The A303

by Tom Fort

  Regrettably Johnson did not pursue the question of how science might solve a problem that to lesser minds might seem insoluble, namely how to coax a pint of liquid into a half-pint pot. These days Boris Johnson is more often to be seen on a bicycle rather than at the wheel of a Ferrari or a supercharged Merc. It is possibly significant that one of his first actions after becoming London Mayor was to endorse the principle of the congestion charges imposed by his predecessor to the accompaniment of bellows of protest from the motoring lobby. It may even be that Johnson found the realities that came with his new job more unyielding than he had suspected.

  The flame of automotive liberty has not, of course, been extinguished. There are plenty of websites maintained by dedicated (overwhelmingly male) enthusiasts and filled with correspondence about which stretch of which road can still offer the thrill of unimpeded high-speed passage. But these bands of brothers are like steam-train clubs, their passion fuelled by a nostalgia for a lost past. The freedom of the road is no longer a true freedom if you need specialised information and an appointed time to find it.

  Much easier, therefore, to experience it through TV – hence the phenomenal popularity of the BBC programme Top Gear, in which three overgrown schoolboys (no girls, please!) giggle and whoop their way through daredevil escapades and high-speed jinks inconceivable on our twenty-first-century road network. This is the automotive dream world, presided over by a tall man in tight jeans with curly hair and a loud upper-class voice. Jeremy Clarkson’s secret is to combine two irresistible types in one: the boy prankster raising two fingers to school rules, and a latterday Mondeo Man, bolshy, individualistic, single-minded in the pursuit of his pleasure, anti-socialist, anti-union, anti-state, anti-eco. Clarkson is loved not for his personality, but for his powers. He is a kind of god, endowed with magic or divine attributes that enable him to enjoy on a weekly basis experiences that to mere mortals remain unattainable fantasies.

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  Great bustard – larger than life

  I kept hoping to bump into the world’s heaviest flying bird, but I never did. It’s not so surprising, as there are fewer than twenty distributed across the 320 square miles of Salisbury Plain, and they are notoriously leery of human company. On the other hand, most of the reported sightings do come from motorists stuck on the A303. It’s possible I might have had better luck if I could have whistled to them in Russian, since their birthplace is the flatlands of Saratov Oblast, down by the Volga.

  ‘Once the pride of our Wiltshire downs,’ lamented the Reverend Alfred Smith in his definitive The Birds of Wiltshire, ‘. . . now alas! driven out from among us by the march of civilisation.’ Even in 1887, when Mr Smith’s book was first published, the great bustard was little more than a memory among a few old shepherds and once keen-eyed slaughterers of game. Until the middle of the eighteenth century it was reasonably abundant across the brecks of Norfolk and Suffolk as well as the rolling downs of Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire. Its decline was rapid – sufficiently so for Gilbert White of Selborne to think it worth recording in his diary in 1775 that he had heard a carter from Andover tell of seeing a flock of a dozen or so birds twelve years before.

  Many were shot and eaten, and the gathering pace of enclosure and the disturbance of the plough converting grazing land to arable hastened the bustard’s demise. By the turn of the nineteenth century it was scarce enough for an encounter with a single bird to be an incident worth reporting. In 1801 a man travelling on horseback to Tilshead, north of Amesbury, was attacked by one. He managed to capture it, and presented it to a Mr Bartley of Tilshead. He kept it as a pet for a while, feeding it a mixed diet of live mice and sparrows – which it swallowed whole – and clumps of charlock and rape, before selling it to Lord Temple for the princely sum of thirty guineas.

  Human interference and persecution were certainly major factors in the bustard’s destruction. But it might also be said that the bird’s physiology and habits made it an unlikely candidate for survival in a changing world. It is very big – the males are up to three-and-a-half feet tall and more than thirty pounds in weight – and very cumbersome. Its mating rituals are elaborate and impressive, but the consequence of them does the bustard few favours. It lays no more than three large eggs on the ground, which makes both the eggs and the mothers incubating them irresistibly vulnerable to predators, particularly foxes. The only circumstances in which the bustard can survive in the wild are where – as is the case beside the Volga and in isolated parts of Spain and Portugal – there is a resident population large enough to sustain an infant mortality rate of 80 per cent. The tipping point for such defenceless and unadaptable creatures is easily reached. In other words, our world is not for them.

  But that kind of callous Darwinism makes us uneasy. We suffer from an absurd guilt over the indifference shown by past generations of our species to other species. We are revolted by the Victorian enthusiasm for killing scarce creatures and displaying them in glass cases. We like to feel that we are enlightened enough to make redress for the crimes of our ancestors by tenderly bringing these lost treasures back into our lives, where we can at least watch them on television. It can work – there have been successful campaigns to re-introduce red kites and white-tailed sea eagles, and to build up numbers of golden eagles and ospreys. But tinkering with the natural balance – whether by accident or design – can have unforeseen consequences. American signal crayfish now swarm over the beds of most of our rivers, causing untold damage to native fauna. Muntjac deer nibble their way through the woodlands of southern England. The despised but highly successful grey squirrel scuttles and skips across gardens everywhere. At the same time there is a tendency – witness the recent reintroduction of beavers in the Scottish Highlands, and periodic calls for wolves and bears to be once more numbered among our wildlife – for quixotic nostalgia to obscure common sense.

  In 2003 the government’s Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs granted a ten-year licence to permit a band of volunteers called the Great Bustard Group to release birds obtained from Russia on one of the military training areas on Salisbury Plain. The group, established by an ex-policeman and his wife, subsequently secured a grant of £2.2 million from the EU to fund its project. It employs seven staff, who are backed by a team of twenty regular helpers. I am forbidden to disclose the exact location of their base, but it is located on the edge of an enormous area of unimproved chalk grassland which – apart from army exercises and some low-intensity livestock grazing – is left to its own devices.

  I visited it in September 2010. I was told that over the previous six years a total of 104 great bustards imported from Saratov Oblast had been released, of which it was estimated that fifteen to twenty were still alive. The remains of the majority of those that had not survived had been recovered. Almost all of them had been killed by foxes. There had been a number of instances of the birds mating successfully after release. None of the eggs had hatched. Almost all of them had also been eaten by foxes. Although foxes were periodically shot, the size of the Plain (as big as the Isle of Wight) and the nature of the terrain made it impossible to control their numbers. With a great deal of human support and money, the bustards were clinging on. The foxes, without any help, were doing very nicely.

  Everyone at the Great Bustard Group was very friendly to me. They brimmed with enthusiasm for the big, brown, ungainly, improbable birds and clearly believed they were engaged on conservation work of the utmost importance. The brochure they gave me described the project as ‘a flagship for conservation’ and asserted that ‘the foundation for a new British population has been laid’. I did not have the heart to say that it struck me as a pipe dream; nor that I thought the money and effort would be very much better deployed on something else.

  I smiled and nodded and took a last look at the pens where the bustards are kept in preparation for release. I watched them pecking away and looking nervy in these fortified fox-exclusion zones, and wondered how long they would last in th
e big, bad world outside.

  But at least the bustard crusaders have something to show for all their hard work. Pity those who tried to save poor Stonehenge!

  ‘The solitude of Stonehenge should be restored to ensure that posterity will see it against the sky in lonely majesty’ – Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister, 1928.

  ‘If there is one thing I am going to do as chairman it is to sort out Stonehenge’ – Sir Jocelyn Stevens, chairman of English Heritage, 1992.

  ‘The status quo is not an option . . . that is the circle we have to square’ – Chris Smith, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, 1997.

  ‘It is clear that the current situation is completely intolerable. Something needs to be done to ease the traffic burden . . . yet maintain Stonehenge’s presence as a national monument. I would like to state that sorting this problem out is very high on my list of priorities’ –Margaret Hodge, Minister for Culture and Tourism, 2007.

  The A303 rises gently and steadily from the Countess roundabout at Amesbury. In the soft-fruit season there is a booth in the lay-by where you can buy strawberries and cherries; the sign advertising its presence lingers on in the depths of winter, perhaps as a reminder that summer will come again one day. Past the lay-by the road becomes single carriageway and flattens over a ridge. Beyond, the country opens out: rolling downs to the south, Larkhill Camp and pale grasslands to the north. Below is the circle of stones. From that distance they always seem small, surprisingly so; and the space they occupy is modest. But because of the emptiness around they are unmissable.

  Stonehenge and the emptiness around

  This, in its essentials, is the view the Amesbury Archer and The Ancestor’s ancestors would have had. And at all but the quiet times, you are likely to have ample time to drink it in as you wait your turn to pass. The road descends to a junction just east of the monument. The right fork is the A344 to Shrewton and Devizes. The left is the A303, which proceeds west to its next obstacle, the roundabout junction with the A360 known as Longbarrow Crossroads.

  The essentials may be timeless but the detail is, of course, somewhat different. One of the details is that on an average day between 20,000 and 30,000 vehicles pass one way or the other. Stonehenge is caught between the prongs of the fork, as if in an insoluble dilemma.

  The Stonehenge road saga is a revealing commentary on the way we do things – or do not do them – in this country. It is difficult to imagine such a study in futility occurring in, say, France or Germany. Over a period of a little more than twenty years around £40 million of public money has been spent drawing up, proposing, publicising, discussing and dumping various schemes to protect the monument from the noise and disturbance caused by passing traffic. There was the northern route, which would have taken the A303 away from the Countess roundabout in a loop below Larkhill and Shrewton and north of Winterbourne Stoke to rejoin the existing path far to the west. There was the southern route across Normanton Down. There was the noble Parker Plan (named after a local military man, Colonel Graham Parker) to divert south from Beacon Hill in a majestic arc down to Old Sarum and up the Wylye Valley past Stapleford and Berwick St James.

  And then there was the answer that finally emerged as the least bad option from all the exhibitions and consultation exercises and interminable public inquiries: to send the A303 over the Countess roundabout, to widen it into dual carriageway, to bury it in a tunnel past Stonehenge, to send it north around Winterbourne Stoke, and to bring it back to its old route somewhere near Yarnbury Castle. The corollary was that the stretch of the A344 to the north of the monument would be erased from the map altogether.

  It was a fine scheme, a good scheme, with elements of grandeur to it. Its weak point was the tunnel. To build a wider, faster, busier, noisier A303 without the tunnel would be to defeat the purpose of the exercise. Everything swung on the tunnel. Its cost in 2002 was estimated at £180 million. Then the engineers looked again at the chalk they would have to dig through. It turned out to be ‘the wrong type’, and by 2005 the estimate had risen to £470 million. At this point the government did what governments always do when something is getting out of hand, and ordered a review. The then Transport Minister, Dr Stephen Ladyman, said he hoped it would enable him to decide on an ‘affordable, realistic and deliverable option’. The review put the likely cost at over £500 million, and in December 2007 another Transport Minister, Mr Tom Harris, announced that the affordable, realistic and deliverable option was to cancel the tunnel altogether.

  Since all other aspects of the scheme – the flyover, the dualling, the bypasses around the Longbarrow roundabout and the village of Winterbourne Stoke – were contingent on the tunnel, they all fell in a heap as well. The rumour that the money that would have been spent on the A303 was diverted to widening the M25 did nothing to console those who had invested so much time, effort and hope. The upshot is that, now as before, the motorist has plenty of opportunity between reaching the queue before Amesbury and accelerating along the next available stretch of dual carriageway well beyond Winterbourne Stoke, to contemplate the vagaries of our bureaucratic processes and – when the moment comes – to enjoy the sight of a 5000-year-old jumble of stone.

  The fate of the road has been mirrored in its futility by that of the notorious Stonehenge visitor facilities. These consist of a car and coach park; a collection of small green prefabs where you buy a ticket and can, if need be, get a cup of tea and a sandwich and go to the loo; and a pedestrian route under the A344 to the stones themselves. No one could pretend that the visitor centre is sumptuous or elegant. It is tatty and tacky. But it does have the great merit of being unobtrusive and convenient. It is also very modest, and one suspects that it is this modesty, above all, that sticks in the throat of English Heritage, the many-splendoured quango that has charge of Stonehenge.

  A million people a year come to look at Stonehenge, making it the second biggest visitor attraction in the country outside London. But the average length of stay is twenty minutes. You, in your ignorance, might think twenty minutes sufficient to view from several angles a number of rather similar blocks of stone without any pretence to being works of art. English Heritage knows better. Stonehenge is too important, too extraordinary, too damned old to be treated thus. Visitors need to be detained, for their own good. There must be exhibitions to explain context, a lecture hall to hear experts, a shop with Stonehenge chocolate and pencils and all the usual heritage stuff. There must be a café selling highly sustainable, organic locally sourced dishes.

  A million people a year come to see it

  Successive chairmen of English Heritage wrestled with the challenge of dignifying Stonehenge. Lord Montagu commissioned plans for a new visitor centre at Larkhill, and Salisbury District Council threw them out. Sir Jocelyn Stevens had a grander vision, for an £80 million complex complete with ‘virtual’ Stonehenge a mile and a half away from the monument to the north of the Countess roundabout. Under Sir Neil Cossons this metamorphosed into a £67.5 million centre with a train to the stones instead of Sir Jocelyn’s bus. Perversely, local opinion turned against the idea of carriages chugging across a World Heritage site; at any rate, the plan sank with the tunnel.

  Nothing daunted, English Heritage came back with a new plan and a new location. They proposed a pavilion with an undulating roof comprising a transparent pod containing the shop and café and a pod clad in local chestnut for exhibitions, to be sited at Airman’s Corner, a mile up the A344. Access would be by a ‘low-key transport system’, which turns out to be a bus that looks like a train. The A344, the horrible old visitor centre and the car parks would all be grassed over. Cost: a modest £27 million, with the government putting up a third. After the 2010 election the coalition promptly cancelled its contribution, whereupon the Heritage Lottery Fund stepped into the breach.

  The work on the new centre was due to start at roughly the same time as the publication of this book and is scheduled to be finished by the autumn of 2013. Thus the original hope that i
t would be ready in time for this summer’s Olympics remains unfulfilled – but then the same is true of most hopes connected with Stonehenge.

  9

  MEN IN WHITE ROBES

  The earliest resident Stonehenge guide was a local carpenter known as ‘Gaffer’ Hunt, who had a hut against one of the northern stones and a cellar dug beneath another, where he kept provisions and drink. Gaffer readily dispensed his wisdom to visitors, one of whom was John Wood, the great architect of Georgian Bath. Wood came away from Stonehenge in 1740 with his head stuffed with nonsense which he solemnly wrote down in a book called Choire Gaure, Vulgarly Called Stonehenge, Described, Explored and Explained. Wood was in no doubt that it was a Druid centre of sun and moon worship. But his claim that it had been built in 100 BC by the entirely mythical King Bladud (also, by a happy coincidence, the founder of Bath) enraged the other eminent Stonehenge expert of the time, Dr William Stukeley. Stukeley, a Lincolnshire-born physician, parson and antiquarian who called himself Chyndonax in honour of a French Druid prince, assigned a date of 480 BC to the creation of Stonehenge. He denounced the ‘crack imaginations’ of John Wood’s ‘fabulous whimsys’.

  Fabulous whimsies were the stock-in-trade of Stonehenge guides. Henry Browne installed himself there in the 1820s, describing himself as ‘the first custodian of Stonehenge’. At around that time Amesbury Abbey and the Amesbury estate – including Stonehenge – were bought by Sir Edmund Antrobus, the Antrobuses being a Cheshire family. Henry Browne dismissed the Druid connection promoted by Dr Stukeley. He was an unswerving Catastrophist, assuring anyone who would give him a hearing that Stonehenge and the other great stone circle at Avebury were built before Noah’s Flood by Adam himself. After his death in 1839, his job and his antediluvian narrative were inherited by his son Joseph. Over the next forty years Joseph became as familiar a feature of the landscape as his father had been, wheeling around a Stonehenge peepshow on a vehicle like a wheelbarrow and selling copies of his father’s guide at a shilling each.