Some time ago — and by “some time” I mean roughly a century and a half and more — if you were going to walk somewhere fairly distant you might say you were going to “ride shank’s mare” or “shank’s pony.” “Shank” means shin, and the expression came out of Scotland sometime in the 1700s. The the sarcastic phrase that basically meant “yeah, sure I’ve got a horse right here, mate, can’t you see it” evolved from the more straightforward “shank it,” which also meant to walk.
There’s another, much more obscure phrase for walking somewhere: “ride the Marylebone stage.” That meant the same thing, but its origins are more interesting. There are two theories about where it came from — “Marylebone” might be from “marrowbone”, which would be the same leg bone referred to in “shank.” The phrase “marrowbone stage” shows up occasionally, as early as the 1820s.
But there’s also an area of London called “Marylebone.” The name is a shortening of its original 14th-century name, St. Mary-by-the-Bourne, where “bourne” is the Tyburn river (which might be more accurately called simply a stream, at least given the view on Google Maps). The “Marylebone stage” appears in Charlotte’s Inheritance, a novel from 1868: “And if they do, there’s the Marylebone stage. I’m not afraid of a five-mile walk.”
As it happens, there really was a stagecoach that went from Marylebone to London. It was only a four-mile trip, but evidently it took up to three hours to arrive, so it was slower than walking. There’s some disagreement about whether the stagecoach took that long because the roads were so bad or because the trip included a long layover at a wayside inn — which perhaps served some particularly good ale.
“Marylebone stage” has pretty much disappeared, but if you listen to Tom Waits’ 1992 album Bone Machine, you’ll hear the song Whistle Down the Wind, which includes the lyric “So I will take the Marylebone coach / And whistle down the wind.” Not everybody appreciates Tom Waits…but then again, not everybody wants to ride shank’s mare everywhere either.
