Celia Fiennes

Celia Fiennes visited Herefordshire in 1696. She saw a countryside in which apple and pear trees were growing everywhere 'even in their corn fields and hedgerows'. She described Hereford as a 'pretty little town of timber buildings' with well-paved streets 'handsome as to breadth and length'.

The palace in the late 18th century. Timber is waiting to be loaded onto barges.

In the 1720s Daniel Defoe was less impressed with Hereford which he described as 'large and populous' but also as 'an old, mean built, and very dirty city'. However, in the countryside around he found things more to his liking when he discovered the purpose of all the fruit trees which Celia Fiennes had seen. Defoe developed a taste for the local drink, cider. 'We could get no beer or ale in their publick houses, only cyder; and that so very good, so fine, and so cheap that we never found fault with the exchange. Great quantities of this cyder are sent to London, even by land carriage 'tho' so very remote, which is an evidence of the goodness of it, beyond contradiction.'

River traffic on the Wye at Hereford. In the early 19th century bargees drank in the Bell Inn in Gwynne Street (then Pipe Lane).

The passing of the Rivers Wye and Lugg Navigation Act in 1809 permitted the creation of a riverside towing path as far upstream as Hereford. This meant that barges could now be towed by horses rather than men with a considerable cost saving. In January 1811 two barges belonging to Mr Crompten of Hereford completed the voyage from Lydbrook to Hereford by the new towing path, using two horses for each barge.

In 1989 local businessman Frank Barton brought the 'Wye Invader' to Hereford. At 230 tons it is the largest vessel to have come up the River Wye.

Although usually fairly safe, journeys were not always completely without hazard. In May 1777 a highwayman stopped the London to Hereford coach three miles outside Oxford and robbed the passengers of their watches and money.

Although usually fairly safe, journeys were not always completely without hazard. In May 1777 a highwayman stopped the London to Hereford coach three miles outside Oxford and robbed the passengers of their watches and money.

 

People who couldn’t afford the stage-coach could ride on carrier’s wagons. In the 1770s Thomas Yeates’ wagon left Hereford for London every Sunday at midnight. Passengers paid just eight shillings (40p) with children sitting on their laps charged at half price. The wagon would be shared with goods bound for the capital - parcels under 12 pounds in weight cost 9 pence (3.75p) and geese, fowls, hares and other game could be sent for the same price. Yeates’ wagons reached the Black Bear in Piccadilly on Thursday evenings.

The horse-drawn railway from Abergavenny

In 1825 Hereford’s gas-works had been built in Commercial Road and in October gas lighting was lit in the streets and city-centre shops. The only way to get coal to the gas-works was by river barge to Hereford and by horse-drawn wagon through the city streets.

Before October was out £25,000 had been raised to connect the horse-drawn tramway from Monmouth Cap on the Monmouthshire-Herefordshire border with the city and an application made to parliament to obtain an act.

The trees stand on the embankment of the old horse-drawn tramway from Abergavenny as it approaches the River Wye at Hereford

The old canal basin at Hereford

The canal, although not profitable to its owners, nonetheless was in fact an asset to the city. The council was able to purchase road gravel for half its previous cost after it opened. Barges continued to use the canal well after the opening of the railways. On the night of the 1881 census, two barges, both working the timber trade had people sleeping on board in the basin at Hereford. On the ‘Emma’ was her captain, Thomas Bayliss and his sons, Samuel, 15, and George, 13.

The other barge was the home of Charles and Mary Deane and their children. These were John, aged 11; Charles aged 8; and their 7-year-old sister Jessie. It was probably a cause of considerable satisfaction to the little girl that the barge of which her father was master, and on which they all lived, was also named the ‘Jessie’.

The canal is currently being restored by the Hereford and Gloucester Canal Trust. A slight deviation from the original course has been constructed at a retail park at Newtown Road, north of the city centre. Here two new bridges one for motor vehicles and one for pedestrians have been built.

1853 – The Year the Railways came

By 1841 the railway had reached Gloucester in the form of the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway. In 1844 the Bristol and Gloucester Railway connected Gloucester to Bristol.

These lines were of the standard gauge (then called narrow gauge) of 4 feet 8½ inches, but the Great Western Railway of Isambard Kingdom Brunel used the broad gauge of 7 feet. The broad gauge rails connected Gloucester with London in 1845.

 

Proposals for building a railway connecting Gloucester with Hereford pre-date the construction of the lines connecting Gloucester to Bristol or Birmingham.  These were two plans of 1836: one for a route through Newent and Ledbury and the other for a route through Ross-on-Wye.  Later in the year a plan for connecting Hereford with Shrewsbury was launched.

Nothing came directly of these proposals, but a few years later things began to move again. Royal assent for a line connecting Hereford to Gloucester was given in 1845 and connections to Shrewsbury and to Newport on 2 August 1846.

The Railway connecting Chepstow to Swansea via Newport and Cardiff had opened in June 1850. The railway system was still patchy however - South Wales had not been connected to London until the bridge over the lower Wye at Chepstow was opened in July 1852.

In April 1852 the railway line from Shrewsbury to Ludlow opened and on the 24th the first ever timetable was printed in the Hereford Times with the warning that the times shown were Greenwich Time not the local time.

The cutting for the Shrewsbury and Hereford Railway at Barrs Court, just to the north of Hereford was started August 1852. By the end of September 1852 the first steam locomotive ever seen in Herefordshire was working on the section of the Newport, Hereford and Abergavenny line to the south of the city and the stone piers of the bridge over the Wye at Hunderton were under construction. To the north of the river, the embankment towards the site of Barton Station was under construction.

By the summer of 1853 massive earthmoving was taking place on the outskirts of Hereford as the three lines converged on the city. Inevitably, the scale of the works and the volume of materials encouraged pilfering and gangs of youths were soon busy stealing brass bearings from trucks being used for railway construction. But there were dangers to the young as well as opportunities in this unfamiliar environment and a boy was run over by a tip wagon when playing on the railway workings at the Barton near Hereford.

The formal opening of the railway system in Hereford was arranged for Tuesday 6th December which was declared a local holiday. At 1pm a train of 31 carriages drawn by three locomotives drew into Hereford from Newport. It carried 640 passengers and was watched by crowd estimated to number between twenty and thirty thousand people, many more than the population of Hereford at the time.

A parade through the decorated city streets met the train and a civic banquet was held in the Shire Hall. The navvies who built the line were feasted at the old foundry in Friar Street and balls were held at both the Shire Hall and the old town hall.

This broad-gauge line crossed the Wye four times and so four bridges had to be built. Four tunnels also needed to be driven. The line proved difficult to construct and In January 1853 work was delayed because of extremely wet weather which flooded the tunnel at Lea. In April a workman received fatal injuries when he slipped under tip truck he was pushing and it ran over him. John Baker, a sub-contractor, was killed in late July in the cutting at Dinedor by a collapse of earth.

The Hereford, Ross and Gloucester Railway opened to Hereford on 1st June 1855. Although this was in the middle of the Crimean War, it was still celebrated with enthusiasm, especially at Ross-on-Wye where 2000 children sat down to plum cake and tea.

The line was converted from broad gauge to standard in 1869 – a test for what was to become a mass conversion of the whole broad gauge system. Impressively, the whole line, a length of over 21 miles, was converted in five days.

The railway bridge at Eign at Hereford was built to carry the Hereford to Gloucester line over the Wye

The Hereford to Worcester railway line Act passed in 1853 and work started 1854. The engineer for this line was a local man, Stephen Ballard, the man who had been responsible for constructing the Hereford and Gloucester canal between Ledbury and Hereford. The line was opened from Worcester to Great Malvern and Malvern Wells in May 1860. But the winter of 1860/61 was the most severe in living memory.

In early January there was a fatal accident at Haywood crossing between Dinmore Tunnel and Moreton Station on the Shrewsbury to Hereford line. A broken wheel on the 12.40 from Shrewsbury caused all the carriages to be thrown off the embankment. The River Lugg had flooded the fields around and the water had then iced over. The derailed carriages crashed through the ice into the water and two women were drowned.

Work on the Hereford to Worcester line had stopped and the workmen were left to find other means of support. Nearly 150 men, many with wives and families, were found employment at the workhouse and paid for by the city rate payers – 9d per day ‘with a liberal allowance of bread.’ On the Stoke Edith estate to the east of Hereford, Lady Emily Foley, a keen supporter of railways, employed large numbers of navvies on coppice work until such time that railway work could begin again. 

The line was opened into Hereford in September 1861 via a junction with the Shrewsbury and Hereford line at Shelwick just north of the city.

Three stations were built between Hereford and Ledbury. The middle of these was built at Tarrington, although it was called Stoke Edith Station. From here trains ran regularly to Hereford and Worcester and the Great Western Railway would run 'hop-picker's specials' to bring in the workforce needed to pick the hops which were a major crop in the area. From 1885, passengers could change at Ledbury Junction Station for Ledbury Town, Newent and Gloucester.

The railway was originally incorporated under an Act of Parliament in 1859. The route was built in stages: the nine miles from Hereford to Moorhampton opened in October 1862; a further five miles to Eardisley were completed in June 1863, followed by Eardisley to Hay (seven miles) in July 1864 and the remaining 5½ miles to Three Cocks Junction on 19 September 1864 when a through service to Brecon began.

It was this final stage that aroused most interest. On the 1st October the Hereford Times commented on the improvement of communication with Hay - 'instead of going to the coach office in Broad-street, and paying down a considerable sum even for a seat on the outside, we have only to go to the Barton Railway station, pay a trifling sum at the little window, receive the ticket courteously rendered, take our seat in the convenient carriages, and in a twinkling we are shaking hands with our friends in Hay'.

On another page of the same edition a reported conversation between two female travellers makes the point vividly - 'in the old coach they charged 10s (50p) and we was travelling all day nearly'. The journey time was now one hour and the return fare 1s 9d (less than nine pence).

The clergyman and diarist Francis Kilvert often used this line. Kilvert was a curate at Clyro in Radnorshire, near Hay-on-Wye, for seven years from 1865. The use that the locals were making of the train is suggested in his diary entry for 28th April 1870 - 'returned [from Whitney to Hay] by the market train crowded with market people'.

Kilvert's parental home was at Langley in Wiltshire, and as a consequence his journeys entailed changing stations at Hereford. For the 28th May 1870, he recounts a furious drive on a fly - a light horse-drawn vehicle which would have been waiting for hire at the station - from Barr's Court Station, on one side of town, to Barton Station, on the other.

Despite the ready availability of rail transport and its acceptance into general use among many sections of the population, not everyone was completely familiar with the longer routes. On 29th February 1872 Kilvert recorded ‘there is a general belief among the Clyro and Langley people that I cannot travel from Radnorshire to Wiltshire without going over the sea’.

On Monday 2nd September that year he finally left Clyro 'As the train went down the valley of the Wye to Hereford I waved my handkerchief to all the old familiar friendly houses'.

Other Herefordshire communities were keen to get railways. Kington was connected to Leominster in 1857, Woofferton to Tenbury Wells in 1861, and by 1870 the dramatic Ross-on-Wye to Monmouth line was well under construction.

Other lines opened in Herefordshire, but financing them in these rural areas proved difficult and few were profitable. The difficulties were apparent in the amount of time it took to build these lines.

The 6 mile long Kington and Presteigne Railway took four difficult years to build, from the cutting of the first turf in 1872, while the 19 mile Golden Valley line between Pontrilas and Hay-on-Wye took 13 years. Work in this line began in 1876. Opened from Pontrilas to Dorstone in 1881, the final section to Hay opened in 1889.

A line designed to connect Leominster to Worcester through Bromyard took even longer to build. This was opened between Worcester and Yearsett, three miles short of Bromyard, in 1874, but it was not until 1877 that it reached Bromyard itself. A line from Leominster to Steens Bridge opened in 1884, but it was another 13 years before the final section was opened to Bromyard.

Steam railways were the main means of travel for over a century. Trains carried the nation’s manufactured goods and farm produce. They took people to work and families on holidays; and they took young men away to wars.

The First World War placed a strain upon the companies’ ability to maintain their services. By 1917 both the 1.40 pm Paddington to Hereford service and the 12.50 pm Hereford to Paddington were withdrawn.

Hereford engine sheds in the early 1960s. These ‘pannier’ tank engines were the mainstay of shunting on the old Great Western Railway and its successor – the Western Region of British Railways. These could have been seen working at the various marshalling yards around Hereford.

The preserved Great Western Railway locomotive King George V at Hereford Station in the 1980s. For several years based at the now-closed Bulmer’s Railway centre in Hereford, when newly built in 1927, the locomotive was sent to the United States for the centenary celebrations of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. This was when it was presented with the bell on the front buffer plate.

The 1960s saw the closure of all but two of the county’s railway lines. Only the north to south line through Hereford from Shrewsbury to Newport and the line from Worcester to Hereford remain.

All over the county the small stations closed, including most of those on the remaining lines.

At the beginning of the 21st century only Colwall, Ledbury, Leominster and Hereford retained railway stations.