If we consider the use and character of the Road, its texture and appearance, its effect upon the landscape, its connection with society as distinct from the legislation connected with it, 1810 is much more of a pivotal date than such dates as 1555 or 1822, which mark the political changes in the statutory powers of dealing with roads. Already stage coaches driven from the box, and every year increasing the rate of travel, had been upon the road for a generation--for twenty-six years; and already great lengths of turnpike trust roads had come to a sufficient excellence of surface to permit travel at an average rate over those branches of ten miles an hour. But, as I have said, there was not as yet _one continuous piece of road designed to connect two important termini, of equal value throughout, and ordered in all its length towards that one end of making equable and rapid transit possible between the two extremities_. That is the point. The thing had not existed in this island (save in the “four Regal Ways”) since the breakdown of the Roman central government in the fifth century. What happened in 1810, and what makes it such a memorable date, is the appointment, under the pressure of the Postmaster-General, of a stonemason who had risen to the practice of road engineering--Thomas Telford--to the overlooking of the Holyhead Road. The initiative came from the Post Office Department: the administrative and engineering genius came from Telford. Incidentally, we should remark, as one of the innumerable examples of unforeseen and exceedingly important side developments in history, the fact that this great revolution in British roads ultimately derived from Pitt’s Act of Union with Ireland, which was already nine years old. It was the necessity of communication between London and Holyhead, and especially of postal communication, which did the business. Telford had been in the employment for some years past of the Highland Roads Commission. He had therefore proved his capacity, and from it he was appointed to a Government position in the re-establishment of the Holyhead Road after the affair had been examined by a Parliamentary Committee in this year (1810). It was not only Telford’s skill, it was still more his energy and intense application to detail which wrought the change. His nominal masters were ten Commissioners and three Ministers at their head; his real chief was Parnell, later Lord Congleton. But it was Telford, by his ceaseless travelling and investigation and overlooking of everything, who pushed the thing through. The whole distance to be reorganized was one of 194 miles. Of this the larger part, 109 miles, fell under seventeen English Trusts; the remaining 85 miles were under six Welsh Trusts, the latter with far less local traffic to provide them with income, and, it would seem, also of less general efficiency.