“GREAT piece on the Darlington/Northallerton mileposts as they’ve been a source of slightly sad fascination for me for years!” says Barry Thompson in Stockton, referring to the article in Memories 687 on the metal milepost on the A167 south of Great Smeaton which has received a ferocious bashing from a grass cutting machine.

READ HERE: GRADE II LISTED BUILDING LEFT REELING ON A167

The Grade II listed milepost is at Five Mile Bank and it proclaims that Northallerton is five miles away and Darlington is 11.

The bashed milepost at Five Mile Bank on the A167 near Great Smeaton

This run of seven mileposts from the vet’s Mile House in Northallerton to the middle of Great Smeaton has survived intact from the 1880s until just a couple of years ago when the post reading Northallerton 6 Darlington 10 was stolen from near Little Smeaton.

“It has often puzzled me,” says Barry, “why they are all in-situ up to Great Smeaton but north of there they die out completely.”

Great Smeaton, once a travel hub, from a 1930s postcard. A sign on the left says: "Caution. Road under repair." On the right is the Black Bull with what appears to be a Cyclists Touring Club metal plate on it

This is one of life’s great mysteries. There were eight mileposts from Blackwell through Croft and Dalton to Great Smeaton and all are no more – even though several are still marked as existing on Ordnance Survey maps.

In fact, there were more than eight, because the turnpike road from Catterick Bridge to Yarm shared a couple of miles of the A167’s length, and so it also had two of its mileposts between Black Man’s Corners and the Entercommon petrol station.

This road is full of travelling stories that are getting lost with the passing of time. For instance, the straight stretches of the A167 between Northallerton and Lovesome Hill are said to have been forcibly built by French prisoners-of-war captured during the Napoleonic Wars.

Then at the Entercommon petrol station, there used to be an inn called the Golden Lion for travellers, and the toll house, where money for using the road was collected, was only demolished a decade ago.

And then Black Man’s Corners, where the B1263 from Scorton joins the A167, have been radically straightened, and safetened, over the years. They apparently got their name from the ghostly hatted man, all in black, who lured carriages off the road on the corners to their doom.

Is it too much to hope that one of the many farms along here saved a milepost when it was uprooted and still has it kicking around in a barn? Please, please let us know if you can tell us anything of the fate of these curious historical oddities.

The milepost at Great Smeaton is the start of the run to Northallerton

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