Malodorous odometer

When I was much younger, I had a paperback book called 'Crazy But True'. I must have liked all of the humorous nuggets of information contained within because I remember I also bought the sequel, 'More Crazy But True'. (I can only imagine my excitement at discovering the second instalment as there was no Amazon to alert me to its existence or publication.)

Even now, forty years later, I can remember one of the crazy but true facts was that Greek people measured distances in cigarettes, i.e. how many cigarettes one would smoke whilst getting from A to B. Young and innocent as I was, it didn't occur to me to suspect that some of these facts might have been written down the pub on a Friday lunchtime as the deadline for publication loomed*.

Instead, I focussed on what I perceived as the inadequacies of this standard of measurement. Surely, I thought, not everyone smokes at the same rate. Or leaves the same amount of time between cigarettes. Had I been a little older, I might have pondered the medical implications for a seasoned traveller, whose lung capacity would surely have been severely impaired by this malodorous odometer.

I remembered this today as I was walking through Kirkby and noticed this milestone, tucked away in a wall. Its measurements are surprisingly accurate and I wonder when it was put there and how the measurements were made. A not entirely satisfying Google search suggests it's been there at least a couple of hundred years, in which case, I wonder, given the varying state of the roads, one's horse's health, the weather, and so on, just how much more useful it was to know one's journey in miles than cigarettes?

*Although I must admit that I don't know for a fact that it's not true.