CAN you guess where this week’s Mystery Photograph was taken?

Each week, the Journal invites readers to test their local knowledge by identifying a historic location from days gone by.

Last week’s Mystery Photograph showed a Blacksmith’s Forge on Bath Old Road.

Bath Old Road in the Radstock area of Somerset (now within Bath and North East Somerset) is a historic local route whose origins lie in the evolution of road travel between Radstock and the city of Bath. As its name suggests, it was once the principal road connecting the two places before more modern highways, such as the A367, were developed and improved.

For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, this route carried most of the local traffic between Radstock and Bath, serving homes, farms and small communities along the way, before being superseded by more direct and wider roads better suited to motor vehicles.

The importance of Bath Old Road is tied to the broader history of roads and transport in the region. North-east Somerset developed around ancient trackways that in some cases followed or paralleled old Roman and medieval routes.

Radstock itself grew as a settlement along such historic communications, with earlier links like the Fosse Way — a major Roman road — passing nearby and helping establish routes north from Bath. Roads like Bath Old Road continued to serve local traffic even as larger turnpike trusts in the 18th and 19th centuries invested in improving long-distance travel routes.

In the era before widespread motor transport, many local roads in Somerset evolved slowly from simple tracks to managed highways. Bath Old Road would have been part of a network of local lanes and byways that linked rural communities and market towns to larger urban centres like Bath.

Its alignment and function changed over time as turnpike trusts and later councils prioritised straighter, wider and more durable roads, eventually diverting the bulk of through traffic onto newer alignments such as the A367 between Radstock and Bath.