The road across Finchley Common was in passive alliance with these gentry. When Pepys visited Barnet, in 1660, partly for sake of its now forgotten medicinal waters, he found the highway “torne, plowed, and digged up,” in consequence of the heavily laden wagons and their long struggling teams of horses and oxen, which had made havoc with what had been a fairly good roadway. Progress was difficult, even in the best circumstances, and when stress of weather made it almost impossible, the highwaymen robbed with impunity, and absolutely at their leisure. The road remained more or less in this condition up to the early years of the nineteenth century. This was partly owing to the mistaken local patriotism which had prevented the remodelling of it in 1754, when the rustics of Whetstone routed the surveyor and his labourers at the point of the pitchfork. Better counsels prevailed in the first decade of the new era, and the eight miles of highway under the control of the Whetstone and Highgate Turnpike Trust rose in 1810 to be considered as good as any in the kingdom. It then became possible, for the first time in its history, for the Barnet stage to leave for London and to reach its destination without the necessity of stopping on the way for tea. The Trustees were naturally pleased with their road, and so in 1823 received with some surprise, under the new Act for the improvement of the line of road from London to Holyhead, a demand for the reconstruction of the highway between Prickler’s Hill and the southern end of Barnet town. They pointed out how greatly superior their portion of the road was to others, but to no purpose. The Government admitted the excellence of the surface, but boggled at the severity of the gradient, and practically insisted on its being reduced. The Trustees were dismayed. Telford and Macadam supplied rival plans, and both foreshadowed heavy expense. Telford’s idea was to slice off the top of Barnet Hill, and to run the road through a more or less deep cutting through the street; a plan which, if adopted, would have left the houses and the footpaths in the position of buildings overhanging a cliff. Fortunately for Barnet the scheme drawn up by Macadam prevailed. It was for the partial filling up of the dip in the road between Prickler’s Hill and the excessively steep entrance into the town, an entrance even now by no means easily graded. What it must originally have been may readily be judged by looking down from the present embanked road to the old one, seen going off to the left, in the hollow where the old roadside houses still stand, among them the “Old Red Lion,” on the site of the inn where Pepys stayed. The end one of a row of ten or twelve cottages, at the corner of May’s Lane, was once a toll-house.