Friday finding

Bestie BikerBabe and I had a good catch-up-and-cuppa this morning, after which it was suddenly lunchtime.  I first cleaned Mirabel's chain but it didn't make a lot of difference to the clicking noise, so I went out anyway.

Having spent more time than was perhaps good for me yesterday going down an old maps rabbit hole, and sticking many pins in a brand new map before I went crazy trying to remember where everything I found was, I nipped out this afternoon to visit one of them.  This big old piece of stone might look slightly familiar, with one of its counterparts living further towards Edinburgh: five miles further in fact.  This milestone marks Edinburgh as being ten miles away, and it is also missing its metal plate.  Not that it matters very much because it's almost completely sunken, as the road has been raised a good foot and a half over the years.

I'm standing on what was once the turnpike from Peebles to Edinburgh, which Thomas Telford constructed in 1812.  Before that, the old route went via Leadburn and Howgate before descending steeply to Penicuik via Pomathorn – quite the task for the stagecoach brakeman!  The turnpike itself was established on the northern arm of the crossroads at Leadburn.  There was another toll house at Bilston to catch the shunpikers who'd opted for the old, unimproved route which was by all accounts in "poor condition", but poor is probably underselling it; the turnpikes before Telford were "full of pulls and extremely fatiguing and irksome to travellers", and farmers "sent all their produce on horses' backs to Edinburgh".  It was actually John McAdam who paved the way (heh) for turnpikes on which carriages could run reliably.  It's hard to believe that even in the 1850s this part of the country had basically only three roads that you could run carriages on.

As ever more horseless carriages zoom up and down the road at speeds that must surely turn milk sour and cause their riders to faint with the rushing of air, the milestone has sat quietly for two centuries, probably, and has seen it all before.