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timekeeping.’
    â€˜How come?’ asked Cowlick.
    Mr Stephenson scratched his head as if wondering how to explain it. ‘Well, prior to that the stagecoaches were notorious for their bad timekeeping. The roads were bad, and sometimes the coaches would get stuck in the mud or break a wheel. Apart from that, there were often long delays at the coaching inns when some of the passengers, and maybe even the coachmen, overstayed their welcome.’
    â€˜You mean drinking,’ said Róisín, who thought that as a publican Mr Stephenson might be avoiding the word.
    â€˜Mmm … more a case of drinking to excess I’d say, and to the exclusion of the feelings of other passengers who were anxious to be on their way. Then, in 1784 a separate Post Office was established for Ireland, and four or five years later mail coaches, like the ones they had in England, began to operate in addition to the stagecoaches.’
    â€˜How did that improve things?’ asked Cowlick.
    â€˜Part of the new scheme was that the mail should be timed at each stage,’ said Mr Stephenson. ‘That meant the mail coaches didn’t delay, or if they did they had to make it up before the next stage.’ He was staring straight ahead now as if he was seeing it all in his mind’s eye. ‘Somehow I’d say there was great competition between them and the stagecoaches. You can just imagine them racing each other … maybe four or six horses to each coach, galloping madly as the drivers urged them on, people hanging on by their fingernails to the seats on the roofs of the swaying coaches. Aye, them were the days. The golden age of the stagecoach.’
    Somehow Rachel couldn’t help thinking that travelling by coach must have been a very uncomfortable experience, even if they did arrive at their destination on time. ‘But what about the Londonderry Mail ?’ she asked him. ‘Can you tell us more about it?’
    Mr Stephenson eased his large frame down onto an aluminium beer barrel, and looking at his own coach, continued, ‘At first the mail coaches only operated between Dublin and Cork and Dublin and Belfast, but gradually they spread out. By 1805 they were going down to Waterford, over to Sligo and up as far as Derry. It wasn’t long before they were operating out of Belfast to Antrim, Ballymena, Ballymoney and Coleraine, then on to Derry that way. That was the route of the Londonderry Mail .’
    â€˜How many horses would it have had?’ asked Tapser, who was trying to imagine it going up the Old Coach Road near his home at Ballymena.
    â€˜Probably four. From the information I’ve been able to dig up, it was expected to travel between five and six miles an hour. The average fare was three old pence per mile if you were sitting on top; five old pence if you were inside. The journey to Derry took seventeen hours in 1811, and the timetable was arranged so that the local merchants had seven hours in which to reply to incoming mail before the coach returned to Belfast.’
    â€˜And what about highwaymen?’ asked Tapser. ‘Mr Stockman says there were a lot of them.’
    â€˜Indeed there were,’ agreed Mr Stephenson. ‘That’s why the coaches had to have armed guards.’
    â€˜What sort of guns did they use?’ asked Cowlick.
    â€˜Oh, they’d have pistols and a brass blunderbuss.’
    â€˜Mr Stockman told me the highwaymen sometimes used a blunderbuss too,’ said Tapser. ‘He said it was a big gun with a wide end on it like a trumpet.’
    Mr Stephenson nodded. ‘So they did, and sometimes armed dragoons – that’s soldiers on horseback – had to escort the coaches through mountainous or remote areas where highwaymen were likely to strike.’
    Anxious to turn the conversation around to Hugh Rua, Tapser asked him if he knew anything about actual robberies.
    â€˜Well, I know they weren’t always carried out