Reasons for Designation
Guide posts are upright markers erected along routeways to indicate, at their
most basic, the course of the route, but they often incorporate further useful
information such as destinations along the route or from junctions, and
sometimes the distances to those destinations. The principles embodied by
guide-posts can be traced back to the milestones erected along roads by the
Roman army for primarily military and state purposes in the first centuries
AD. During the medieval period, responsibility for way-marking largely fell to
the church who had a strong interest in maintaining the clarity of routes at a
local, regional and national level; their way-marking frequently took the form
of erecting crosses along the wayside, conveniently asserting the Christian
faith at the same time as marking the route. This system collapsed with the
Reformation, both with the Dissolution of the Monasteries who had maintained
the routes and with the deliberate destruction of many of the route-marking
crosses themselves, though substantial numbers of crosses still survive in
some areas. The resulting early post-medieval deterioration of the nation's
roads produced successive legislation assigning responsibilities and standards
for the highways to the parishes. Provision of posts to guide travellers along
routes developed only gradually and haphazardly in the 16th and 17th centuries
and surviving examples from this period are rare, their erection not being
covered by legislation until an Act of 1697. By then, however, the first
Turnpike Acts had been passed, enabling tolls to be levied on road users to
pay for the maintenance of specific roads. During the 18th century, this
system revolutionised the previously inadequate highways maintenance, both
reflecting and generating increased trade and traffic. Turnpiking made the
provision of guide posts and milestones essential to define the legal
responsibilities of Turnpike Trusts and to encourage increased inter-regional
road use; their increased provision was itself a major stimulus to the great
increase in the nation's internal trade during the 18th century. A substantial
number of the resulting turnpike stone guide posts still survive, as opposed
to the early wooden examples, and as with the contemporary milestones, they
are often of a distinctive style peculiar to one Turnpike Trust and sometimes
to only part of a Trust's length of road. Increased competition for traffic,
initially from canals but most successfully from railways, meant the Turnpike
Trusts became increasingly unviable during the 19th century; once again the
need to finance the road system threatened to constrain the nation's economic
development. Between 1888 and 1930, highways maintenance, including
signposting, passed to County and District Councils, with national government
taking responsibility for trunk roads in 1936. The locations, style and level
of standardisation of guide posts provide very tangible indicators of the
post-medieval development of the road system; those erected during the 17th
and 18th centuries formed an essential element in the growth of the nation's
internal trade which provided the setting for the Industrial Revolution.
The guide post 270m north west of Bowden survives well as an unusually early,
and thereby rare, post-medieval waymarker, embodying both local vernacular
style and spelling, and still standing at its original junction. The guide
post is of particular significance in marking a major junction in the pre-19th
century network of the nation's principal routes. As both the junction and the
routes that met there have been subsequently removed far from this guide post,
its survival at a minor rural road junction in the present landscape
illustrates well the enormous development of the road network since the mid-
19th century and its underlying cause: the massive expansion in the movement
of people and goods. Its association with the medieval wayside crosses and the
turnpike guide posts along the main spinal route through Cornwall demonstrates
clearly the development of way-marking provision and those responsible for it,
a sequence that culminates in the modern road signs familiar along the present
trunk roads.
Details
The monument includes an early post-medieval guide post marking the original
site of an important junction which linked the major spinal route through the
south west peninsula with the main route behind the north Cornwall coast.
Those routes are followed by trunk roads in the present road network but in
the 19th-20th century development of the road system, their courses were
progressively altered and their junction shifted to the east, leaving their
former routes surviving as minor narrow lanes along which the guide post
provides unusually clear evidence for their former significance. The
guide post is Listed Grade II.
The guide post stands 1.34m high overall on a low verge in the western angle
of the junction and survives with a thick triangular granite head mortared
flat on an upright square-section granite post. The next principal town along
each route from the junction is marked in incised lettering, mostly capitals,
on the faces of the head. The longest face, oriented to the SSE, is marked
`LAUNCESTON rODE' (with the lower case `r'). Of the other two shorter,
equal-length, faces, that oriented to the NNE is incised `CAMELFORD' and that
to the north west is incised `BODMY RODE'. The western tip of the head is
fractured away, a break which clearly occurred during incision of the `L' of
Launceston, the upright arm of the letter being cut into the fracture surface;
this also accounts for the curious spelling `Bodmy' for the town of Bodmin:
the full name, spelt as the vernacular `BODMYN', must have been already
incised when the break occurred, removing the final `N'. Three edges of the
shaft and the upper and lower edges of the head's SSE face bear short chisel
slots at roughly 11cm intervals from shaping the slabs from which the
guide post was prepared.
The incised destinations confirm that this guide post remains beside its
original junction between Launceston and Bodmin on the principal road along
the spine of the south west peninsula, at the point where travellers could
leave along a ridge-top road passing north of Bodmin Moor towards Camelford on
the route linking towns behind the north Cornish coast. This important
junction was depicted at the present site of the guide post on Martyn's map of
1748 and on the earliest Ordnance Survey maps of the area in 1813.
The spinal route through the peninsula is of considerable antiquity and
retains several of its medieval way-marking crosses; the medieval origin of
the portion adjoined by this guide post is confirmed by the modified later
medieval bridges which still carry this now-minor road over the River Inney
and Penpont Water to each side of the ridge where the junction occurs. Parts
of the route were used by several early post-medieval travellers who recorded
their experiences, including Daniel Defoe in 1724 and, in 1695, Celia Fiennes
who also travelled from Camelford to Launceston, noting the `wet and dirty
lanes in many places'. The medieval crosses surviving along the spinal route
were supplemented in 1742 by a series of posts erected at quarter-mile
intervals. In 1769 the route between Launceston and Bodmin, over Bodmin Moor
and passing the junction marked by this guide post, was turnpiked; several of
the resulting guide posts still survive, similar in concept to that in this
scheduling in having stone posts supporting a flat head edge-marked with route
destinations but of different and much neater character, deploying thinner
slabs cut with destinations in regular well formed capitals; their far neater
execution and the increased standardisation of highway furniture that followed
from turnpiking implies that the different, very individual, style of this
guide post pre-dates that turnpiking of 1769.
In the 1820s, the turnpiked spinal route was substantially re-aligned to
cross the River Inny 1.75km to the south east at Two Bridges. From that date
this guide post lost its function as a major route marker, though it still lay
along the road to Camelford. By the 1860s, revised Ordnance Survey maps show
that main Camelford road had also been re-defined to a course 2km to the north
east and joined the spinal route at Kennard's House, 3.5km ENE of this
guide post. These 19th century revisions largely give the basis for these
routes' successors in the modern transport network: the A30 trunk road along
the spinal route and the A395 providing the link with the A39 trunk road
passing through Camelford. Their modern junction, a major interchange on the
A30T dual carriageway, contrasts enormously with its pre-1820s predecessor,
the junction of rural lanes marked by this guide post.
The modern metalled road surface where it falls within the guide post's
protective margin is excluded from the scheduling, but the ground beneath it
is included.
MAP EXTRACT
The site of the monument is shown on the attached map extract.
It includes a 1 metre boundary around the archaeological features,
considered to be essential for the monument's support and preservation.
