The A303

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by Tom Fort


  These days Deadman’s Plack has a neglected air about it. The monument is crowded by saplings and branches, and the inscription on the plinth is hardly decipherable. But it remains as lovely and lonely a spot as it was in Victorian times, when the great nature writer W. H. Hudson leaned his back against it to smoke a pipe and listen for the grasshoppers – although not quite as peaceful, with the A303 growling invisibly from a couple of hundred yards away.3

  One minor mystery occurred to me as I stood before the cross. There is a secondary inscription recording that it was placed there by Colonel William Iremonger in 1825. But why? What was it about this ancient tale that inspired the local squire, as he was, to go to this trouble and expense? The Iremongers lived at Wherwell Priory, built in the eighteenth century where Elfrida’s abbey had stood. The Colonel inherited the estate in 1806, two years before he took part in the Peninsular War as commander of the 2nd Regiment of Foot (subsequently the Queen’s Royal Regiment). He left the army in 1811 to retire to Wherwell where – apart from Deadman’s Plack – he seems to have made little mark.

  I picture him as a whiskered veteran, living the quiet life of an English country squire, his mind stirred by memories of musket and cannon under the burning Spanish sun and the dreadful retreat to Corunna, and by the tale of Edgar and his friend and the irresistible Elfrida that had reached its murderous climax almost on his doorstep. All supposition of course, but the impression made by the Harewood Forest murder was certainly deep. Apart from the monument, Iremonger named one of his sons Aethelwold and one of his daughters Elfrida.

  A monument of a different kind has arisen on the other side of the A303, where it bypasses Weyhill on the west side of Andover. It is a rectangular grey building with an undulating pale green roof, and – unlike Deadman’s Plack – you cannot possibly miss it. It stands out bold and brutal on what was once Andover Airfield, which was used by the RAF until deemed surplus to the nation’s defensive needs in 1977. The size is the thing.

  It is colossal, covering ten acres of ground, the equivalent of a dozen football pitches. It is a shed, a Great Shed. Its greatness is only the greatness of scale. It does not commemorate anything noble or splendid in the human spirit, merely our appetite for consumables.

  It is a distribution centre for the Co-op, and it’s an interesting thought, as you stand across from it trying to comprehend its scale, that it should have been very much bigger. The original plan, submitted on behalf of Tesco, was for a shed almost twice as large, to be accompanied in time by a hotel and conference centre, office blocks, a rash of smaller warehouses, and a lorry park capable of handling 1500 trucks a day. Subsequent events followed a path familiar to students of Tesco’s imperial ambitions. Andover rebelled, and a ‘Stop The Megashed’ campaign rolled. Tesco offered blandishments: two thousand jobs, acoustic screening to keep the noise down, a new £5 million roundabout, a £200,000 ‘contribution to public art’. At first the members of Test Valley Borough Council resisted, then they gave in. Planning permission was granted in August 2009.

  Great Shed

  But there was an unusual twist. Tesco had second thoughts, and – for reasons never fully explained – pulled out. Into the breach stepped the Co-op. But the Co-op did not require such a monstrously Great Shed as Tesco, so a more modest project has been realised.

  They are mysterious places, these distribution centres. Their blank walls are inscrutable. They reveal nothing of what goes on inside. Goods arrive from somewhere, goods depart for somewhere. Vegetables come from the fields of Lincolnshire, are sorted and dispatched – some of them back to Lincolnshire. According to the cultural analyst Joe Moran, ‘big sheds encapsulate the strange ethereality of the modern economy, the way it controls our lives while we have only the dimmest understanding of its workings.’ As he points out, an essential element of the Great Shed is its impermanence. Implicit in the amazing speed with which it has risen from its concrete base is the assumption that it will not be there for long. It looks as if one good kick from a celestial colossus dispatched to earth to ask awkward questions about our habits would bring the Andover Great Shed crashing down. It is a temporary temple to our religion of shopping. But it will do nothing to help the archaeologists of two thousand years hence work out the kind of people we were, because it will leave no trace.

  * * *

  The road to Monxton leaves the new Great Shed roundabout on the A303 and cuts through what is now the Headquarters of the British Army’s Land Forces (known rather confusingly as Marlborough Lines, in tribute to the first Duke of Marlborough’s great victories over the French at Blenheim and Ramillies). Monxton is one of a string of villages that lie along a little stream that used to be called the Ann (hence the Vale of Anna) but was long ago renamed the Pilhill Brook. Despite their proximity to ever-swelling Andover, these villages – East Cholderton, Amport, Monxton, Abbotts Ann and Little Ann – have managed to cling on to their rural character, significantly but not ruinously diluted by rashes of modern bungalows and ‘executive-style’ houses.

  Monxton has a pleasant green shaded by a big, spreading ash, which slopes down to the glass-clear Pilhill Brook. Next to the green is the pub, which stands in a row of pretty old cottages and houses, some red-brick, some flint, some with thatched roofs and cob walls. A turn down the lane to Amport leads over the brook to the church, a small flint and tiled affair with a sharp little steeple which was built in 1854 on the site of a much earlier and even more modest place of worship. Looking across at the church from the other side of the lane is the old rectory, a lovely, big, warm, eighteenth-century red-brick house surrounded by spacious gardens –just the kind of rectory, one feels, to suit one of Trollope’s hunting parsons or one of Jane Austen’s clubbable clerics.

  Monxton Church

  The parish records of the early eighteenth century contain some curious snippets of news about Monxton’s distant past. Henry Skeat, we learn, ‘was not sick but thinking himself too full of blood was let blood and in four or five minutes after he was bled ten ounces expired, aged 25.’ In 1730 there arrived a ‘parsel of slaves from Turkey’, and a shilling was offered from parish funds to help them. The following year another slave from Turkey – ‘who had his tung cut out’ – received a shilling.

  In 1723 Thomas Rothwell, a choice specimen of English eccentricity, became Rector of Monxton. After his death twenty-five years later, another clergyman, a well-known antiquary and collector of historical scraps, William Cole, had occasion to visit Monxton, because his brother-in-law, Dr Apthorpe, was being invested as Rothwell’s successor. Cole was not impressed by the place – ‘the church, like most in this county, is very small and is a mean building’ – nor by what he was told about the previous rector’s way of life:

  By the account even of his own children and neighbours he was a most whimsical and singular man. He sat all day long in a parlour by himself where he would dine and sup without any of his family, who were not suffered even to enter the room for fear of putting him out in his calculations. And there he used to amuse himself with figures and algebra to which study he was so devoted that for many of the last years of his life he stirred not out of his house, not even to the Church, but had a constant curate even though the Church is not a stone’s throw from the rectory; and gave himself not to be shaved but let his beard grow till he was a spectacle . . . He brought himself into an ill habit of which he died, from which however he might have recovered even at the last, as his physician told him, if he would have taken moderate exercise, which he had taken into his head would kill him.

  Regrettably William Cole failed to inquire closely into the nature of the Reverend Rothwell’s algebraic calculations. The great challenge of the time – which foxed even Isaac Newton – was to ascertain a rule for working out the number of imaginary roots of an equation involving a negative (x squared minus 1 in its simplest form). The answer (which is not accessible to my understanding) was not provided until 1864, when the English mathematician James Joseph Sylvester publ
ished his cat-chily titled Algebraical Researches Containing a Disquisition on Newton’s Rule for the Discovery of Imaginary Roots and an Allied Rule Applicable to a Particular Class of Equations together with a Complete Invariative Determination of the Character of the Roots of the General Equation of the 5th Degree etc. I particularly like the ‘etc’.

  But is it not possible that Rothwell got there first? That one day, in the parlour of Monxton Rectory, amid his accumulated mountains of calculations, he was transfixed by a shaft of the light of understanding? That he solved the conundrum that baffled Newton, Leibniz and Euler among others? And that his solution was lost, swept away when his family and servants came to clear up the mess he had left behind? It’s possible; though more likely, on balance, that he went off his head in the attempt.

  The next rector after William Cole’s brother-in-law also made himself the object of unwelcome attention. George Bally had inclinations towards poetry and stronger ones towards drink. There were complaints about his behaviour at the communion table, and uproar when he publicly accused a local woman of being ‘the whore of the parish’ after she was found in a ditch with a young man who should have been helping with the hay harvest. Mr Bally composed his own eloquent epitaph:

  If just or virtuous to this tomb draw near,

  If knave or hypocrite shrink back in fear,

  He was a man when living did detest

  Alike the rogue conceal’d, the rogue confess’d,

  If he knew such should here presume to tread,

  This stone would be much heavier on his head.

  5

  BEASTS, BODY PARTS AND HORNS

  The verge of the A303 is hostile terrain for humans. Walking along it is no fun at all. The ground is rough and uneven, and the incessant noise and blasts of displaced air from the traffic make it an uncomfortable place to be. Sometimes the ground is gouged by tyre tracks, serving as a reminder that passing vehicles do not always stay where they should and that being pulverised by one of them would be a bad way to go. But you do notice things.

  The drivers, of course, notice nothing. They inhabit what the French philosopher Marc Augé defined, in a celebrated phrase, as a ‘non-place’, an environment where there is no sense of belonging. Other non-places include airports, shopping centres and motorway service areas. The car is a bubble, divorced from its surroundings. Its occupants can have no meaningful relationship with the landscape around or anyone in it. To drive a road such as the A303 is to enter what the sociologist John Urry calls ‘a world of anonymised machines’. The machine moves too fast for the driver’s eye to linger on anything or make contact with anyone. Most of the familiar components of everyday life – lights, sounds, smells, even temperatures – are missing. The experience of driving is reduced to the views through the windscreen, the rear window, and the wing-mirrors.

  Having no need to take account of or even notice what is beside the road, the driver is able to adapt the vehicle into a movable extension of the home. The company of music, the radio, the audio-book helps reassure him that he hasn’t really left his own territory at all. Increasingly, mobile phone, text and email facilities give him constant access to the communication stream. The rapid advance of so-called ‘smart car technology’ means that the machine itself requires less and less attention from its pilot to the business of driving, creating more opportunity for absorption in the world within the bubble.

  Occasionally the motorist puts a foot on the brake and interrupts the hurtling progress along the highway to divert into the non-place that is the service area. The reason may be to obtain more fuel in order to resume progress as quickly as possible, to ease cramped muscles or to have a snooze, or to use the lavatory. Any one or all of these may be combined with entering a Little Chef which is the same in its essentials as all the other Little Chefs. Inside he or she picks up a generic menu and orders a generic plate of food (sorry, Heston). None of these activities makes a social or observational demand of any kind. There is no need to engage with anyone beyond the formalities of the commercial exchange. There is no need to know where you are.

  The break in the driving routine is heavily ritualised, but remains voluntary. There is another situation, all too familiar, in which the driver is deprived of choice altogether. It occurs when too many others are trying to do what he is trying to do for the road to be able to cope. It is called congestion, and in theory it should offer an opportunity for the driver to connect with his or her surroundings. In practice, though, this rarely happens. Instead, the consciousness is flooded by the familiar feelings of frustration and weariness that are integral to the experience of being in a jam. These feelings are not conducive to appreciating the charms of the countryside. Even the marvellous view of Stonehenge that the A303 reveals as it rises then declines over the ridge west of Amesbury does little to comfort the westward-migrating horde of would-be holidaymakers crawling in an unbroken line of sealed social capsules towards campsites or rented cottages that seem almost unattainably distant.

  I wouldn’t say that those for whom the verges of the A303 are no more than a passing blur are missing too much in the way of beauty and interest. There is a passage in Joe Moran’s On Roads which sets out considerable claims on the part of the neglected and overlooked margins of motorways to be regarded as the wildlife reserves of the high-speed age: havens for voles, moles, field mice, snakes, lizards, orchids, ferns, fungi, linnets, kestrels, hooded crows and a host of other flora and fauna. It may be so. Although motorways were necessarily built in sections they were planned as entities and great attention was paid to their setting. In the 1950s a distinguished committee of high-minded landscape architects, horticulturists and conservationists was formed to advise the government and its contractors on such matters as alignment, curvature, the avoidance of parallelism and ugly angularity, the interplay of light and shadow, and appropriate planting.

  Bridges, the committee declared, should be designed to be as light and elegant as the use of pre-stressed concrete permitted, with slender supporting pillars and railings rather than parapets. The road should ‘flow’ through the landscape in long and harmonious arcs. The margins should be pleasingly embanked and planted with native species of tree like beech, oak and ash, and not with striking exotics, which would be too distracting. The arbiters of taste were particularly hostile to the idea of prettifying the verges and central reservations with flowering shrubs such as forsythia and pyracantha, on the grounds that they were much too fussy, ornamental, colourful and generally suburban.

  Unlike the purpose-built motorways with their landscaped margins, trunk roads like the A303 tended to be stitched together episodically and haphazardly, using stretches of existing roads wherever possible. The detailed construction plans for the upgrading of the Hampshire section are on a scale of 1:2500, large enough for individual trees to be marked, and they reveal how the surveyors went about their laborious task. In between the major new sections, such as the Andover bypass and the Bullington Cross interchange, were the remnants of the old road that had to be incorporated and adapted into the whole. Sometimes it was just a matter of adding a carriageway to the existing road and tidying up the junctions. Sometimes long-standing awkward angles – a diversion that took the original turnpike around the local bigwig’s estate or a dog-leg railway bridge – had to be smoothed away. These meant compulsory purchases – which could be of several hundred acres of farmland, or a row of cottages that needed to be demolished, or simply the corner of someone’s garden. In some cases the deviation from the old A303 was limited to a hundred yards or so. In others – for instance between Thruxton and Cholderton – the old road was entirely superseded for several miles and relegated to the status of a country lane.

  Key Plan, Andover bypass

  Micheldever and other improvements

  The result is that the A303 has an orphaned look. No one ever sat down – as the Advisory Committee on the Landscape Treatment of Trunk Roads did with the first motorways – and considered how to
make it look good. The surveyors plotted the route, the engineers attended to the road, the designers doubtless did their best to make the bridges as inoffensive as possible. But no one addressed the holistic dimension, and it shows.

  The A303’s central reservation is a study in contempt for notions of pleasantness. Along most of it, grey safety barriers run in monotonous lines above concrete tufted with scalded weeds and rank grass. The one plant that seems to find a congenial roothold is ragwort. Numerous slender but flourishing colonies have established themselves between Basingstoke and Amesbury, producing startlingly bright splashes of pale yellow during the April flowering season which darken over the summer to a shade somewhere between farmhouse butter and apricot.

  Modern road – old hedge

  Further east, near Micheldever, there is an extended length of unkempt, valiant hawthorn hedge along the reservation. When I first walked that way, I wondered briefly if it might represent an act of independence by some iconoclastic hedge enthusiast within the county surveyor’s department. Then I realised that the trunks were thick and gnarled, and that it must have been planted long ago to stand beside the road in its single carriageway incarnation.

  There are places where the A303 runs for a while beside or through handsome mature woodland – at Harewood Forest, for instance, or along the southern fringe of Stockton Wood, near Fonthill. There is also evidence of occasional efforts at tree-planting in the form of a cluster of green plastic tubes with spindly beech saplings within. But in general the provision of tree cover has been left to nature, and nature has responded with a thick, low scrub – chiefly hawthorn and the gleefully opportunist elder, with beeches, yews, apples and others appearing quite randomly.

 

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