Before the road was remodelled by Telford, in 1826, the way out of St. Albans was past the “George” and down the steep descent of Romeland and Fishpool Street, through the village of St. Michael’s, and diagonally across a portion of Gorhambury Park, crossing the river Ver at Bow Bridge, at a point one and a half miles from the city, just short of Prae Mill. The present Holyhead Road, starting from the “Red Lion” in the Market Place, was in 1828 an entirely new work. It is described by Telford as a two miles’ length, extending from the “Red Lion” to “Pond Yards,” a spot probably identical with Shefford Mill, half a mile beyond Prae House, the site of the ancient hospital of St. Mary de la Pré, or de Pratis (“St. Mary of the Meadows”) originally a retreat for women lepers, founded in 1190, and afterwards a Priory of Benedictine nuns, suppressed by Wolsey in 1528. Priory and mill are alike gone, but Prae House is seen on the left of the road, dwarfed by the embankment with which the roadway is raised securely above danger of flooding from the river Ver.
When the new road was completed, the old route through Gorhambury became private, and the entrance to it is now guarded, in the village of St. Michael’s, by lodge gates. St. Michael’s, now lying on the road to nowhere in particular, remains a sweetly old-world place, and the breakneck descent to it is one of the quaintest corners of St. Albans. Here old houses and quaint signs are the rule, and modern buildings the exception. The “Jackdaw,” the “Cock and Flower Pot,” and many other old names attract attention. Curiosities of the geological sort at St. Michael’s are the huge masses of conglomerate rock, or “pudding-stone,” found here and there in prominent positions, having been dug up at different periods in the neighbourhood. The name of “pudding-stone” is excellently descriptive, the rock consisting entirely of pebbles welded together by some prehistoric force, and resembling, to the imaginative mind, Cyclopean fossilised fragments of some antediluvian plum-pudding, extraordinarily rich in plums.
St. Michael’s Church, standing as it does almost in the centre of the site of old Verulamium, is largely built of Roman tiles. It is of many periods, from Saxon to Scottian and Grimthorpian, and of an extraordinary interest, somewhat blighted by the heavy hand of Sir Gilbert Scott, who “thoroughly restored” it in 1867, and the inconceivably heavier hand of Lord Grimthorpe, who pulled it about shamefully in 1897, utterly demolishing its quaint old rough-cast tower, and building a new one from his own amateur-architect design. The odd architectural details would be ridiculous if they were not pitiful, in view of the really interesting work they replace. One device, in especial, resembles a cycling free-wheel clutch rather than anything known in the whole range of Gothic design.