Milestone Immediately In Front Of No.7 Grove Cottages

Milestone immediately in front of No.7 Grove Cottages, Ladock

This milestone was erected in 1830 to designs by William McAdam and made by Benjamin Bowden. It is triangular on plan, stands 0.9 metres high with a flat top, and carries inscribed iron plates cast by the Perran Foundry Company on its front faces. The north plate is inscribed "TRURO / 7 / FALMOUTH / 17½" in Roman capitals, while the south plate reads "BODMIN / 17¼ / LONDON / 243" in sans serif capitals. The entire milestone is painted white, including the plates, with the lettering picked out in black.

The milestone was commissioned as part of the renewal of the General Turnpike Act in 1828, when the Truro Turnpike Trustees proposed a new road running north-east from Truck Hill through the parishes of Probus, Ladock and St Enoder to Penhale. William McAdam, Surveyor for the Trust, engineered this as part of a scheme to create a modern, well-graded road from Falmouth to London. McAdam chose a gentle, winding route through the Tresillian river valley to give the easiest possible climb. This route was made feasible by improved methods of drainage developed by McAdam and his father, John Loudon McAdam, which allowed for road construction in muddy river valleys.

The Truro Turnpike Order Book for 1830 records that twelve triangular milestones were commissioned from Benjamin Bowden at an initial cost of 13 shillings per stone, later raised to 15 shillings. The stones were designed to display the distance to London, and the Perran Foundry Company was paid £11 2 shillings for producing the cast iron plates. However, the distances to London shown on the plates were rendered obsolete in 1835 when the Bodmin Turnpike Trust constructed a new road to avoid the long steep climb from Lamorick. Although this new road provided a shallow gradient, it increased the distance between Bodmin and Truro. Uniform discrepancies in distance appear on this and other milestones in the series on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1880. The second edition of 1907 shows correct distances, suggesting the milestones received new mileage plates sometime between these dates, probably in 1889 when the County Council took on road maintenance.

The route remained the main A39 until the 1990s, when a new A39 was provided between Truro and Mitchell, taking over and upgrading an earlier route that the Tresillian Valley road had itself replaced in the 1830s.