The A5 between Nuneaton and Hinckley runs along the line of Watling Street, laid down by the Romans and used as a working road ever since, which means that whatever else it is, this stretch has carried traffic, and the opportunities that traffic creates, for the better part of two thousand years. Somewhere in that long history a phantom highwayman attached himself to the road, and one especially vivid local description has survived: a dark coat with sleeves of bright crimson, and a tricorn hat pulled low enough to throw his face into shadow, the very image of the eighteenth-century highway robber as popular memory has preserved him.
No specific hold-up, no named victim, and no individual robber's biography sits behind the figure; he is a type rather than a documented man, assembled from the costume and manner that everyone already associates with the golden age of English highway robbery. What lends the story more weight than most invented highwaymen is the road itself. An old coaching route linking two market towns, well used by travellers carrying money and goods between Nuneaton and Hinckley, is precisely the kind of ground on which real highwaymen worked throughout the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, so even without a name to attach to him, the crimson-sleeved figure fits naturally onto a stretch of road that would very plausibly have seen the real thing. He is recorded here as local tradition, a costume without a name, but one resting on genuinely appropriate historical ground.
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