Extract from The Changing Face Of Warminster by Wilfred Middlebrook, published in 1971:Â
Across the road from the Minster Church is Furneaux House. The Manor of Furneaux consisted of houses and lands “situate dispersedly over all the parish of Warminster†back in the reign of Edward The First.
Across the Cley Hill Stream at Coldharbour, after passing the Lord Weymouth Grammar School Swimming Baths next to Furneaux House, is Furneaux Lane, also called Gashouse Lane as it leads to what used to be the Warminster Gasworks. The huge gasholders remain, but are now kept at full pressure from distant sources; from Bath I believe at the moment, but possibly from the North Sea at some time in the future. Gashouse Farm entrance is passed on the way, then come the old gasworks’ cottages, now derelict, and the two sky-blue gasometers at the end of the lane. The site of the old gasworks is now a County Council yard, and the lane ends here at a gate leading to the Warminster Refuse Tip. So very near to the town, yet surely one of the loneliest spots in the district, this Bath Road approach to Warminster is beset with spacious fields.
The Bath Road meets Dead Maids Corner and Black Dog Hill before dropping steeply into Somerset via the Standerwick marshes. This was a little-used track for centuries because of the dense and dangerous Selwood Forest and the often impassable marshes, later traversed with difficulty by pack horses, carriers’ wagons and stage coaches. The remarkable thing is that despite past difficulties in reaching Warminster from the old Roman city, the exit from Bath is still called the Warminster Road. This seems to indicate that Warminster was a more important township than Frome, which is equally on the route as far as Beckington, but the probable answer is that mail coach or stage coach traffic passed from Bath to Warminster en route to further destinations such as Salisbury or Shaftesbury, just as the speeding motor coaches of today pass through Warminster on their way to the South Coast and other places.
Towards the end of the coaching era, from 1850 to 1856, a stage coach left the Red Lion inn at Warminster for Bath every day, leaving at 7.30 a.m. and returning at 8.00 p.m. The ‘Rocket’ coach from Bath to Salisbury called daily at the Bath Arms Hotel at 11.30 a.m., returning at 2.00 p.m. from Salisbury. In those days, passengers wishing to travel to London by rail had to go by stage coach to Bath or, via Frome, to Chippenham.
The mails were carried between Warminster and Bath along this road, with the dreaded and still dangerous Black Dog Hill an ever-present hazard. The late Mr. Albert Dewey, blacksmith, recalled how on one occasion he was called out in the dead of night to walk to Black Dog Hill. Hard-frosted snow was on the ground, and the mail-horses could not get up the hill until the smith had driven frost nails into their shoes.
Another old Warminster personality, Mr. Mark Cole, was a postman for over thirty years, and he declared that many attempts were made by highwaymen to stop the mail cart on Black Dog Hill, but the speed of the horses usually defeated them. Another version of the highwaymen stories was given by Victor Manley, who declared that a large black dog with flaming eyes attacked benighted travellers at the foot of Black Dog Hill.
The Bath Road at Warminster has never become a residential area, though a few buildings have been erected in the last few years, including a petrol filling station, and a group of buildings that were first built as a modern poultry farm for “Sykes Chicks,†now Sykes International Ltd. They were later occupied by a garden implement firm. At the time of writing, in 1970, the premises are now empty and for sale.