The roads in Hyde Park must have been rather like South African tracks at the present day, and driving at night was not free from danger even at a comparatively late date. Attacks from highwaymen were to be feared. Horace Walpole was robbed in November 1749, and the pistol shot was near enough to stun though not otherwise to injure him. The Duke of Grafton had his collar bone broken, and his coachman his leg, some ten years earlier, when, on his way from Kensington to “the New Gate to make some visits towards Grosvenor Square, the Chariot through the darkness of the Night was overset in driving along the Road and” fell “into a large deep pit.” Soon after William III. purchased Kensington Palace from the Earl of Nottingham in 1691, he commenced making a new road through the Park. This became known as the King’s Road, or “Route du Roi”: a corruption of the latter is Rotten Row, the name now given to King William’s Drive. In the eighteenth century it was called the King’s Old Road, and the one which George II. made to the south of it was called the King’s New Road. When this was finished in 1737, it was intended to turf the older “Rotten Row,” but this plan was never carried out. The old road was much thought of at the time it was made, and the lighting of it up at night with 300 lamps caused wonder to all beholders. A young lady, Celia Fiennes, describes the road in her diary about 1695. “Y^e whole length of this parke there is a high Causey of a good breadth, 3 Coaches may pass, and on each side are Rowes of posts on w^{ch} are glasses--Cases for Lamps w^{ch} are Lighted in y^e Evening and appeares very fine as well as safe for y^e passenger. This is only a private roade y^e King had w^{ch} reaches to Kensington, where for aire our Great King W^{m.} bought a house and filled it for a Retirement w^{th} pretty gardens.” The road was in bad repair before the new one was in good order, and Lord Hervey, writing in 1736, says it had grown “so infamously bad” as to form “a great impassable gulf of mud” between London and Kensington Palace. “There are two ways through the Park, but the new one is so convex, and the old one is so concave, that by this extreme of faults they agree in the common of being, like the high road, impassable.”