Through Ryton-upon-Dunsmore, and past pretty Willenhall, with the Warwickshire Avon crossing under the road and seven tall poplars fringing it, Coventry is reached, over Whitley Common, once a lonely spot, horrific by reason of being Coventry’s place of execution. Old maps give the picture of a structure like a football goal at this point, ominously permanent, and labelled “Gallows.” It was not until shortly after 1831, when Mary Anne Higgins was hanged here for poisoning her uncle, that “Whitley Common” lost its old notoriety. Even so, the present directions to the stranger enquiring the way into Coventry are scarcely cheerful, the cemetery being the guiding landmark. Beyond that evidence of the populous nature of Coventry, commence the outskirts of that city; the road still with a kind of a furtive back door approach, with many twists and turns and narrow passes through picturesque slums as far as the very centre of the place. The entrance from London, in fact, remains the most difficult and crooked of any town all the way to Holyhead, and this although it stands as an improvement upon what had been before 1827, when Telford cut a new length of road here. The only good entrance to Coventry is from the railway station and along Hertford Street, an improvement made in 1812 in place of Greyfriars Lane; a steep, narrow, and cobble-stoned way that was once the only road in that direction. Coventry’s lanes possessing every possible disability and inconvenience from the coachman’s point of view, it was, when the question of reforming the Holyhead Road was being debated, seriously proposed that a new route should be adopted, avoiding the city altogether. The proposition failed, and resulted in a compromise that did little real good, even though it cost £11,000. As an indignant writer of that period remarks: “Individual interest was allowed to have its weight, and the traveller is still jolted through the long and narrow streets, uttering imprecations at every yard of his progress.” It is a thrilling picture thus presented to the imagination, the traveller cursing as he goes, and recalls Swift’s proposition for a Swearers’ Bank, enriched by funded damns. If he could have estimated a good income from the number of good, hearty oaths uttered in one day at a little Connaught fair, riches surely beyond the dreams of avarice would have accrued to a branch of the Bank at Coventry. These “private interests” were, of course. those of the innkeepers and the tradesmen, and they secured the continuance of the old route into the city, while permitting the not so urgent alteration of the exit toward Birmingham, where no trade would be disturbed by making what is now the so-called “Holyhead Road,” and deserting the “Old Allesley Road.”