Historic England Draft List Entry

Name: Milestone 7
Location: Milestone 7, Military Road, Heddon-on-the-Wall, Northumberland, NE15 0DR

Milestone 7 marks the distance in miles from the west gate of Newcastle upon Tyne along the military road that was constructed between Newcastle and Carlisle between 1751 and 1757.

Known as the Military Road, currently partly reused by the B6318 and the B6528, the need for this road was identified by Field Marshall George Wade (1673-1748), following his failure to intercept the Jacobite army of Charles Edward Stewart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) in November 1745. Wade was at Newcastle when the Jacobites marched from Edinburgh, taking Carlisle on the 15th and moving onwards to reach Manchester by the 23rd. Meanwhile, Wade left
Newcastle for Carlisle on the 16th but had been forced to halt at Hexham by poor roads and snow, returning to Newcastle by the 22nd, without ever having made contact with the Jacobites. Although the road is now often associated with him, Wade was not involved in its
construction as he died in 1748.

The route of the Military Road was surveyed in 1749 and was estimated to cost in the region of £22,450. Following an Act of Parliament in 1751, construction work was contracted out to two civilian companies, who completed the road in 1757. The first 48km follows the alignment of Hadrian's Wall, with much of the stone used for hardcore being quarried from the historic structure itself, which caused considerable disquiet among antiquarians at the time. The total cost of the road was £22,680, shared by the Cumberland and Northumberland commissioners; this figure included the purchase of land, dry stone boundary walling, stone bridges, the construction of 14 tollhouses, and erection of milestones along the length of the road, in accordance with the Act of Parliament. The original milestones were all slender stone posts and as the principal garrison was housed at Newcastle, the distances marked on them were only given from Newcastle’s west gate.

Milestone 7 is sited in its original position on the southern verge of a minor road that was once part of the B6318 before it was realigned in the late C20. It is situated within the Hadrian's Wall World Heritage Site and lies within one of the scheduled areas for Hadrian's Wall. It is labelled as 'Old Milestone' on the 1897 25-inch Ordnance Survey map because it was superseded by a metal milestone sited on the turnpiked road about 380m to the east on Great Hill, which shows seven miles from the centre of Newcastle.

Details
Milestone (Military), erected between mid-1751 and 1758, as part of the military road linking Newcastle to Carlisle, which was built in response to the second Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.

MATERIALS: sandstone.
DESCRIPTION: situated on the southern verge of the Military Road, formerly the B6318, the stone pillar stands about one metre high and has a narrow rectangular section approximately 30 x 15cm, with a chamfered rounded upper surface. The face has a roughly punched-tooled surface and is inscribed: 7, which represents the distance in miles from the west gate of Newcastle upon Tyne in the mid-C18. The rear of the pillar is hidden from view against a garden wall.

Selected Sources
Books and journals
Lawson, W, 'The Origin of the Military Road from Newcastle to Carlisle' in Archaelogica
Aelianna, Vol 44, (1966), 185-207
Lawson, W, 'The Construction of the Military Road in Northumberland 1751-1757' in
Archaelogica Aelianna, Vol 1, (1973), 177-193
Websites
Heddon-on-the-Wall Local History Society - Military Road, accessed 15 August 2022 from
http://heddonhistory.weebly.com/blog/military-road
Per Lineam Valli - What is the Military Road, Mike Bishop, 2015 accessed 18 August 2022 from
https://perlineamvalli.wordpress.com/2015/06/07/69-what-is-the-military-road/

For those who keep their eyes open the milepost bearing the figure 8 also survives a mile west within the hedgerow alongside the road on the way to Rudchester.

Those at miles 10, 11 and 12 are also recorded but none of these are listed.

There are a few Grade II Listed milestones attributed to the Military Road in Cumbria but they have metal plates attached to the chamfered faces of a low stone post indicating distances to both Newcastle and Carlisle and likely date to the later 1811 turnpike.

During the Jacobite uprising of 1745, the government forces based in Newcastle, under Field Marshall George Wade, were unable to cross to Carlisle in time to intercept the rebels and in fact bad weather and poor roads halted them near Hexham.
 
It was reported that departing Newcastle’s Town Moor on the 16th November, infantry only made it to Ovington by night. The roads were “terribly broken and full of ice” and men were sent out with lights and carts to bring them up, a process that went on till the march was continued next morning at nine. The first troops reached Hexham about four that afternoon, the rear at midnight, when, they could proceed no further because of the snow. They pitched camp on the south side of the union of the two Tynes and were provided with straw by the townsfolk who also kindled fires all over the ground as a protection against the severe cold. Wade waited three days for a thaw and, when none came, returned to Newcastle. He arrived on 22nd November, his army almost spent with fatigue and having failed dismally to halt the progress of the rebels.
 
One of Wade’s party, Thomas Sayer, later reported, “That he is well acquainted with the Road from Carlisle to Hexham, which is mostly through an open Country, with very few Houses, not One Part in Ten of the said Road being through inclosed Grounds: That the Country is rocky, mountainous, and boggy, and absolutely impassable, both in Summer and Winter, for heavy Carriages; and there are several Waters in the said Road, which frequently overflow and render it impassable.” The maps designated it as a ‘Summer Road’.
 
In 1749 a letter from the Duke of Northumberland with attached petition was referred to the Surveyor General. They asked “That Leave be given to bring in a Bill for laying out, making, and keeping in Repair, a Road proper for the Passage of Troops and Carriages between the said City of Carlisle and Town of Newcastle, in such Manner as to the House shall seem meet.”

In July to September 1749, a survey was undertaken by two military engineers, Dugal Campbell and his assistant Hugh Debbeig. Although it is often called ‘General Wade’s Military Road’, Field Marshall Wade (to give him his correct rank) in fact died in his home in Bath in 1748 and there is no evidence he had anything to do with it. It is suggested, however, that a possible instigator of the proposal, Lancelot Allgood  of Nunwick, who became Sheriff of Northumberland in 1745, may have heard, first hand, the Field Marshal’s bitter remarks about the roads over which he had just struggled to Hexham, comparing them with roads that he (Wade) had made in the Highlands some years before. Allgood became a Member of Parliament in 1749 and was actively associated not only with the Military Road but also with the Corn Road from Hexham to Alnmouth.
 
The outcome of the survey was a map measuring about ten feet six inches long by two feet wide covering five sheets joined together to make a roll. It covered an area roughly sixty miles long (i.e. from about three miles east of Newcastle to about two miles west of Carlisle) by about six miles broad at a scale of just over two inches to the mile. There are five insets all concerned with the Roman Wall and its attendant works and the course of the proposed road is shown as a dotted line co-incidental with the Wall from Newcastle to a point nearly thirty miles west. The surveyors estimated the cost of the road as £22,450.