The A303

by Tom Fort

  But wonderful as she may have been, the Thatcherite model – pro-business, pro-Mondeo Man, indifferent to public transport, contemptuous of tree-hugging eco-types – found itself increasingly undermined by awkward realities and alternative propositions. An influential report from the Oxford-based Transport Studies Unit entitled Transport: The New Realism challenged the Channon orthodoxy that road-building should keep pace with demand, and called for much greater investment in rail and bus services. The so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 added the phrase ‘sustainable development’ to the political lexicon and raised awareness of the pollution of the planet by vehicle emissions.

  By then the lady herself– like Mr Marples long before – had gone. John Major’s Transport Secretary, John MacGregor, initially declared himself for ‘roads, roads, roads’. But the spectacle of mass protests against the section of the M3 through Twyford Down in Hampshire and the inevitable police backlash did nothing for the cause. MacGregor himself was compelled, through gritted teeth, to acknowledge that even Tories must think in terms of making ‘better use of the existing road system . . . and reducing people’s need to travel without restricting their freedom to do so, and making them aware of the real cost of travel.’

  ‘The real cost’ was a deadly phrase, wherein lay a revolution in attitude. In that same year, 1994, a Royal Commission report on environmental pollution recommended that the road-building programme should be cut by half and the price of fuel doubled. Even more crucially, the government’s own Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Roads woke up to a truth that had dawned long before on everyone other than the wholly dim-witted: that building roads encouraged people to use them; or, as the committee vividly expressed it, ‘induced traffic can and does occur quite extensively’.

  In the context of transport policy, this was the equivalent of Luther rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation. For forty years the building of roads had been regarded as essential to the pursuit of ever greater prosperity and efficiency. Bigger, faster roads were the answer to inadequate transport links. Now we had finally noticed that roads were part of the problem. The more you built, the more people wanted to drive on them. The provision of new roads would never and could never keep up with the desire to use them.

  The prophet of the new government approach was MacGregor’s successor, Brian Mawhinney. With his immensely high forehead, gleaming teeth, and quiet, reflective Ulster voice, Mawhinney demonstrated that being a fervent Protestant and coming from Belfast did not necessarily inspire a fanatical urge to consign the Pope to the fires of hell. He was an expert on radiation, and arrived at the Ministry of Transport determined to tackle what he saw as the damage caused by vehicle emissions to the nation’s health. He rejected Margaret Thatcher’s ‘great car economy’ line, urged the road lobby to talk to environmentalists, pledged to minimise the impact of new trunk roads on the countryside, and announced a review of all the 270 road schemes he had inherited.

  Mawhinney had the nerve to announce in Parliament that he considered the trunk road network ‘broadly complete’. Paradoxically his last act before his promotion to party chairman was to approve one of the most contentious road schemes of all, the A34 Newbury bypass, which also took some balls. The construction led to a civil insurrection in the woodland along the route, and the temporary deification of a local lad, Daniel Hooper, under the nom-de-guerre Swampy. Much later Mawhinney looked back at the battles among the tree-houses and reflected on the dilemma he had faced:

  ‘Yes, I still remember the beautiful countryside around Newbury which is no more, and how much I enjoyed walking through it as a preliminary to making my decision – even as I know that tens of thousands of people live better lives as a result of that decision.’

  Myself, I think that Mawhinney got it about right. I drive that section of the A34 fairly often on my way to join the A303 to go fishing near Amesbury, and I bless the convenience of it. For Newbury it was more salvation than convenience – the town had been identified forty years before by Colin Buchanan as an extreme illustration of the damage and misery caused when a market town high street becomes a major arterial trunk route. The problem with our apprehension of big road schemes is that it tends to be governed by familiar visual images of violation: bulldozers tearing open woodland and fields, mountains of spoil, slicks of mud, buildings tottering before the wrecking-ball. Unless we live in the town or village ravaged by the queues of traffic, we cannot imagine the relief of quiet. Nor at the time of outrage can we visualise the road as it will become, the way the land heals and takes the road into it.

  * * *

  Newbury could count itself lucky. It got its bypass in the nick of time, just as society turned decisively against that kind of grand engineering project. Since then the big roads rhetoric has been periodically reheated by ministers to appease the roads lobby and foster an impression of boldness and tough thinking in the pursuit of the dynamic economy. But the roads themselves have generally been left where they started, on drawing-boards. And in the current climate of monkish austerity promoted by the Cameron/Clegg axis it is difficult to imagine any major new road making it to the commissioning stage.

  Winterbourne Stoke, two-and-a-half miles or so west of Stonehenge, was not as fortunate as Newbury. No one disputed the case for Winterbourne Stoke to have the same relief as a string of other towns and villages along the A303, starting with Andover and Amesbury in 1969, and ending with Bourton and Zeals, whose bypass opened in July 1992. The route, looping through empty farmland around the north of the village, was accepted, even embraced, by all. The curse was Stonehenge. While the wrangling over the tunnel continued, Winterbourne Stoke waited patiently. Then it dawned on its people that their curse would not be lifted. Not now; probably not ever.

  The village lies at the bottom of a dip in the downs, beside a little stream of erratic flow. There are roughly eighty houses spread along both sides of the A303 and over land to the south. Apart from the handsome brick-and-flint Church of St Peter there is one notable building, Manor Farm, a splendid and lovely mainly seventeenth-century gabled house in pale stone and flint at the western edge of the village. Otherwise there is a smattering of pleasant old cottages and a preponderance of less pleasant modern houses. It could be any unexceptional, nondescript rural settlement – if it were not for the road.

  Instead, Winterbourne Stoke is a place bruised, battered and traumatised by noise and movement. There is no peace there, except when some horrendous crash blocks the A303 and police divert the traffic elsewhere (it was shut for four hours once, and in the silence that descended on Winterbourne Stoke, someone suggested holding a street party). At peak times more than 30,000 vehicles pass through each day; the year-round average is 22,000. The noise is pretty much continuous. When the traffic is flowing freely it is a high-volume rasp thickened by the roar of lorry engines and punctuated by the clang of wheels on drain covers. When the queue is solid, the sound is heavy, more threatening, dissonant with the hiss of brakes, the crunch of gear change, the swell of acceleration.

  Some residents are more philosophical than others. I bumped into Charlie Vince the day before he retired from running the village garage and shop. He said there were plenty of places worse than Winterbourne Stoke; and he must have meant it, because he was retiring no further than his cottage on the other side of the A303. He regaled me with well-used stories of apocalyptic collisions and gruesome deaths in his forty years looking out on to the road. One of his elderly customers, Charlie told me, was too slow to be confident of getting across in one piece, so he would wait on the other side until Charlie came out to throw his daily packet of fags across to him. Just next to the garage is a comparatively new pedestrian crossing with traffic lights; it is common practice, apparently, for people to press the button to cross, then dash back to their cars in order to get out onto the road.

  I was shown a quartet of old postcards of the village, dating – I would guess – from the 1930s. The road is amazingly narrow, wander
ing this way and that around the walls of the buildings. The bridge over the stream – which was replaced in 1939 – looks just wide enough for a single stream of traffic. In all but one of the pictures the road is empty.

  There was peace then in Winterbourne Stoke.

  11

  WILTSHIRE HORN

  Winterbourne Stoke’s stream is called the Till. Both stream and name come from Tilshead, an isolated village a few miles over the downs to the north. It seems that the place-name – said to be a contraction of ‘Theodwulf s hide’ – came first, which is not usually the case with rivers and the settlements beside them.

  Stop on the bridge in Winterbourne Stoke in spring or early summer after a winter of decent rainfall, and you will see a pretty little stream of water as clear as glass beneath. But, generally speaking, by July or August the flow has faltered. The little tresses of green water crowfoot wilt and vanish. The gravel is exposed, and any trout that ventured up in search of extra rations will have fled back downstream. Through autumn and early winter it remains a forlorn sight. Then, as the rain clouds sweep over the empty downland, the chalk aquifers are recharged; and quite suddenly the stream is reborn.

  A stream but no water

  These days – because of abstraction from the aquifers and generally lower rainfall – the rebirth is a hit-and-miss affair. But in times past the yearly cycle was reliable enough to sustain a method of land use that was crucial to the economy of Winterbourne Stoke, and of a host of communities across Hampshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire and Dorset.

  Vestiges of the system canjust be made out in the meadows beside the Till upstream of the bridge at Winterbourne Stoke, like an old, faint footprint. There is a pattern of connected miniature ridges and depressions. Here and there a slab of cut stone shows through the rough grass, which once formed part of a tiny culvert or supported the top end of a channel or ditch. There are the remains of a Lilliputian aqueduct. Someone, a long time ago, went to a deal of trouble to engineer these meadows to a very particular end.

  There are plenty of other more or less detectable traces of the uses to which this landscape has been put over the ages: the thatched roofs and cob walls of the old cottages, the flints that give the churches their grainy pallor, the hedges marking boundaries recorded in Domesday, the terracing still visible on downland slopes indicating field systems that go back to the Bronze Age.

  Roughly half of the A303 runs across the great chalk stratum of which Salisbury Plain forms the western sector. The chalk downland ends a little way west of Fonthill, roughly where the A350 Blandford–Bath road cuts at right angles across the A303. Beyond that point the traces of the distant past are generally sparser and more hidden, if not wholly erased. But across the wide, rolling uplands of the Plain, and on the slopes of the valleys and in the meadows by the streams, the long, long story of how our species sought to manage this landscape and exploit its peculiar qualities is quite clearly written.

  Go back six thousand years. The process of clearing the primeval upland forest is in hand. Tools of antler and bone are in use. Flint blades and stone axes are being developed. Mesolithic gives way to Neolithic. By 3000 BC emmer wheat, einkorn and barley are being ground in stone querns to make flatbread. Decorated pottery is in circulation. Prominent ancestors are laid to rest in collective burial chambers. The earth bank and ditch around Stonehenge are constructed, and the first circle of bluestones put in place. As Neolithic gives way to Bronze Age, deforestation accelerates. Permanent settlements are established. Burial chambers for individual leaders are excavated.

  By 1500 BC Stonehenge in its mature form was already five hundred years old. Over the next thousand years the hilltop settlements grew in size, and were surrounded by substantial earthworks. Quarley Hill, Yarnbury Castle and Cadbury Castle are three notable examples close to or next to the A303. The prominent dead were cremated and their remains placed in urns for burial. The emphasis of agriculture was arable, but sheep and especially cattle were established components of the economy. In the period up to Roman occupation the land was divided between different communities and marked by visible boundaries. Wheat and barley were the main crops, but rye and oats were also grown.

  In terms of land use, not a huge amount changed over the next millennium and a half, except that settlements generally migrated into the valleys or rivers and streams, and sheep grazing tended to elbow out the Celtic field systems. Invading armies – Romans, Saxons, Danes, finally the Normans – swept through, spilling blood and spreading destruction. Occasional periods of peace and good order – for instance under Alfred’s kingship – were preceded and followed by longer periods of violence and political flux. As far as they were able, the ordinary folk went about their ordinary business, which was extracting the means to live from the land they occupied. The relative stability that the Normans brought was reflected in the development of the rural economy. Mills were installed along rivers and streams to grind corn for bread and to treat cloth. The lands of the Salisbury Plain plateau were parcelled out between manors. Sheep ruled the upper pastures, the lower slopes were dedicated to crops.

  It was the sheep and the shepherds that caught the eye. The animals roamed and nibbled in vast numbers. Their teeth kept the downland grasses, clovers, herbs and flowers close cropped, giving the turf what the great nature writer W. H. Hudson called ‘the smooth elastic character which makes it better to walk on than the most perfect lawn’. The celebrated seventeeth-century antiquary, John Aubrey, described how the standard shepherd wore a long white cloak of wool with a deep cape and carried crook, sling, scrip (wallet), tar-box and flute, with a dog at his heels. Shepherds were freelances, employed by a co-operative of farmers attached to each manor to manage the flocks. Traditionally they were difficult, obstinate and unbiddable. But they were also irreplaceable, and the owners of the animals would go to great lengths to avoid offending them.

  Shepherds could also be of service to travellers. Daniel Defoe, writing early in the eighteenth century, referred to the ‘certain, never-failing assistance’ they rendered in a landscape where ‘there is neither house nor town in view and the road which often lyes very broad and branches off insensibly might easily cause a traveller to loose his way . . .’

  Sheep defined the Plain, but they were not its core business. It was corn that sustained the rural economy of Wiltshire and Hampshire. The role of sheep, although crucial, was entirely subsidiary.

  The sheep of the downland was the Wiltshire Horn. Unusually, both males and females were horned: hence the name. It had a big, uncouth, round-nosed face, long body, and thick legs. Its meat was edible but distinctly mediocre, its wool serviceable for cloaks and rough garments but too coarse and sparse to be valued by the textile industry. The worth of the Wiltshire Horn lay in its strength and stamina, and in its digestive system. It was regarded primarily as a dung machine, and its duty was to fertilise the arable fields.

  The pattern of their day hardly varied. From morning to afternoon or evening – depending on the season – they roamed the grazing land filling their bellies with herbage. Before light faded they were driven down from the pastures to the arable fields and confined within hurdled pens for the night. There, tightly packed together – the recommended density was a thousand sheep to the acre – they defecated for their living. At daylight they were driven off again to the uplands. The wattle hurdles were dismantled, moved along, and reassembled so that the next acre of ground could be manured the following night. Only in the bitterest winter weather were the sheep allowed into shelters; then the dung was collected and carried to the field.

  The corn that grew in that rich ground made the money that kept the farmers of Wiltshire and Hampshire afloat. Some was sold in small local markets at Salisbury and Amesbury. The famous Weyhill Fair and the annual fair which was held within the big prehistoric hillfort known as Yarnbury Castle both saw large-scale trading in corn and sheep. But the regular outlets were the markets at Hindon, south of the A303 near Fonthill, and Warminster. W
illiam Camden, visiting Warminster in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, described the quantities of corn sold there as ‘scarcely credible’, while John Aubrey’s bailiff counted ‘twelve or fourteen score loads of corn’ arriving there for market day.

  The system was an early version of the collective later embraced by Stalinist social planners across Russia and eastern Europe. It was held together by dependence. The grazing was common land, and crops were grown in strips across big, open fields – generally one for winter wheat, one for spring barley, and one left fallow. The great majority of farmers participated in the common sheepfold; if they didn’t, they had no entitlement to the precious dung. Their reciprocal duties including paying towards winter fodder when it was needed, and contributing hurdles for the fold.

  During the seventeeth century a radical new technology gave a tremendous boost to the chalkland rural economy. Historically, the chief restraint on the numbers of sheep that could be kept – and therefore the amount of manure available – was the so-called ‘hungry gap’, the late winter period when reserves of hay were exhausted and the grass had not yet started growing. To fill that gap, the practice developed of ‘floating the water meadows’, as it became known. It involved taking water from the nearest stream and, by means of an intricate grid of channels and carriers, spreading it across the meadows. The flooding took place in November, and the effect was to protect the grass from winter frosts, thereby encouraging early growth, which was further promoted – though no one realised it at the time – by the exceptional nutrient-load of chalkstream water. Ideally the depth was no more than an inch or two, and towards the end of February the water was drained off the land, which was then given a couple of weeks to dry off a touch and get its grass going. Come March the hungry ewes and lambs were unleashed into the rich, emerald pasture for the day, and driven off to the arable fields for the night.