On 1 March 1820, William Cobbett drove up the Coventry to Hinckley turnpike road in a hired post-chaise, past Griff House and then on through the village of Chilvers Coton (where he must have stopped to pay a toll) into Nuneaton.In these same weeks of March 1820, the surveyor and land agent Robert Evans moved his family—complete with his four-month-old daughter Mary Ann (known later as novelist George Eliot)—into Griff House, which overlooks the same turnpike road, travelled several times a day by the long-distance stage and mail coaches from Birmingham and Warwick to Leicester and back. Here the Evans family would remain for the next twenty years.