[1] This old road still exists today, complete with its steep 1 in 8 gradient, surmounted by the substantial "Queen's Arms Inn" first built in 1769.

The banked footings of the base of this new road swept very high above the Fowlea Brook, ensuring easy passage across the valley bottom in all weathers.

[1] Due to abundant well-drained clay all along the valley ridge, tile and brick making is documented here as far back as the late 1600s.

During the 1830s, the area along the base of the escarpment featured the full range of brick and tile yards and small ceramics manufactories, increasingly working at an industrial scale.

The Potteries Loop Line local railway (Etruria to Kidsgrove) was closed by the notorious Dr. Beeching cuts in spring 1964.

In his autobiography he wrote "I found... the strange landscape of the Five Towns with its blazing iron foundries, its steaming canals, its clay-whitened pot-banks and the marvellous effects of its dust and smoke-laden atmosphere, very stimulating..." "...at Etruria my real writing began..." There he began the early drafts of what would become his famous The Time Machine (1895).

He planned a vast melodrama set in the Five Towns, but the only section known to survive is the macabre short story "The Cone".