Travelling in the Regency Era

Did they experience boat lag? Carriage lag? Maybe!

About one hundred years ago, I arrived back in Ireland from my Christmas visit to the States.

What do you mean, it was only a little over three weeks? You will never convince me that this month has not gone on for like, four generations.

Even after all this time, I still haven’t got a hang of getting over jet lag. It’s an overnight flight from there to here, so in the past I have tried: sleeping through the whole things; staying up through the whole thing; snoozing for and hour or two; snoozing for half the flight.

And then! I either try to stay up the whole day (lol) or go directly to bed and wake at noon, like it was any old day that I had a big lie in.

This time round, it only lasted a week, which was a week of not really waking up until 4pm and not wanting a meal until 10pm and thus I am blinking like a lil owl in the hollow of a tree until 3am.

I love having travelled, but kind of do hate travelling.

All of this is to say, would I prefer to be crowded into a poorly sprung carriage for hours at a time, taking days to get to my destination? That would be a ‘no’.

Research that I did around travelling by coach in the Regency Era makes it sound horrendous: bad suspension on the vehicle, poor condition of the highways much less the byways, and sitting cheek by jowl with as many as could fit in the thing.

Given the indifferent approach to bathing of that time period, it’s all very ‘yikes’ for the contemporary person.

Horseback was slightly better, in terms of covering ground, but not by a whole lot. I recall being called out by a reader about the amount of time I accorded to distance in A Wolf in Duke’s Clothing and I stand by my reckoning: it took the length of time it did because of the lack of safe roads and Felicity’s unfamiliarity with the terrain and her mount.

To wit: a horse walks at roughly 4mph, so a ten mile journey would take a little over 2 hours. A trot is 8mph, so let’s say an hour. A bit of cantering on the straight would take off maybe 15 minutes.

Add to this the need to have the horse in good fettle for everyday excursions and that leaves you with doing all you can to preserve his or her fitness. Sheesh!

Not me stewing over that for actual years.

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The offending calculations can be found in A Wolf in Duke’s Clothing, have a look in my shop.