Collecting Isle of Wight tollhouses

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Collecting photos

Emily and I are spending the afternoon photographing some of our local tollhouses

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.

Near Hay-on-Wye

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

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

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

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.