From Burslem, the Mother Town of the Potteries, an important pack-horse road ran from the Market Square, as already mentioned, via Pack-Horse Lane, winding by St. Paul's Church, Dalehall, via Trubshaw Cross, fording the stream at Longbridge (Longport), by the present road past a group of houses called Longbridge Hayes. From thence it went round the Bradwell side of what is now Longport Station and up the hill, now traversed by the road (made about 1875) and so on to Wolstanton and Newcastle."

A Sociological History of Stoke-on-Trent, E J D Warrillow

'A bit of geography'

Nearly 2,000 years ago the Roman victors founded a camp near Mount Pleasant, in the present village of Chesterton, near Newcastle-under-Lyme, calling it Mediolanum.

If you were to make an immense cross from Chester to London, and from Cardiff to Manchester, the centre thereof would be not far off this village of Chesterton, and that cross would almost delineate the ancient Roman roads in the north-west of Britain.

Now let us turn our attention to a pair of compasses, the apex of which lay at Chesterton, and the legs stretching over Bradwell Wood, across the narrow valley of Ravensdale, one point to Longport and the other point to the last of the old posting inns—the Swan Inn, at Tunstall. This pair of compasses, with legs each two miles in length, would embrace the probable earliest location of pottery in Staffordshire, and also some remarkable developments in the art.

Beginning at Chesterton and its vicinity, where the Romans made pottery, and iron also, in all probability, for it is said by Miss Meteyard that Mr. Josiah Wedgwood found traces of a potworks here, and looking eastward, on the left leg of the compass, we should in one mile, as the bird flies, come to the locality where the Elers Bros, erected their works at Bradwell Farm, and, still in a direct line on the left leg of the compass, we should arrive in another straight mile, at the aforesaid Swan Inn, on the old road that runs from Newcastle through Tunstall, where it diverges to Lawton and Biddulph. At this terminal point almost are, firstly, the "Old Bank," and a few yards further we arrive at the manufactory where pottery was first fired (or baked) in biscuit and afterwards dipped in fluid glaze for the "glost" fire.
The latter works were, at the date of 1750, kept by Mr. Enoch Booth, who was said to be the first man in England to fire his ware twice. We have, then, in almost a straight line, within a distance of two miles, the foundations of Romano-British pottery—Elers' pottery, translucent pottery, and firing in duplicate, i.e., biscuit.