During the Middle Ages the Chester Road was known as the Welsh Road. Drovers would bring their herds of cattle and sheep for sale at the markets of Birmingham and the Midlands, London and the south-east of England.

Livestock were not brought for sale for slaughter, but to be fattened up. The poor soils of Wales and Scotland did not produce animals fat enough for sale as meat. And so they were brought for sale to farmers in the lusher pastures of England who would fatten them up for sale.

Every spring and autumn large numbers of animals were driven south. From Wales to the Midlands might take two or three weeks, from Scotland to the south-east was a journey of over seven weeks. Although droving must have happened for many hundreds of years, the greatest numbers of animals were moved between 1700 and 1850, from the time the English cities began to grow until the coming of the railways. By the beginning of the 19th century some two million beasts were moved every year.

The route to the Midlands for many cattle started on the isle of Anglesey. The animals had to swim the Menai Strait at low tide, often 300 at a time. In the year 1794 records show that some 14,000 cattle crossed from the island to North Wales.

The drovers would then head for Shrewsbury to follow the ancient route of Watling Street, the A5, towards Brownhills. Here the Welsh Road turned south heading for the crossing of the River Tame. Drovers going to London would follow the road from Castle Bromwich to Stonebridge and on to, Kenilworth. This is now largely the route of the A452. From there the way to London went via Southam and Buckingham along what are now minor roads and tracks.

At Castle Bromwich many drovers would continue on towards the south east, while others would make their way via Hodge Hill and Washwood Heath into Birmingham. Every year, thousands of cattle and sheep would pass through Castle Bromwich.

Travel with a herd of cows was slow, perhaps only two miles per hour. As a result many stops for the night would have to be arranged and paid for. It is thought that Welshmans Hill on Chester Road North near New Oscott was one such, hence its name.

In the 18th century the crossroads on the High Street in Birmingham with Bull Street was known as the Welsh Cross. This was the site of the market for livestock from Wales. The building itself dated from the beginning of the 18th century and was demolished in 1803.

The Broughton – Chester – Stonebridge Turnpike 1759

In the 18th century the responsibility for maintaining roads lay with the parish. It is easy to understand the resentment felt by local people who had to pay for the upkeep and repair of through routes which were used by travellers who gave nothing to the local economy.

The Chester Road was part of a long-distance route from the south- east to the north-west of England and North Wales. It was heavily used by cattle drovers and, from 1659, was the route of the London-Chester stagecoach, the first such in the Midlands. (This service ran with until the 1830s with only a single year’s gap during the outbreak of the Great Plague in 1665. It was put paid to when the London – Birmingham railway opened in 1838.)

Parliament authorised turnpike trusts to be set up to take responsibility for specific stretches of road. Each trust had to be established by an Act of Parliament permitting it to erect gates and keepers’ cottages, and to charge tolls in return for maintaining the road.

The first turnpike act was passed in 1663 but it was not until the next century that large numbers of toll roads were set up. Most of the country’s major roads had been turnpiked by 1750. The tollhouse at Castle Bromwich was probably a simple structure like this one at the Weald & Downland Open Museum, Chichester.

All toll houses had a board listing the charges like this one at Todmorden.

The Broughton – Chester – Stonebridge Turnpike was set up in 1759 with a toll gate on the Chester Road at Old Croft Lane. The toll house has not survived and was very likely a simple wooden structure. A house nearby is now called Toll Gate House, although this is in reference to its position rather than the fact that it actually was the toll house. The 14 foot-wide (4½ metre) Castle Bromwich gate still survived as part of a fence in Kyter Lane until 1956. The route was ceased to be a turnpike in the 1870s.

The Coleshill Road

The Birmingham – Coleshill Road leaves the Chester Road by Castle Bromwich Hall heading into Birmingham via Hodge Hill, Ward End, Washwood Heath and Saltley. This was a route from Norman times – a market in the Bull Ring was established by a royal charter in 1166 and Coleshill in 1207. The road found its way along higher ground where possible though the crossing of Wash Brook at Washwood Heath Park and especially the River Rea at Saltley must have been tricky in winter.

In 1760 this road was turnpiked. However, writing in 1781, Birmingham’s first historian, William Hutton, complained about the route. He knew it well, as he lived at Washwood Heath and had farming interests on this side of town.

‘At Saltley, in the way to Coleshill, which is ten miles, for want of a causeway, with an arch or two, every flood annoys the passenger and the roads: at Coleshill-hall, ‘till the year 1779, he had to pass a dangerous river.’

The End of the Turnpikes

The last turnpike to be set up was a two mile stretch at Hastings in 1836; by this time all major and many subsidiary routes had been turnpiked. However, with varying qualities of maintenance and delays caused by stopping at gates every few miles, the system was beginning to be seen as disruptive to the free flow of trade.

And then railway mania began. When the London – Birmingham Railway opened in 1838, there was an immediate and dramatic fall in takings along the roads affected. That same year, the Royal Mail was first carried from London to Birmingham by rail.

The turnpikes were unable to compete with the capacity or speed of the railways for long-distance traffic. Many of the trusts ran into debt and the conditions of the road deteriorated. By 1840 all the London to Birmingham stagecoaches had ceased and by 1850 only a few services remained running to towns not served by rail. Most turnpike trusts were dissolved in the 1870s and 80s and they all were finally abolished by Parliament in 1888 when the newly established county councils were given responsibility for trunk roads. Parishes and townships took control of local roads.
The A452

The present national road numbering system was put in place in 1923. The Chester Road through Castle Bromwich was designated as the A452 from Leamington Spa to Brownhills, where it joined the A5 London-Holyhead road.

The route of the A452 through Castle Bromwich was that of the Chester Road from Stonebridge and Bacons End past the Bradford Arms and through the village (Bradford Road had not then been built).. The Chester Road turns sharply at Castle Bromwich Hall and formerly dropped steeply down to the crossing of the River Tame, then following the Chester Road to New Oscott, skirting west of Sutton Park to Brownhills.

Bradford Road was laid out in the 1930s with Newport Road to bypass Castle Bromwich village and the steep Mill Hill. It is named after the Bridgeman family, Earls of Bradford who bought the manor 1657; the title of Newport is that of the Bradford heir.

When the Chelmsley Collector Road was constructed in the 1970s, it became the route of the A452 from Bacons End to join the Chester Road at a newly laid out island at the M6 Junction 5 at the foot of Mill Hill.

The Chester Road through Castle Bromwich was then designated as the B4118 with the Bradford Road becoming the B4114, the former only 2½ miles in length, running from Castle Bromwich to Water Orton, the latter running from Birmingham (Saltley) to Leicester (Fosse Park). The B4119 is that short stretch of the Chester Road running past the Bradford Arms from Bradford Road to meet Water Orton Road at Whateley Green. Only 0.2 miles in length it is one of the country’s shortest numbered roads.

Many of our English place names are over a thousand years old and give some idea of the landscape and way of life of our Anglo-Saxon predecessors.

Castle Bromwich was founded by Anglo-Saxon settlers some centuries before the Norman Conquest, that successful invasion of England by William the Conqueror in 1066. Known initially as Bromwich, the name is Old English; brom wic and means ‘broom farm’.

Brom – Broom, Cytisus scoparius, is a shrub which thrives on the sandy and gravelly soils of glacial drift, materials which were pushed by glaciers down from the north during the last Ice Age which ended ten thousand years ago.

Common across this country and temperate Europe, broom is a shrub which grows well on sandy heathlands as an erect bush between 1 and 1.5 metres in height. It produces long, slender, green branches, profusely covered with bright yellow flowers from April to July. These develop into flat black seed pods which burst audibly when they are ripe, scattering the seeds some distance from the parent plant.

The plant’s name derives from an Anglo-Saxon word simply meaning a ‘thorny shrub’. The straight flexible branches were bundled and tied and used for sweeping houses, hence the modern use of the word. The second element of the name, scoparius comes from the Latin scopae, which also means a broom.

Wic – A subsidiary settlement of an earlier village was often referred to as a wic in Anglo-Saxon times, and it may be that Aston was the original settlement from which Bromwich was founded. Castle Bromwich, until modern times, was part of the extensive ancient manor and parish of Aston, a village which was important enough to have its own priest when the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086.

A little local geology

The lay of the land and make-up of soil have always determined the locations and types of settlements. Castle Bromwich is no exception. Here there is a range of soil types: heavy clay, light sandy soil and alluvium.

As many local gardeners well know, the soil of much of the area around Birmingham, especially to the east, consists of Mercia mudstone, a heavy red clay. Hard as rock in a dry hot summer, its imperviousness to water turns it into a sticky slimy morass in wet weather.

Cutting through the clay, Birmingham’s rivers created wide marshy valleys rich with fertile alluvium, soils created by river silt and rotting plant material. Locally the River Tame and the River Cole were prone to flooding in winter and were difficult to cross at any time. Fords on clay or on marshland were necessary but unsatisfactory, and their locations are often evidenced by place names. Fulford, ‘foul ford’ is common across the country; there was one at Witton on the Tame, another near Sparkhill on the River Cole and the name of Stechford, another crossing of the Cole, probably means ‘sticky ford’.

However, where rivers and streams crossed deposits of glacial drift, the river bed was much firmer and easier to cross. A sandy or gravel riverbed was much easier to negotiate. Travellers in Anglo-Saxon times would recognise better river crossings by place names such as Greet, which contains the Old English word greot meaning gravel, and Gravelly Hill. By choice they would head for fords referring to the plant, broom, which they knew grows on sandy or gravel soil. Medieval travellers would much prefer to cross at Bromwich and Bromford, if they could, rather than at Stechford or Fulford.

The wic element of Bromwich also refers to the geology and topography of the place. A wic was a daughter settlement where livestock, especially cattle, were kept. It may well be that (Castle) Bromwich was established by villagers from Aston who kept their cattle on the floodplains of the River Tame and Cole. The land would often flood in winter but in summer there were lush water meadows, perfect for grazing livestock.

Castle Bromwich had the best of three worlds. Down in the valleys, there were ideal conditions for livestock. On the higher ground, much of which was a mix of sand, gravel and clay in varying amounts, there was lighter tree cover and easier ploughing than on lands lying solely on clay. Close by, on the clay lands, there was the Forest of Arden, a valuable woodland resource providing timber especially of oak and ash, as well as game and grazing for livestock, notably pigs.

After a thousand years, evidence survives

The river valleys are still much in evidence in Castle Bromwich. The Cole Valley is a linear public open space, part of an urban country park following the course of the river from Chelmsley Wood to Solihull Lodge.

The great open fields for growing crops, traditionally a three-year cycle of cereals, legumes and fallow, disappeared at the beginning of the 19th century but were not built on until the 20th century. However, Southfield Avenue is named after the large house at the corner of the Chester Road and Hall Road (now the Remembrance Club) which itself was named after the medieval open field of the same name on which the Hall estate stands.

Vestiges of the ancient woodland of the Forest of Arden also survive with stands of trees on the Park Hall Nature Reserve between the M6 and the River Tame