Sedbergh 5 Milestone on the A683 at Cautley

Stand on the verge of the A683 at Cautley, where the road follows the Rawthey valley below the Howgill Fells, and you might walk straight past it: a short cast-iron post at the foot of a roadside wall, at National Grid Reference SD 7045 9731. Raised letters on its head read "Sedbergh & Kirkby Stephen Road, Cautley", and its two faces count the miles: five back to the town of Sedbergh, nine on to Kirkby Stephen. This is the Sedbergh 5 milestone, a Grade II listed milepost on the old turnpike road between the two towns.

The Turnpike Road

The story of this milestone begins with an Act of Parliament. In 1762 the Lancaster and Westmorland Roads Act named 326 trustees (seventeen gentry, sixty-four esquires, thirty-four clerks and two hundred and eleven gentlemen) for "repairing and widening the Roads from Kirby-Steven High-Lane Head in the County of Westmorland, through Sedbergh, to Greeta Bridge in the County Palatine of Lancaster". The Sedbergh Turnpike Trust was born.

Unlike most turnpike trusts, which managed a single route from A to B, the Sedbergh Trust operated five roads radiating outward from the town like spokes of a wheel, using Sedbergh's position where four valleys meet: the Lune, the Rawthey, the Clough and the Dee. Sedbergh then lay in the far north-west corner of the West Riding of Yorkshire. The road north-east to Kirkby Stephen, named in the 1762 Act, follows the line of today's A683 up the Rawthey valley, past this milestone; the Milestone Society's Yorkshire Group dates it to 1765.

Further Acts in 1784, 1805 and 1826 continued and enlarged the Trust's powers, and along its roads the Trust set up stone milestones of its own distinctive design.

Stone and Iron

The Sedbergh Trust's own milestones follow a standard, distinctive pattern. Each is shaped from a single piece of stone: a D-shaped column with a slightly domed top on a rectangular base, with up to fifty centimetres of worked stone and rougher stone deeper in the ground. The back is left rough and unworked.

On those stones, destinations are shown simply by their initial letters, and some carry the township name on the base. The Sedbergh 5 milestone is not one of them. It is a cast-iron milepost of the later nineteenth century: a short triangular shaft with a semicircular head, with raised lettering reading "Sedbergh & Kirkby Stephen Road, Cautley" on the head and "Sedbergh 5 miles" and "Kirkby Stephen 9 miles" on the two faces of the shaft. Its listing records it as one of four surviving from a series of five in Sedbergh parish.

Why the Milestones Mattered

The Turnpike Roads Act 1766 made statutory provision for milestones along turnpike roads, showing the distance between the main towns on the road. They turned distance into a shared, visible fact: travellers, carriers and drovers could see how far they had come and how far remained.

Good roads mattered to Sedbergh. The town's long-standing industries were farming and woollen goods: wool was spun into yarn at mills, and people knitted hats and socks at home, which were sold as far away as the coalfields of North-East England.

By 1840 the Trust had sixty-two miles of road and seven main gates, among them the Borrett toll bar on the Kendal road, a mile west of Sedbergh.

What Survives

The Sedbergh 5 milestone was listed at Grade II on 14 June 1984 and is recorded on the National Heritage List for England as list entry 1384110. According to the Yorkshire Group of the Milestone Society, the Trust's stone milestones survive on all its roads except the Hawes road, today's A684, where County Council mileposts replaced them. At Cautley, it is this later iron post that counts the miles.

The milestone stands within the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Sedbergh itself is England's official book town and home to Sedbergh School, established in 1525 by Roger Lupton, who was born at Cautley. Nearby, the Quaker meeting house at Brigflatts was built in 1675.

Finding the Milepost

The Sedbergh 5 milestone stands on the east side of the A683, the old Cautley road, five miles north-east of Sedbergh in the Rawthey valley; its earlier listing placed it about 200 yards east of the Cross Keys. It is best seen on a walk or drive between Sedbergh and Kirkby Stephen, on a road that still follows the turnpike line, with the Howgill Fells rising to the west. Look for a small cast-iron post at the foot of the roadside wall.

This article was written by EachMoment, which digitises old photographs, films and tapes, as part of a series on local heritage.