Until towards the end of last century the town was not very easy of approach from any direction. The roads leading to it had become worn by the traffic of many generations. The hoofs of the pack-horses, helped by the rains, had deepened the tracks in the sandy soil, until in many places they were twelve or fourteen feet deep, so that it was said of travellers that they approached the town by sap. One of these old hollow roads, still called Holloway-head, though now filled up, was so deep that a waggon-load of hay might pass along it without being seen. There was no direct communication between Birmingham and London until about the middle of the century. Before then, the Great Road from London to Chester passed it four miles off, and the Birmingham manufacturer, when sending wares to London, had to forward his package to Castle Bromwich, there to await the approach of the packhorse train or the stage-waggon journeying south. The Birmingham men, however, began to wake up, and in 1747 a coach was advertised to run to London in two days “if the roads permit.” Twenty years later a stage-waggon was put on, and the communication by coach became gradually improved. When Hutton entered Birmingham in 1740, he was struck by the activity of the place and the vivacity of the inhabitants, which expressed itself in their looks as he passed them in the streets. “I had,” he says, “been among dreamers, but now I saw men awake. Their very step showed alacrity. Every man seemed to know and to prosecute his own affairs.” The Birmingham men were indeed as alert as they looked--steady workers and clever mechanics--men who struck hard on the anvil. The artisans of the place had the advantage of a long training in mechanical skill. It had been bred in their bone, and descended to them from their fathers as an inheritance.[95] In no town in England were there then to be found so many mechanics capable of executing entirely new work; nor, indeed, has the ability yet departed from them, the Birmingham artisans maintaining their individual superiority in intelligent execution of skilled work to the present day. We are informed that inventors of new machines, foreign as well as English, are still in the practice of resorting to them for the purpose of getting their inventions embodied in the best forms, with greater chances of success than in any other town in England.