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After I did the post about the early C18 Toll house that moved from the A140 to Needham Market where it is now a Vets surgery I looked on the library website to see if there were any books on the subject and reserved this one.
The map shows the roads in Suffolk that had toll houses and the black solid dots show those that still exist in one form or another.
Most of the toll houses built in Suffolk were not an interesting shape like The Mustard Pot but always built right on the road edge. They would have had a door opening to the road where the gate keeper would sit taking money and opening the gate.
This house below is Tollgate Cottage on the way out of Eye. It dawned on me as I was taking the photo that this is the reason this road in Eye is ‘Lowgate’. The house was on the turnpike between Woodbridge and Eye in 1802.
The house previously had a door between the windows, no doubt blocked up when motorised traffic started rushing by.
I couldn’t take a photo of Tollgate Cottage just north of Debenham as it’s on a busy road and right where there are road-work traffic lights – but it looks exactly the same as the house above.
In Debenham village there’s a house called “The Old Toll House” but this would have been the home of the man who looked after the regular markets and took tolls from the stallholders.
The last few pages of the book are about houses like this one above, that look like toll-houses but have no mention on old maps and records of the C18 and C19 turnpike roads.
After the turnpike roads came the railways and these too had small houses built for the gatekeeper where the railway crossed busy roads.. I’m old enough to remember several places in Suffolk where the railway gatekeeper would hurry out to close the gates to road traffic before the train came and open them again afterwards.
Back Tomorrow
Sue
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