John Metcalf

John Metcalf was born into a poor family in Knaresborough, Yorkshire, in 1717. Smallpox took his sight when he was six, and his parents paid for fiddle lessons so that he could earn a living. He learned to swim, climb trees, ride and gamble. By fifteen he was playing at the Queen\'s Head in Harrogate. He was a big man with a taste for wagers, and once beat a colonel\'s coach from London to Harrogate on foot, taking five and a half days.

He worked as a carrier, hauling fish from the coast and stone between York and Knaresborough, and by 1754 ran his own stagecoach, which he drove himself. He went with the army to Scotland in 1745 and was employed moving guns across boggy ground, a lesson he would later use.

In 1765 Parliament authorised a turnpike near Knaresborough and Metcalf, who knew the roads better than anyone sighted, won the contract for three miles between Harrogate and Boroughbridge. Over the next thirty years he built about 180 miles of road in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire and Derbyshire, walking every route with a long staff and doing his own surveys. His method was to dig good drains and lay a convex surface on a firm foundation. Where the ground was bog, as on the moor between Huddersfield and Manchester, he floated the road on bundles of heather and ling, and it held.

He dictated his life story shortly before he died, in 1810, aged 92.