by Tom Fort
I lack not fame . . .
Deep in my heart I hold romantic story
Age-old my tales of armour and the men,
Illustrious knights who honour England’s glory
Frequent my downs that come within my ken
And Amesbury is my name.
They don’t make poetry like that any more. (‘Straeds’, by the way, is Old English for ‘streets’, which doesn’t rhyme with ‘glades’.)
Amesbury’s history is immensely ancient. It leads back to the bluestones of Stonehenge, shipped from Wales and unloaded in the crook of the river’s elbow. It holds the legend of Guinevere’s end and Launcelot’s final act of devotion. Vespasian himself may or may not have come by, but the Roman legions certainly did so. Amesbury Abbey was a renowned religious house until Thomas Cromwell had it despoiled. To Edward Hutton, writing at the time of the 1914–18 war, it was ‘not only the chief but the oldest place in the upper valley of the Avon . . . nor is there any town or village in Wiltshire more to be loved . . . it is delicious, deeply embosomed in woods in all the loveliness of that fair vale.’
I fear that Hutton would howl if he could see it now. Most of the loveliness has been erased in the course of contemporary Amesbury’s search to establish a new identity and function for itself. Its rebranding is summed up by a 160-acre gash in the chalk on its eastern fringe, predictably named Solstice Park. The way in from the A303 passes the main southern distribution centre for Robert Wiseman Dairies, a group of grey steel hangars guarded by rows of milk lorries in black-and-white livery. Across Equinox Drive from Robert Wiseman stretches a bleached wasteland of weeds and chalk and heaps of shattered tarmac, still empty several years after clearing. The far boundary is Sunrise Way, on the other side of which stands a trio of office blocks in smoky glass and tubular steel called The Crescent. You may agree with its developer that it is spectacular, inspirational, innovative and high-profile; certainly it looks rather lonely perched on the edge of a white, thistly emptiness.
The Ordnance Survey map reveals a rich abundance of ancient sites either side of the A303 as it heads west past Amesbury. The land is littered with long barrows, round barrows, disc barrows, burial grounds of every kind. Many have been flattened by ploughing or have disappeared under buildings. But many survive, a visible graveyard left by our invisible forbears, the Neolithic people and the Bronze Age people after them.
You can meet one of them, in a manner of speaking, as you turn into Solstice Park from the A303. In fact you can hardly miss him. Even though he is kneeling, The Ancestor – as he is known – is more than twenty feet high. Welded from bits of dark steel that glitter like newly cut coal, he faces east from a patch of land in front of the Holiday Inn, arms outstretched, gazing skywards. His brow protrudes, his eyes are sunken, his nose is wide and flat. In spring and summer he wears a spiky copper-coloured head-dress of leaves and corn stalks and balls of wire. His sculptors have supplied a text to explain what he represents: ‘Ancient man on his knees, head thrown back, arms open wide. Reaching up to the sky, spreading out like a mighty oak, straining towards the sun on the longest day, rooted into the moon, protected by three magical hares. The sun and the moon with life in between. THE CIRCLE OF LIFE.’
The Ancestor
There is a message, too: ‘The Ancestor means many things to many different people. This is what he means to us. WE HAVE FORGOTTEN TO BE GRATEFUL.’
It’s lucky for him that he looks east towards Beacon Hill. If he faced west instead, the first thing he would see (be grateful for?) would be the Holiday Inn, an example – according to its designers – of ‘Neolithic chic . . . very boutiquey, very contemporary and modern, appealing to the techno-savvy.’ If he rose from his knees and walked past the Neolithic chic and Somerfield petrol station, he would come to the Harvester Inn, built in no discernible style at all, where he could grab an Earlybird breakfast or a combo meal-deal. Beyond are Pizza Hut and KFC, with drifts of discarded packaging in front and another tract of weed-infested waste ground behind.
If The Ancestor lumbered on towards town along what used to be the A303 until the bypass came, he would find Lidl on the left, followed by a spanking-new Tesco with angled blue-and-white funnels on its flat roof. Should he be grateful for Lidl and Tesco? If, instead of taking the road into town, he turned left and went past the innovative, inspirational and high-profile Crescent and the entrance to Boscombe Airfield, he would come to the great swathe of new houses that now covers the high, sloping ground on Amesbury’s southern flank. The development is called Archer’s Gate, in honour of a real-life ancestor, whose skeleton was uncovered when they were clearing the area for the builders to move in. Buried there about 2300 BC, he was immediately dubbed The Amesbury Archer because of the arrowheads and bowman’s wristguard found with him. His mortal remains and possessions – including minute gold hair ornaments, the oldest gold objects ever found in this country – are now in Salisbury Museum, which would be a bit of a hike for The Ancestor. But if the two of them – Archer and Ancestor – could talk, what a tale they might tell!
Somewhere on his tour, The Ancestor might well be invited to pick up a leaflet from the tourist board which makes the bold claim that Amesbury’s ten-fold growth into a town of 30,000 people has not lessened its charm. He might scratch his head-dress at that; might even forget to be grateful.
The charm that survives, such as it is, is to be found by the river. After coming under the bypass, the Avon executes two big meanders, an extravagant ‘S’. With protective high ground to the south and west, it made for an ideal place to set up home. It was evidently a place of some importance at the time of the Archer, who came there all the way from the Alps with his bow and arrows and tools. More than a thousand years later an Iron Age hillfort looked down on the river, later still incorporated into a Roman military base.
The charm of Amesbury
It was to Amesbury that Guinevere stole away after the death of Arthur and the knights. In Malory’s version, ‘there she let make herself a nun and wore white clothes and black, and great penance she took, as ever did sinful lady in this land, and never creature could make her merry.’ Launcelot came after her, and she commanded that ‘thou never see me more in this visage’. And he, honourable knight that he was, went away to Glastonbury where he did his own penance, until he learned in a vision that she was dead. Then he marched with eight of his fellows to Amesbury, to be told that the Queen had died half-an-hour before. And there was ordained a horse bier, and so with a hundred torches ever burning about the corpse of the Queen and ever Sir Launcelot with his eight fellows went about the horse bier singing and reading many a holy orison . . . Thus Sir Launcelot and his eight fellows went on foot from Amesbury to Glastonbury . . . and after she was put in a web of lead and then in a coffin of marble, and when she was put in the earth he swooned.’
Maybe there never was a Guinevere nor a love-lorn Launcelot nor a sword in the stone. But the historians believe there may well have been a religious house of some kind in Amesbury in the murky period before the Saxon invasion of Salisbury Plain in the mid-sixth century AD. And it is certain that in 979 or thereabouts Elfrida – the cause of all the trouble in Harewood Forest – founded a convent there. That unreliable chronicler William of Malmesbury says she did so from remorse over her part in the murder of the stepson Edward, but it’s just as likely that it was no more than a conventional act of piety. In time, Elfrida drowned in the Test, her son Ethelred made a hash of things, the Danes came and went, the Normans came and didn’t go. Under Henry II a whiff of scandal emanating from Amesbury became strong enough to reach the nostrils of first the King, and then the Pope, Alexander III. There were rumours of riotous living and lax morals; the abbess herself was said to have given birth to three children. The Pope sent two worthy bishops to investigate. They deposed the abbess, expelled the bad nuns, and dispersed the rest to other convents. Henry II himself – in acute need of restoring some credit on earth and in heaven following the infamous mu
rder of Becket in Canterbury Cathedral – refounded the convent by importing two dozen presumably extremely chaste and pious nuns from Fontevrault, in his French dominion of Anjou.
A fine new abbey rose a little distance from the three or four streets of medieval Amesbury. After a while some monks came too, with a prior, but the prioress had ascendancy over the prior and the nuns over the monks – in accordance with Henry II’s command that ‘the authority which Christ gave to Mary on the Cross should be the model of the relation between the women and men of his congregation.’
Over the succeeding centuries Amesbury Abbey’s importance and usefulness were never seriously challenged, until the arrival in 1539 of Thomas Cromwell’s visitors signalled the end. The nuns and monks were sent packing, and the monastery with its twelve acres of gardens, orchards and fishponds was snapped up by the lordly and rapacious Edward Seymour, then Earl of Hertford, subsequently Duke of Somerset and for a time Lord Protector of England. By Somerset’s order the lead was stripped from the church, the chapel, the cloister, the dormitories, the chapter-house, the kitchens, the prioress’s lodging, the buttery and the infirmary. Everything that could not be recycled for use in his various mansions or sold was left to decay. Edward Hutton damned Somerset as ‘this great rogue’ and gloated that he eventually ‘met the end he so richly deserved on Tower Hill’.
Every vestige of the Abbey has long since vanished. Since the 1840s the site has been occupied by an imposing porticoed stone mansion which is now a nursing home. It is surrounded by spacious parkland, with the willow-shaded Avon curling around its edge. There is a private – but not too private – road that leads from the parish church through lawns and past stately oaks to the front of the house, then bends away to rejoin the official road beside a bridge with a dark pool beneath. I cycled absent-mindedly through, reflecting on Guinevere and Elfrida and lustful nuns and tyrannical lead-stripping earls, until I came out by the gatehouse. Traffic noise filled the air, banishing the past.
8
OLD STONES, BIG BIRDS
Maybe it’s fanciful to suggest that the great sweep of land that reveals itself west of Beacon Hill could somehow ‘feel’ ancient, could in some subliminal way transmit a sense of belonging to the deep past. At the same time, however, even the most severe rationalist would have to accept that a great weight and depth of old history is spread across it. In addition to the prehistoric burial sites, there are earthworks, ditches, fortifications, lynchets, Celtic field systems, Romano-British villages, Roman roads, medieval droving paths – a wealth of footprints from the past still visible along the ridges, over the downs, in the valleys.
The archaeologists tell us that six-and-a-half thousand years ago Salisbury Plain was mostly covered by forests of ash, elm, lime, hazel and alder, which were hunted by isolated bands of men with bone axes and tools fashioned from antler. Fifteen hundred years later, extensive areas had been cleared for crops and grazing, and communities were sufficiently settled for them to consign their important people to burial chambers. By the second millennium BC society was organised into extended family units mostly gathered into hilltop enclosures defended by ditches and ramparts, with grazing and arable land close by. By 100 BC permanent settlements of considerable size had been long established, still concentrated on hillforts, with land boundaries defined and marked, if not always respected.
Then the Romans came with their roads and towns, and history proper began.
At the heart of this old, old world, on a rise of ground a little way to the west of the crook in Avon’s elbow, is a circle of upright stones that look as if they might have been left behind from some celestial building game.
But first you have to get there.
On a quiet traffic day the cars and lorries skim along easily enough from the beginning of the A303 almost to Amesbury. The first intimation of the impediments and irritations that lie ahead is a ‘Queues Likely’ sign near the turn-off to Solstice Park. At unquiet times the driver will not need to be told about the likelihood of queues as he or she will already be in one. At peak times the sign assumes the function of a satirical comment for the solid line of traffic extending back to Beacon Hill and beyond.
It should not have been like this.
Although the A303 was labelled the London–Penzance Trunk Road, there was never a systematic plan to make it so. In fits and starts the road got bigger and faster. But two ugly and intractable complications hovered on the horizon. The lesser was how to extend it from its existing end, short of Honiton, to Exeter, which had to happen if the vision of a through-route to Cornwall was to be realised. The other was what to do about Stonehenge.
As the upgrades proceeded, so the traffic anxious to take advantage of them multiplied. Like so many of our roads, the A303 became a victim of its own expansion far more swiftly than the gloomiest forecaster could have predicted. There was never time when motorists were grateful to their leaders for the far-sighted investment in it. Instead it became a byword for jams. The assumption among road builders and surveyors was that the pressure from hauliers, motoring organisations, lobbying groups and the increasing (and increasingly irate) army of A303 users would eventually compel central government to summon the resolve and the cash to deal with the intractable complications.
The first big obstacle to the A303’s progress west was the Countess roundabout just north of Amesbury. The great scheme for the London–Penzance Trunk Road envisaged this being effortlessly surmounted by a flyover on which the road would soar over the roundabout on stilts of concrete and sweep gloriously forward along whichever route had finally been agreed on to take it away from Stonehenge. But the flyover never happened. The glorious new route away from Stonehenge never happened. The joining up of all the pieces never happened. The dream remained just that.
A few hundred yards beyond the Countess roundabout is another visual warning of bad things to come: a two-pronged upside-down fork, meaning that two lanes are about to become one. It is this fatal constriction that is responsible for the queue, rather than the roundabout itself, where traffic signals have now been installed to try to control the flow more equitably. But what do the queuers care for the finer points of traffic dynamics? All that matters to them is that they are stuck in it, imprisoned, enslaved. Theirs are the faces of queues everywhere: patient, resigned, weary. Their expressions acknowledge the reality – this is the way it is, lump it and don’t bleat. If you ever believed them when they told you they would make it better, more fool you. Now you know otherwise.
Somewhere along the road the ideal of automotive freedom died. Sitting in the queue waiting to get onto the roundabout is as good a place and time as any to reflect on how this happened.
It was rooted in the notion of the ‘open road’, of cars as liberators of the spirit. To have one was to possess the key to new worlds and experiences. Public transport looked pitiful beside the motor car; waiting for the bus was for losers. With the car you could go where you wanted when you wanted, taking with you whatever you needed. Cars were affordable, democratic, individual. They were at the same time conveniences, and symbols of status and aspiration.
But the ideal was intrinsically and fatally flawed by its interior contradictions, or ‘antagonisms’, as the sociologists call them. The first was that for the freedom to exist at all, it must be limited. To avoid chaos and anarchy there must be rules governing basics like which side of the road to drive on, how to behave at junctions, speed and so on, and there must be sanctions for those who infringe the rules. As car ownership increased, further antagonisms revealed themselves. Too much mobility resulted in general immobility, otherwise known as congestion. Cars despoiled the environment and polluted the air. They killed and maimed, bringing misery to the families and friends of victims.
In the end the alliance of liberty and mobility – call it automobility – collapsed inwards on itself, undone by its fundamental conceptual disharmony. But it took time for this failure to sink in. The car meets too many needs and fulfi
ls too many desires for us to forsake it lightly. It remains an article of faith for the car industry, the haulage industry, the motoring organisations, the road builders and for many drivers that the concept of automobility is strong and good. To make it work, all that is required is access to unlimited fuel (to be guaranteed by military action if need be), for society to accept that a certain level of road deaths and injuries is a price worth paying, and for governments to find the funds to build the necessary roads and the will to stand up to the eco-bleaters.
A few years ago, before he became Mayor of London, the effervescent, straw-thatched Boris Johnson produced a book called Life in the Fast Lane which set forth the fruits of his deep thinking on this subject. It comprised columns he had written earlier for the Daily Telegraph in the persona of a Woosterish throwback to the glory days of the open road, all goggles-and-capes and jolly japes and thumbing a nose at the traffic bobbies with their beastly speed cameras. ‘It has always seemed obvious to me,’ boomed Johnson, ‘that the car has not only made our modern landscape, it has been the biggest revolution since print, and the spread of the car, like the spread of literacy, has been a fantastic and unstoppable force for liberty and democracy. It has done more for human freedom than the aeroplane, penicillin, the telephone and the contraceptive pill put together.’
The great bugbear for Johnson and other four-wheeled libertarian crusaders was not congestion or pollution. It was the interference of the state, as represented by the seat-belt law, the drink-drive law, speed bumps, ‘calming schemes’, and above all by the loathed remote speed cameras. ‘The more widespread a liberty becomes,’ Johnson lamented, ‘the more necessary it seems for governments to regulate, trammel and constrain it.’ He wondered if the state would finally annihilate ‘the joy of the car’ – ‘or will science come to the aid of freedom, as she has so often in the past?’