A working index, crossed with the roads that made the inns
Regions & Coaching Routes
The gazetteer pages for England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland — each region cross-referenced to the 1822–1901 stagecoach route gazetteers, so that an inn at Stoney Cross sits beside the road it once served, and a corridor of coaching houses in Montgomeryshire can be traced back to the Old Welsh Mail.
Four nations, one gazetteer
The register is held in four national chapters, each numbered to its position in the original 1822 stagecoach calendar. The totals below are drawn live from the editorial database as of the Spring 2024 issue.
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England
From the Holyhead Road to the Old Kent, the lion's share of the index — arranged by county and crossed with the turnpike trusts that commissioned the inns.
Open the English chapter -
Scotland
The Edinburgh–Glasgow post road, the Aberdeen mail, and the long cold miles of the Highland stage — a thinner, harder index, with longer distances between houses.
Open the Scottish chapter -
Wales
The Old Welsh Mail from Shrewsbury to Holyhead, the Cambrian mail-coach roads inland, and the coaching houses of the Marcher towns — the smallest chapter by count, the deepest by single-road concentration.
Open the Welsh chapter -
Ireland
The Cork–Dublin mail, the Limerick stage, and the coaching houses of the Boyne Valley — the newest chapter, opened in 2019, and the only one licensed by Tourism Ireland.
Open the Irish chapter
The connective tissue between the chapters
Five roads account for nearly a third of every inn ever listed in the register. Each is given its own plate below, drawn from the 1822–1901 gazetteers held in the National Stagecoach Museum at Sherborne.
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Plate IThe Holyhead Road
London to Holyhead · 263 miles · Chester, Shrewsbury, Llangollen, Betws-y-Coed, Bangor.
287 inns indexed along its length
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Plate IIThe Great North Road
London to Edinburgh · 400 miles · Stevenage, Stamford, Doncaster, Durham, Berwick.
214 inns indexed along its length
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Plate IIIThe Exeter Road
London to Exeter · 172 miles · Andover, Salisbury, Shaftesbury, Dorchester, Exeter.
142 inns indexed along its length
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Plate IVEdinburgh – Glasgow
Edinburgh to Glasgow · 44 miles · Corstorphine, Linlithgow, Falkirk, Cumbernauld.
68 inns indexed along its length
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Plate VCork – Dublin
Cork to Dublin · 158 miles · Fermoy, Mitchelstown, Cashel, Kilcullen, Dublin.
54 inns indexed along its length
The depth of the index, in four figures
A coaching road in 2024 is not the tarmac beneath your tyres. It is the sequence of inns a stranger was welcome to sleep in, in the order the horses could manage. The register records that sequence — nothing fancier, nothing less.
Open the index, or add an inn to it
The register is a working reference, not a booking engine. Whether you are planning a weekend on a coaching road, or you keep a coaching inn the index ought to know about, the two doors below are the right ones.
No venue pays to be listed or starred. Every entry in the register has been visited anonymously by a regional reviewer who paid their own bill. Read our editorial promise.