The Temple's magnificent estate needed good road connections. Visiting nobility and royalty would approach on perfectly straight roads lined with trees. As they rode closer to the estate, grand vistas would open revealing the glory of Stowe, the splendour of its temples and the opulence of the main house.

The approach from Buckingham was known as the Grand Avenue. It leads from the town centre via Chackmore to the Corinthian Arch. Once through the arch, visitors were treated to a panoramic view of the south front of the house.

From the southwest and Oxford, the approach was along The Course, the tree lined avenue from the Lodge on Brackley Road to the current entrance to Stowe. Thereafter, the Oxford Avenue continues over Oxford Water to the magnificent north front of the house.

The plan was to extend this approach to the turnpike road at Finmere. Local landowners and gentry built the first turnpike roads at the end of the seventeenth century. They were managed by local trusts and the costs of construction were recouped by tolls collected by pikemen. The Temples had helped finance the turnpike that passed Finmere. It ran from Bedford via Stony Stratford, Buckingham, Tingewick, Aynho and Banbury to Warmington in Warwickshire. The section that bypassed Finmere (the old B4031) was the first to be built in 1744.

A map in the Huntington Library (ST Map 142) shows that the Temple family planned to link the Turnpike to the Oxford Avenue. The map below shows the proposed line of the road. The Huntington map in undated but is likely to date from the early nineteenth century. The road was probably not built because of the increasingly disastrous state of the family's finances as they strove to fight off bankruptcy.