The A303

by Tom Fort

  * * *

  On a fine September day in 1808 a man of striking features left a lodging house in Amesbury and rode over to Normanton Down. There he met a father and son, John and Stephen Parker, who – like him – lived in Heytesbury, a village on the Wylye twelve miles away to the west. The ridge where they gathered was littered with ancient burial sites: three long barrows and almost forty round barrows of different types. Under the direction of the man with the singular face, the Parkers began to dig into a round mound which had been given the name of Bush Barrow by a previous visitor, the druidical Dr Stukeley, because it had stunted trees growing on it.

  First they cut a trench across it. Then they dug a pit in the middle, using spades. They had already made one attempt on the barrow, two months before, but had found nothing. This time they were more thorough. They found a skeleton on its side, in a crouching position. They were encouraged but not excited. They had been excavating barrows for ten years and had uncovered skeletons before.

  Casting their spades aside they proceeded more cautiously, using slender trowels. Eighteen inches from the skull they uncovered a quantity of bronze rivets, a bronze axe head, decayed fragments of wood, and the remains of a bronze dagger with studded hilt. Near the shoulders was a bronze chisel, and next to the right arm were two more daggers, a gold belt-hook, and a decorated lozenge of sheet gold. On the skeleton’s right side lay another gold lozenge and a stone mace-head. The handle of one of the daggers was ornamented with a chevron design made up of tiny gold pins – ‘but unfortunately John Parker with his trowel had scattered them in every direction before I had time to examine them with a glass.’11

  These words – which still cause archaeologists to shudder – were written by William Cunnington, a Heytesbury wool merchant and shop owner. A lithograph shows him as a man with an exceptionally dark and prominent brow and a massive chin. Christopher Chippindale speculates that he may have suffered from acromegaly, a condition caused by excessive production of growth hormones from the pituitary at puberty that can result in a bulging or protruding forehead, enlarged cheekbones, and a lengthening and widening of the jawbone. The associated tumour often compresses brain tissue, causing severe headaches, sleeplessness and periodic bouts of depression – all of which afflicted Cunnington.12

  In general acromegaly does not reveal itself fully until middle age. These days the condition is successfully treated by surgery to the pituitary. But when William Cunnington began to exhibit symptoms in the 1790s the only advice his doctor could give him was ‘ride out or die’. Early in 1797 he rode over from Heytesbury to Stonehenge after hearing that two of the biggest uprights, with their lintel, had fallen outwards causing a thud that was felt by ploughmen half a mile away. Cunnington had already undertaken some amateurish excavations on the downs above Heytesbury, recovering bits of pottery and beads which he had tentatively identified as Roman.

  At Stonehenge he dug with a stick into the shallow depressions left by the fallen stones and found ‘several pieces of black pottery’. They seemed to him remarkably similar to those he had found near Heytesbury. He communicated his findings to John Britton, a hot-tempered and impulsive former attorney’s clerk then engaged on writing a projected three-volume work to be called The Beauties of Wiltshire. Unfortunately Britton’s impressionable mind was already buzzing with wild theories about the dim past. He had been much influenced by the work of a well-known Welsh philologist, William Owen Pughe, who had toiled for many years on a Welsh dictionary and had recently branched out into Bardic fantasising.

  No one could doubt Pughe’s dedication or capacity for hard work, but his judgement was another matter. His belief that Welsh was derived from some primitive mother tongue caused him to twist himself into knots with word derivations and spellings. His reputation was not helped when he declared himself a believer in the prophecies of Joanna Southcott, a religious lunatic from Devon who announced herself as the woman spoken of in the book of Revelation ‘clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’ who would give birth to the new Messiah (she died in 1814 at the age of sixty-four, after causing a sensation with the news that she was pregnant with the harbinger of the Second Coming).

  Pughe asserted that Stonehenge had been constructed in the fifth century ad on a site previously used by the Romans. John Britton seized upon Cunnington’s discovery of supposedly Roman fragments at Stonehenge as proof positive of Pughe’s eccentric chronology and the accompanying Druidic make-believe. Cunnington soon repented of his association with Britton. But as he widened and systematised his exploration of the Wiltshire barrows, he could do little to restrain the reckless speculations of those intent on running their own historical hares. The Wiltshire MP, Henry Wyndham, convinced himself and some others that the big barrows contained hundreds of victims of battle interred by the victors after slaughter that left the ground soaked in blood. Thomas Leman, a learned antiquary and expert on Roman roads, argued loudly for a Roman dating. William Coxe, the Rector of Stourton, had in mind elbowing the irritating Mr Britton out of the way and writing his own history of Wiltshire’s antiquities.

  What all these men had in common – apart from a fondness for airborne castles – was a disinclination to engage in the time-consuming and often thankless business of opening the barrows. They were content to leave the dirty work to Cunnington and his assistants, and to use the results to promote their versions of the past. To their disappointment, these findings were generally rather meagre and confusing, and in time they all lost interest. This was a fortunate development, as the responsibility for funding and recording Cunnington’s work then passed to someone much more suitable. This was Sir Richard Colt Hoare, the owner of Stourhead, the fabulous garden paradise created just beyond the western edge of Salisbury Plain by his grandfather, Henry Hoare.

  The Hoare family business was banking. But Richard Colt Hoare’s reflective, melancholic temperament did not suit him to money-dealing, instead inclining him to lengthy travels, drawing, and history. He and Cunnington became close colleagues, despite their very different backgrounds. Colt Hoare never interfered with the excavations, and rarely even attended them. He depended wholly on Cunnington’s meticulous record-keeping when he got down to compiling his monumental Ancient History of North and South Wiltshire. His contribution to the partnership was an open-handed liberality with his money and what the Dictionary of National Biography characterised as ‘the extraordinary zeal’ which he expended on the eventual printed record.

  ‘Our object is truth,’ he wrote to Cunnington. ‘In this curious investigation we must form no previous system about Britons, Romans or Saxons.’ But the more Cunnington and the Parkers excavated, the more elusive the truth became. Cunnington learned from his earlier indiscretions. He wrote: ‘The only conclusion we can draw from finding Roman pottery on this ground [Stonehenge] is that this work was in existence at the period when that earthenware was made use of Both he and Colt Hoare mocked the deluded William Owen Pughe for deducing that fragments of marked bone found in a barrow south of Stonehenge ‘were used in casting lots . . . Under the druidical system many important decisions were taken this way.’ ‘The poor man is bit by the Prophetess Southcott,’ Colt Hoare observed.

  In ten years’ digging Cunnington and his team opened around six hundred barrows, a third of them around Stonehenge. Often they dealt with two or three in a day, and only those supporting mature trees or under crops were spared. Most of the time the influence of Colt Hoare and the other sponsors was enough to secure the required permission, although on one occasion, when they were searching for a barrow above Fonthill they were threatened with prosecution by the farmer, ‘young Candy, who took us all for poachers’.

  William Cunnington died on the last day of 1810 at the age of fifty-six, having survived long enough to see the first part of his friend’s Ancient History published. Hoare dedicated it to him; the engraving used as the frontispiece shows Cunnington holding a drawing of Stonehenge. �
��How grand! How wonderful! How incomprehensible!’ was Hoare’s verdict on the monument that had preoccupied them for so long. In the end, the more they found, the less they knew, and they were forced to give up the great endeavour of establishing a chronology for prehistory. Unusually for the time, they were humble enough to realise that the subject was too much for them. They had glimpsed an appalling truth: that the span of time involved was simply beyond their understanding.

  By the standards of modern archaeology, Cunnington’s methods appear dreadfully crude. The casual reference to John Parker scattering the gold pins unearthed in the Bush Barrow was a cause of agony to the painstaking professionals who went to work in the twentieth century with their tiny brushes and abundant university funding. One of the kingpins of Stonehenge scholarship, Professor Stuart Piggott, declared sternly that ‘the excavations and their record fail lamentably to satisfy even the most moderate demands of modern archaeologists’. But Piggott’s sense of historical perspective was defective. What struck him and his contemporaries as a blundering clumsiness almost too painful to contemplate amounted to a species of rare restraint in its own time, when grave raiding was standard practice.

  A later generation of archaeologists has been kinder to Cunnington. In the case of the famous Bush Barrow – the richest of all the finds – the care with which Cunnington recorded and described the skeleton and the objects with it has enabled a team led by Stuart Needham, formerly the British Museum’s Keeper of Bronze Age Artefacts, to reconstruct the deposition with remarkable exactness.

  ‘They had the audacity,’ wrote Needham and his colleagues of Cunnington and Hoare, ‘to believe that more could be learned about the ancient past of Britain by the excavation of ancient monuments than by assuming that the literature of “the ancients” (i.e. the legends of Merlin and mythical kings) was relevant and faithful. They had the perseverance to conduct many such excavations . . . despite the fact that the majority of sites did not yield results that were either exciting or interpretable within the prevailing climate of knowledge. Most unusually they realised the importance of individual context . . . to the extent that they recorded each burial site in its own right and ensured the correlation of relevant finds in perpetuity.’

  It’s a generous tribute to a pair of long-departed and much-abused pioneers. Having offered it, Needham and his fellow archaeologists proceed to some informed guesswork of their own. Their starting point is the extreme rarity of rich treasure such as that interred in the Bush Barrow. They like the idea that ‘exceptional grave goods connote something exceptional about the person interred’. They hypothesise that the position of the barrows on Normanton Down – looking down on Stonehenge – was reserved for the cream of society, possibly the masters of the ceremonies, the rulers of the time. It’s a persuasive account, but no more. Like William Cunnington and Richard Colt Hoare, we can never know.

  * * *

  Nineteen seventy-three was the year of the oil crisis.

  On 17 October the energy ministers of seven Arab countries as well as Iran, Indonesia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Nigeria, collectively known as the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, agreed to impose a complete embargo on exports of oil to the United States. Shipments to America’s Western allies, including Britain, were to be severely curtailed, and the price doubled. The immediate trigger for the OPEC decision was the American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Long-term the oil producers had determined to end the era of cheap fuel. The Shah of Iran expressed the sentiment thus: ‘It’s only fair that you should pay more. Let’s say ten times more.’

  It was bad luck for Edward Heath and his Conservative government in Britain that they should have had to deal with the oil embargo at the same time as becoming involved in a trial of strength with the National Union of Mineworkers under its combative new leader, Arthur Scargill. The first effect of the squeeze on fuel imports was to set off panic buying at petrol stations across the country, where the queues recalled conditions in eastern Europe, and police were on hand to quell the rage of motorists limited to one or two gallons at most. The government ordered petrol ration books and coupons to be printed, imposed a 50 m.p.h. speed limit, and even considered banning motoring altogether on Sundays. Heath himself vetoed a suggestion from the Queen that she should call for national unity in her Christmas broadcast. Viewers were treated instead to footage of the Royal tour of Canada and the marriage of Princess Anne to Captain Mark Phillips, which did little to quell the sense of crisis.

  On 13 December Heath announced in the Commons that from 1 January 1974, factories and commercial premises would be limited to three working days a week. In February the leaders of the miners rejected a 16.5 per cent pay offer and ordered a national strike. Heath called an election under the slogan ‘Who Governs Britain?’ By March he no longer did. Labour were back in power, if not in control.

  One of the short-term casualties of the energy crisis was Britain’s road-building programme. This had travelled far since Alfred Barnes’s timid undertaking to improve the roads ‘subject to the means available’. Little by little the Conservative administrations of the 1950s had realised that the car had become integral to modern life, and that owning one figured at or near the top of the average family’s list of aspirations. People wanted cars and decent roads to drive them on; furthermore, it was obvious to even the dimmest minister that improving the road network was essential if the country were to modernise and maintain progress towards ever-greater affluence.

  ‘There are votes in roads’ – Harold Watkinson’s rallying call to his Cabinet colleagues in 1957 – rapidly evolved into the dominant transport orthodoxy. Spending rose to £60 million a year under Watkinson, more than doubled under his successor, Ernest Marples, and continued on its upward trajectory after Harold Wilson’s Labour government came to power in 1964. Wilson’s transport minister, Barbara Castle, could not drive, but she was susceptible to the evangelical lobbying of Lancashire’s County Surveyor and Bridgemaster, James Drake, the driving force behind Britain’s first stretch of motorway, the Preston bypass. ‘A gloriously unpolished Northerner of blunt speech in a broad Lancashire accent, obsessed with roads and a real go-getter’, was Castle’s assessment of Drake. In her two and a half years in charge, annual spending rose from £209 million to £273 million. In 1970 Labour produced a White Paper entitled Roads for the Future, proposing the construction of 1000 miles of motorway over the next fifteen years at a cost of £4 billion. After the Tories regained power that year, the Ministry of Transport was swallowed into the mighty new Department of the Environment under Peter Walker, who talked chirpily of a ten-year programme to built 2000 miles of motorway and 1500 miles of ‘high quality strategic routes’.

  It was an article of faith that new roads would mean a better, more prosperous Britain. No one of any importance questioned the assumptions, and hardly anyone objected to the schemes themselves. Before building the M1, Sir Owen Williams, head of the construction firm of the same name, personally visited every affected landowner to explain the virtues of motorways. Two minor objections were lodged and accommodated.

  The economic crisis precipitated by the 1973 oil embargo and the subsequent capitulation of the new Labour government before the might of Arthur Scargill’s NUM served to demolish any surviving belief that Britain could ever match its overseas competitors, as well as slamming the brakes on the road-building programme. The Heath government slashed spending by a fifth. Under Labour it was cut again, and in 1976 a six-month freeze on all new starts was announced.

  The climate of acquiescence was also changing. 1972 saw a novel co-operative venture between the rail unions, the newborn Friends of the Earth environmental pressure group, the Council for the Protection of Rural England, the National Trust and the Civic Trust. It was called Transport 2000, and its mission was to campaign against further reductions in the rail network and for a more sceptical attitude towards road-building. At the same time a new generation of militant environmental campaigners
identified a way to challenge what the most notorious of them – a Sheffield Polytechnic lecturer, John Tyme – referred to as ‘the consummate evil’ of the motorway programme.

  The arena was the public inquiry. During the 1960s these were very low-key affairs, because the objections were few and muted. But they offered anti-roads fundamentalists tremendous opportunities for disruptive action and glorious publicity. In 1974 John Tyme repeatedly held up the inquiry into the proposed extension of the M16 (later annexed into the M25) through Epping Forest. His argument was given some weight by Dr John Adams, a geography don at University College, London, who produced the first detailed statistical critique of the traffic forecasts used to justify new motorways. Two years later an improbable alliance was formed between the loquacious Tyme and the somewhat liberal and trendy headmaster of Winchester College, John Thorn, to oppose plans to slap a twelve-mile stretch of the M3 across Winchester’s historic water meadows. The repeated ejection of the two men from the proceedings reinforced a general impression of chaos bordering on anarchy.

  By 1978 the average length of time for a major road scheme to proceed from conception to realisation had grown to fifteen years (in 1957 it was four, in 1969 seven, in 1973 ten). Roads were still being commissioned and built, but the process had become hugely costly in terms of money, time and effort, and hugely contentious. There may still have been votes in roads, but they were counterbalanced by the appalling publicity generated by the feeling against them. Government commitment to the concept of the strategic network was quietly dropped, as spending fell from nearly 8 per cent of the overall Department of the Environment budget in 1973 to less than 5 per cent in 1978.

  Onto this scene of faltering faith in the motor car strode Margaret Thatcher. She disdained rail travel, and would no more have been seen on a bicycle than galloping naked on a white stallion. Proclaiming Britain to be ‘the great car economy’, Mrs Thatcher appointed Nicholas Ridley as her Environment Secretary, a heavy smoker not noted for sensitivity to environmental concerns. Ridley was followed by Paul Channon, a devout believer in the doctrine that the only way to tackle congestion was to build more roads. He was largely responsible for the notorious White Paper of 1989 provocatively entitled Roads for Prosperity. Rather foolishly described by Channon as ‘the biggest road-building programme since the Romans’, this proposed a 50 per cent increase in spending to £6 billion.