road network. This may reveal the locations of some of the lost tollhouses in the county.

The original document is in the Bodleian Library.

Saturday 21 April 2012

Final Tewkesbury tollhouse

I have completed the page for the Mythe tollhouses, Tewkesbury. The tollhouse and tollbooth stand at the eastern end of a bridge over the river Severn designed by Thomas Telford.


Tuesday 17 April 2012

Ledbury tollhouse pages

I have added a page for each of the tollhouses in Ledbury that I photographed over the Easter weekend. I have also added a page of links to information about the Leominster & Ledbury Turnpike Trust.

The home page of my tollhouse website can be found here.



Monday 16 April 2012

2nd Tewkesbury tollhouse

I have added a page for the second tollhouse in Tewkesbury here. This is a similar looking building to the Ashchurch gate tollhouse.


View Larger Map

Tewkesbury tollhouses

I have completed the page for the first of 3 (or 4, depending how you count) tollhouses in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire. It can be found here.


View Larger Map

I will add the remaining 2 (3?) this week and then add the Ledbury, Herefordshire tollhouses. That will be all of the 5 I visited over easter and I will be ready for another trip to photograph some more.

Monday 9 April 2012

Easter tollhouse hunt

Over the Easter weekend I managed to photograph a few more tollhouses. I found 3 in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, and 2 in Ledbury, Herefordshire. The partial maps for those counties are below.

I am in the process of producing the individual pages for each of these tollhouses on my site and will link to them from here once they are done.


View Herefordshire tollhouses in a larger map

View Gloucestershire tollhouses in a larger map

Sunday 1 April 2012

Beat me to it?

It seems that someone back in the days of 8-bit computing had already mapped the tollhouses in Hampshire:

View Hampshire tollhouses in a larger map

Wednesday 28 March 2012

Lost tollhouses

Along with the picture of the New Alresford tollhouse, Hampshire county archives also have photographs of several other tollhouses. I think I have pinpointed the locations of the three in the Fareham area.



View Lost tollhouses in a larger map

To track them down I used the locations from the archive along with the maps available at www.old-maps.co.uk and Google's own maps to find the present day location corresponding to the point on the old map I think the buildings were.

Monday 26 March 2012

New Alresford tollhouse

I have added a page for the New Alresford tollhouse to the site here.

Although I have not yet taken any pictures of this tollhouse I have managed to find an old photo of it in the Hampshire County Council archives and also added a link to the English Heritage site giving the details of its listed status.

HCC have 7 other photos of tollhouses (returned by an archive search on "tollhouse") but none of these seem to be still standing.

Old maps of Hampshire

I have found an excellent site containing high quality scans of many old maps of Hampshire: Old Hampshire Mapped.

It interesting to see tollhouses and toll-gates marked on some of the maps and not others of a similar period. Also interesting to see how the names of places have changed over the years. Big towns seem to have remained constant over long periods of time; but the farms and the urban areas named after former farms have very variable spelling. In some cases the older spelling seems more sensible and less fanciful than the modern spelling.

I am having a break from mapping Devon's tollhouse locations and am browsing the Hampshire archives to see what tollhouse related records and images they have. Will provide links to them if I find anything interesting.

Website update

I have just updated my website with a new page for one of the tollhouses in Twyford, Hampshire.

The page has a few photos I took today, a map of the building's location and a link to the English Heritage page giving the listed building details.

The Devon map is still in production, might be done by the end of the week if I get a couple of good hours spent on it.

Thursday 22 March 2012

Tollhouse national ID

I have started using the Tollhouse National ID codes on the pages on my website. Using this will help link entries on my site to the information at various other places, including the Turnpike Road website and Tollhouse Alan's Flickr pages.

I am still working on the Devon map. There are a lot of tollhouses in this county so it is taking a while. Tollhouse Alan has kindly provided me with an up to date copy of his spreadsheet and a pointer to some Google Earth information that should speed things up.

I have also been in contact with the Hampshire County Council archives people who are happy for me to link to tollhouse related items they hold, so expect those to start appearing on my site soon. I assume other counties have similar archives and will be contacting them once I have run out of local stuff to link to.

Keith

Friday 16 March 2012

Summary of progress

I have been at this mapping thing for a few weeks now and I thought I would show my overall progress on a map of the UK.
Green counties have had an initial map produced for them. Devon is orange as that is the one I am currently working on.

It's going to take a while to map the entire country!

Sources that I have been using include Tollhouse Alan's Flickr pages, his turnpike pages, the OS website and general searches in Google.

Isle of Wight mapped

For some reason I missed the Isle of Wight when I mapped Hampshire. Not a bad collection, I have locations for 6 tollhouses on the island. With luck I will be there later in the spring and will be able to take photos for the site.


View Isle of Wight tollhouses in a larger map

Monday 12 March 2012

Dorset mapped

I have completed my map of tollhouses in Dorset, which can be seen below. Of course these locations are also added to the UK tollhouse map, which can be accessed using the tabs at the top of the blog.

I think I will continue heading west, so it is Devon next.


View Dorset tollhouses in a larger map

Dorset map in progress

I am about 75% done with the tollhouse map of Dorset. Will have it posted here in the next day or two.

Monday 5 March 2012

Website gets new pages

I have done some updates to my tollhouses website here.

I have added a page for Wiltshire, as I have just finished its map. Also I have roughed out pages for Herefordshire and Worcestershire, as I have a couple of photos to go into those already.

I need to choose the next county to map, I am thinking Dorset.

Sunday 4 March 2012

Wiltshire mapped

I have finally finished my first pass of Wiltshire. There are alot of tollhouses in this county and it took a while to find them all on the maps.

The map is below, and the kml file can be found here.


View Wiltshire tollhouses in a larger map

Tuesday 28 February 2012

Updates to tollhouse pages

I have added pages for the four tollhouses I photographed on Sunday. They can be found on my tollhouse website, the Hampshire page is here.

I have come up with what I think is a sensible design for the website. It should allow me to extend it to cover all tollhouses in the whole country quite easily.

Sunday 26 February 2012

Some Hampshire tollhouses

Emily and I went for a drive this afternoon and visited 4 of the tollhouses in our local area.

First was the one I used to live in, in Chineham, Basingstoke.


Then we went down the B3400 to Whitchurch.


Then headed south of Andover to Wherwell.


And finally north of Andover to Hurstbourne Tarrant.


I will upload more photos to the relevant tollhouse pages over at my tollhouse wiki

4 Hampshire tollhouses photographed

We bagged the ones in Whitchurch, Wherwell, Hurstborne Tarrant and my old one in Chineham.
Photos should be available this evening.

Collecting photos

Location: A33, Chineham, Hampshire RG24, UK
Emily and I are spending the afternoon photographing some of our local tollhouses

Tuesday 21 February 2012

Hampshire tollhouse locations

I have completed my initial search of sources to find as many tollhouses as I can in Hampshire. The results are stored in a kml file here. This can be downloaded and opened in Google Earth or imported into Google Maps. If you do the latter it should give you a view that looks like the map below:


View Hampshire tollhouses in a larger map


I now have to choose the next county to work on. If any readers have a preference let me know, otherwise I will probably start with one of Hampshire's neighbours and then work onwards from there.

Updating map

I have been adding Hampshire tollhouses to the UK map page.

As well as the map, I am planning to put a kml file for each county on the blog, starting with Hampshire tomorrow. This should make it easier for people who want to visit a few of the interesting and historic buildings to plan their route.

Thursday 16 February 2012

National Road - USA

The National Road was the first federally built road in the USA, it is now mostly known as route 40. Wikipedia has a nice page on the road here. From reading that page it seems that three tollhouses remain on the road, one in Maryland and two in Pennsylvania. I have pictures of two of them.

Maryland tollhouse, Lavale



I visited this one February on week-long drive I took from Boston to Washington via Niagara and Pittsburgh. I have added it to the rest-of-world map page and you can also find it on the map below


If you zoom the map out you will see that this one is well placed in a gap in the hilly ridge, making it one of the few routes to drive livestock or carriages from one side to the other.

Pennsylvania "Searight's Tollhouse"

I didn't actually take these pictures myself, my parents spotted the tollhouse and took them for me.

They clearly went there on a much warmer day!




I like the "...whatever name it be called..." bit to ensure no one can sneak a vehicle past by claiming it doesn't appear on the list.


Both of these tollhouses seem to be constructed to the same plan, but the Maryland one is rendered whereas the Pennsylvania one is left at the natural brick finish. The third remaining tollhouse is the Petersburgh tollhouse in Pennsylvania. I don't have my own photos of that one but if you look at streetview on google maps other people have.


If you look at the photos you will see that again the plan is the same, but this time the building is of stone construction and is not rendered.

Wednesday 15 February 2012

Near Hay-on-Wye

Location: Whitney Bridge, Hereford, County of Herefordshire HR3, UK
A couple of tollhouses I spotted near Hay-on-wye.

The first is controlling a tollbridge:


Don't be fooled by the dubious road surface, this is actually the B4350 although there is a speed restriction over the bridge.

As with all the pictures I am posting, the locations of these tollhouses is marked on the map on the UK map page.

The second pic from the Hay-on-Wye area is taken just outside Hay itself.


This tollhouse is on the B4350 again and is now a children's bookshop with a website here.

Near Malvern

Location: A449, Malvern, County of Herefordshire WR13, UK
OK, I have found more of my older pics of tollhouses.
This one is near Malvern, on the A449. Another picture can be found here, not much different to mine apart from the colour.

Listing details - Chineham tollhouse

Location: A33, Chineham, Hampshire RG24, UK
The national heritage listing for the Chineham tollhouse can be found here.

The description of the house in the list is a bit out of date. The original listing date is in 1984, so it must be after that time that the house was extended.

English Heritage give some advice on what you can do if you own a listed building here.

English Heritage did a photographic survey of all listed buildings in the early part of the 21st century. The Chineham tollhouse's page can be found here.

The Chineham tollhouse

Location: Chineham, Hampshire, UK
This is the tollhouse in Chineham, on the A33. It was at the southern end of the Reading-Basingstoke turnpike.



The octagonal building on the right is the original tollhouse. The wooden centre section and second octagonal building make up the extension, built 25-30 years ago. According to the deeds the road originally ran right up to the wall, in fact the house projected into it. A parcel of land was bought and attached to the property to allow garden all around the building. The current A33 runs behind the fence just visible on the far right of the picture.


The original part of the building is Grade II listed apparently.

Tuesday 14 February 2012

Map of tollhouses

I have added a map page on which I will put a pin for each tollhouse I know about. Click the tab near the top to see the page

Monday 13 February 2012

First!

I used to live in a tollhouse on the outskirts of Basingstoke. The original building was more than 200 years old and an extension built in the '80s more than doubled the size of the house.

I will dig out my own photos of the house, but for the time being it can be seen in several other places online, for instance: