We took one coach, two coachmen, and four horses, And merrily from London made our courses, We wheel’d the top of the heavy hill call’d Holborn (Up which hath been full many a sinful soul borne), And so along we jolted to St. Giles’s, Which place from Brentford six, or nearly seven, miles is, To Staines that night at five o’clock we coasted, Where, at the Bush, we had bak’d, boil’d, and roasted. XIII Staines, where the road leaves Middlesex and crosses the Thames into Surrey, is almost as commonplace a little town as it is possible to find within the home counties. Late Georgian and Early Victorian stuccoed villas and square, box-like, quite uninteresting houses struggle for numerical superiority over later buildings in the long High Street, and the contest is not an exciting one. Staines, sixteen miles from London, is, in fact, of that nondescript--‘neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red-herring’--character that belongs to places situated in the marches of town and country. Almost everything of interest has vanished, and although the railway has come to Staines, it has not brought with it the life and bustle that are generally conferred by railways on places near London. But, of course, Staines is on the London and South-Western Railway, which explains everything. Staines disputes with Colnbrook, on the Bath Road, the honour of having been the Roman station of _Ad Pontes_, and has the best of it, according to the views of the foremost authorities. ‘At the Bridges’ would doubtless have been an excellently descriptive name for either place, in view of the number of streams at both, and the bridges necessary to cross them; but the very name of Staines should of itself be almost sufficient to prove the Roman origin of the place, even if the Roman remains found in and about it were not considered conclusive evidence. There are those who derive ‘Staines’ from the ancient stone still standing on the north bank of the Thames, above the bridge, marking the historic boundary up-stream of the jurisdiction exercised over the river by the City of London; but there can be no doubt of its real origin in the paved Roman highway, a branch of the Akeman Street, on which this former military station of _Ad Pontes_ stood. The stones of the old road yet remained when the Saxons overran the country, and it was named ‘the Stones’ by that people, from the fact of being on a paved highway. The very many places in this county with the prefixes, Stain, Stone, Stan, Street, Streat, and Stret, all, or nearly all, originate in the paved Roman roads (or ‘streets’) and fords; and there is little to support another theory, that the name of Staines came from a Roman _milliarium_, or milestone, which may or may not have stood somewhere here on the road. [Sidenote: _STAINES STONE_]