Arthur Young's judgment on Irish roads is well known; that indefatigable traveller who had many hard words for the highways of his native country, asserted: ‘ For a country so very far behind us as Ireland, to have got suddenly so much the start of us in the article of roads, is a spectacle that cannot fail to strike the English traveller exceedingly ’ A quarter of a century later his views received general corroboration from the statistical surveys of the counties and from other commentaries and travel-journals of the time. Sampson, who found little to criticise in the county Derry roads, remarked: ‘ I have seen no country more intersected by good roads than the neighbourhood of Kilrea and Magherafelt’.