by Tom Fort
He told me – and I don’t think he said it because he thought it would please me to hear it – that he liked it in England. In fact he preferred it to Turkey. People here do not bother you, he said. In Turkey everyone wants to know your business. He enjoyed chatting with his customers, many of whom stopped regularly to chew the fat and a sandwich. Sometimes his cousin came over from Salisbury to keep him company and give a hand cutting the bread (mainly white, but he does offer brown), flipping the eggs and the sizzling bacon off the hot-plate.
I asked him about the flag. It was there because the Highways Agency, which has charge of the lay-by, did not object to it. For some obscure reason probably arising from a pettifogging regulation concerning visual distraction or sightlines, the Agency will not permit Joseph to have a sign advertising his first-rate sandwiches and revitalising mugs of tea. I am therefore happy to urge readers of this book who happen to be on the A303 anywhere near Winterbourne Stoke to stop at Joseph’s. In warm weather he puts out a plastic table and chairs for the benefit of those who want to take their time and take in the view of the road and the fields beyond. Otherwise you either have to take your sustenance standing in front of the hatch or hasten back to your vehicle with your bacon sandwich warming your hand through its wrapping.
* * *
The first of my several encounters with Joseph and his butties occurred when I was walking back to Winterbourne Stoke from Yarnbury Castle, the enormous hillfort spread over the crown of the next hill along the road. It was my second attempt to find and explore the site. On a previous occasion I had cycled from Shrewton on what began as a well-marked bridle-path, only to lose my way and bearings completely. Had I been Daniel Defoe, I could have summoned a rough-hewn shepherd to put me right. As it was, the landscape of huge fields of corn was utterly devoid of human life. I eventually found myself on the wrong side of a rectangle of golden barley so immense that one end was out of sight. Beyond it I could see the tops of the lorries grinding along the A303, but there was high, tight barbed wire between me and the barley, so I went around it – the long way, as it turned out.
Having completed a three-quarters circumnavigation of this one field, my interest in Yarnbury Castle was waning fast. Had I known it, I was at the time equally close to Parsonage Down, a nature reserve comprising 5000 acres of pristine grassland covered in hundreds of ancient anthills and home to a prodigious abundance of wildflowers, including Europe’s biggest population of the rare burnt tip orchid. But I was getting to the state of sweaty irritation in which I couldn’t have cared much about that either. I found my way to the road blocked by another barrier of twangingly tight barbed wire. By now more than a little desperate, I propelled my bicycle over it and followed it, tearing the skin on my left palm and a large rip in my trousers.
Finally reunited with the A303, I dragged myself and my machine along the verge for a couple of hundred yards, whereupon Yarnbury Castle revealed itself to my right. By then it was 1.30 p.m., and had it been the Sphinx itself rearing from the Wiltshire countryside, I would not have stopped to inspect it. There was a pub in Wylye at the bottom of the hill ahead, which I suspected would stop doing food at 2 p.m. – food that I needed even more than I needed beer. I therefore rode my bike along the verge. Fortunately it was downhill all the way and I managed to get up to nine or ten miles an hour, which still made being overtaken by pantechnicons travelling at 80 m.p.h. distinctly unnerving. I made it to the Bell in the nick of time.
Yarnbury Castle, I reflected, could wait for another day. After all it had been there for almost two-and-a-half thousand years.
Position is everything for a hillfort. No good picking a spot where your enemies can creep up on you unseen and stick a dagger in your back or apply a mace to your skull. The first priority is the view, then clearing the trees so you can see who is coming, preferably for several miles. After that you may start feeling secure.
The hill on which Yarnbury Castle was first constructed around 300 BC is 500 feet high, which isn’t a lot. But the configuration of the landscape gives it an impressive command. To the east a look-out could easily make out Beacon Hill, well beyond Stonehenge. To the south-west the land drops down into the valley of the Wylye, then rises again to Great Ridge Wood. Further round to the south is a long, even ridge, covered in the ancient woodlands of Grovely. North, the chalkland rolls away, concealing no secrets. Friend or foe would have given plenty of warning that they were coming.
So they got down to the digging. ‘Yarnbury Castle,’ wrote Sir Richard Colt Hoare, ‘presents a very fine specimen of ancient castramentation.’ Indeed it does. It is a mile around the outer ditch, and the total extent is close to thirty acres. The entrance on the eastern side was between two parallel banks of earth, with an additional mound shaped rather like a kidney to protect the mouth. Two banks separated by a deep ditch surrounded the fort. Within was a level enclosure, presumably the main living area. At some stage a third outer embankment was added, and later still a Roman garrison constructed a V-shaped extension on the west side with a wooden gate as entrance.
Colt Hoare hazarded the guess that Yarnbury was originally occupied by ‘Britons’, then Romans, then Saxons. He was not far off, if we take Britons to mean the pre-Roman Iron Age residents. The main excavation at Yarnbury was carried out in the 1930s by the archaeologist Maud Cunnington, by a neat coincidence the wife of William Cunnington’s great-grandson Ben. She found the usual shattered pottery and human bones – nothing exciting and nothing to suggest a particular history for Yarnbury beyond the familiar stuff: growing crops, grazing beasts, making tools, obscure death rites, obscure social hierarchy, probably some killing, probably some plague and pestilence.
The Saxons came down from the hill to the valley. Yarnbury had served its purpose and was left to the sheep and the rabbits (after the Normans introduced them): a huge, brooding, silent commentary on a life that had run its useful course. People continued to come by; there was a well-used trackway along the eastern flank and another on the west side. There was also, very likely, a route of some kind to the south, more or less coinciding with that of the A303, although its status is unclear. The famous atlas created by Charles II’s ‘Cosmographer and Geographick Printer’, John Ogilby, shows the road from Andover and Amesbury forking left at Stonehenge for ‘Stoke’, i.e. Winterbourne Stoke. But there is no indication from Ogilby that it amounted to a through route to anywhere else, and he recommends the right fork leading to Shrewton and Warminster. It was not until the turnpike age of the second half of the eighteenth century that what we now know as the A303 developed into a more coherent road at least as far west as Mere.
At some point – certainly by the eighteenth century, possibly much earlier – Yarnbury Castle became the venue for an important annual sheep fair. It was held early in October, giving farmers and dealers time to drive newly acquired or unsold animals across the downs to Weyhill Fair, which took place a week later. The Yarnbury Fair was evidently a big date in the local calendar. Caleb Bawcombe, the shepherd in Hudson’s A Shepherd’s Life, recalled that the Ellerbys of Doveton Farm – for whom he worked for many years – sent sheep there over an unbroken period of eighty-eight years. Ella Noyes, who lived up the Wylye valley at Sutton Veny, described how the earthworks were packed with penned sheep, ponies and carthorses. In her book Salisbury Plain, published in 1913, she recorded that ‘up to within the memory of people still living, the fair was followed by horse-races next day and sports of all kind. But now the pleasure part of the meeting has been abandoned; the folk disperse quietly . . . leaving Yarnbury to the silent occupation of prehistoric ghosts for another year.’ Three years later the last fair was held, after which the military put the Castle out of bounds.
It is still out of bounds, surrounded by barbed wire, without even one of those reassuring English Heritage noticeboards to tell passers-by how old and important it is. You may do as I did, and climb the wire and hope that the minions of the landowner are somewhere else. But that is hardly cond
ucive to communication with Miss Noyes’ prehistoric ghosts.
* * *
Just east of Yarnbury Castle, the A303 becomes dual carriageway again. The effect on westbound traffic is wondrous to behold. Drivers trapped in the long crawl from the ridge before Stonehenge explode like sprinters off the blocks. Waves of outrage envelop any truck that pulls out first to heave itself past some panting hay-trailer or combine harvester. The grassy earthworks of Yarnbury Castle are a blur as the cars flash downhill past Wylye and over its river.
In 1997 John Major and his feuding Tories were finally booted out by an electorate grown weary of Thatcherism and its smoking fag-ends. Tony Blair stormed into Downing Street, a bright-eyed zealot bursting with vigour and promising – well, what did he not promise? One of his first exciting initiatives was to put John Prescott at the helm of the gargantuan new Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, a vessel whose size and manoeuvrability may have reminded its skipper of his days as a steward on cross-Channel ferries.
Three years later, to usher in the new millennium, Prescott presented a Ten Year Transport Plan – ‘a route map’, he called it in the jargon of the time. It was stuffed with platitudes and commitments to ‘vigorous innovation . . . radical reform . . . integrated solutions [and] strategic approaches’. Road congestion would be cut by 3 per cent by ‘smarter network management’ and better ‘real-time management of traffic’. Roads would be ‘smart’, motorways ‘electronic’. A Network Traffic Control Centre would be established to ‘drive through’ the new smartness. All road schemes would be assessed according to the New Approach to Appraisal (NATA), which would balance the ‘economic, environmental, safety, accessibility and integration applications’. Over the ten years, £21 billion would go to ‘strategic roads’, out of a total transport budget of £180 billion.
After Prescott, lesser, greyer figures were invited to take the transport helm: first Stephen Byers, then Alistair Darling, who held on to the job between May 2002 and May 2006, making him the longest-serving transport minister or secretary since Ernest Marples. Throughout this period the consultations over what to do about the A303 and Stonehenge ground agonisingly on. In December 2002, Darling announced that the 7.7-mile stretch between the Countess roundabout at Amesbury and the start of the Wylye bypass at Yarnbury Castle would be upgraded to dual carriageway, with 1.3 of those miles disappearing into a tunnel past Stonehenge. The fine words floated off over Salisbury Plain, while someone – Darling, Blair, or someone else – decided that a Ten Year Plan was too modest, and that what was really needed was a Thirty Year Plan.
Tony Blair himself provided a foreword to this prophetic document, which appeared in 2004. He described the challenge ahead as ‘a tough one’. It would, he said, admit of ‘no quick fix’. Like its predecessor, the new plan made much of ‘smart solutions’. The smart solution to the A303/Stonehenge scheme turned out to be cancellation.
Lucky Wylye had got its bypass long before, in 1975, in retrospect a golden age for the road-builders. Before then the A303 had cut through the western part of the village, crossing the river on a tight, dog-leg bridge which was the cause of much loathing among holidaymakers and truck drivers. Now it sweeps past over the river and under the A36 Salisbury–Warminster road, with which it shares a complex junction requiring close attention. You can find the ‘old’ A303 just out of Wylye, on the western side of the railway line. The original bridge has been removed, leaving an abrupt termination high in the air above a murky pond. A pile of railway sleepers and a rusted red plough have been abandoned among the bushes that have forced their way through the fractured tarmac. The amputated old road creeps along beside the new for a mile-and-a-half, separated from it by an embankment and a line of scrubby thorn trees. It is narrow and forsaken, its cat’s eyes gouged out and removed, its surface broken and weed-infested. Here and there a splash of its white line can be made out, like a murmur of its past, when it went somewhere and counted for something.
Old and new, side by side
Historically, Wylye stood guard beside the main ford on the upper section of the river from which it got its name. It was the most important of a string of villages between Salisbury and Warminster. The political firebrand and social commentator William Cobbett counted thirty-one; W. H. Hudson made it between twenty-five and thirty – the number, he said, seemed to change each time he walked or cycled the valley. It was a valley beloved by those who knew it. Edward Hutton, in his Highways and Byways in Wiltshire, called it ‘an epitome of all the valleys of the Plain . . . fruitful and very quiet, but not dumb; in it the heart of England still laughs and sings, serene and steadfast under the great downs that compass it with their strength on every side.’ Hudson wrote of the stream showing ‘like a bright serpent’ in the meadows, then disappearing into the trees that hid the villages so completely ‘that at some points, looking down from the hills, you may not even catch a glimpse of one and may imagine it to be a valley where no man dwells’.
The villages are still there. They all have their charms, and some – I think of Stockton, Boyton and Upton Lovell – are so pretty as to seem almost unreal; in Hudson’s words, ‘of the old, quiet, now almost obsolete type of village, so unobtrusive as to affect the mind soothingly, like the sight of trees and flowery banks and grazing cattle’. There are plenty of the crooked old cottages he loved – ‘weathered and coloured by sun and wind and rain . . . mostly thatched, but some have tiled roofs, their deep, dark red clouded and stained by lichen and moss . . . they stand among and are wrapped in flowers as a garment – rose and vine and creeper and clematis.’
Mostly they have been tarted up, of course, and frequently tarnished by tactless extensions. Often, too, the spaces between them have been filled with specimens of contemporary housing: machine-cut bricks in deadly beige or dog-shit brown placed in dead-straight lines of spirit-choking regularity, complete with concrete tiles, dismal brown window-frames, and built-in garages with corrugated doors. The unwitting effect of the intruders has been to endow their elderly neighbours, with their roofs of thatch or wandering tiles and walls of soft grey stone and chequered flint or bulging cob, with an ethereal and poignant loveliness.
But it is not the lamentable quality of modern housebuilding that has robbed the Wylye Valley and its villages of the magic that entranced Hudson, Hutton and others. It is a road, a bully of a road – not my A303, but the A36. This is essentially a country road doomed by geographical bad luck – it is the only feasible way from Southampton and Salisbury in the south to Warminster and eventually Bristol to the north-west – to serve as a major arterial route. It is narrow, it twists and turns, it rises and falls with every fold in the land. Everyone hates it: car drivers because it is difficult and hazardous to overtake, truckers because of the constant gear-changing and wheel-turning, locals because of the risks involved in turning onto it and the horrible grinding racket with which it fills their days.
I have spent many happy hours on the Wylye between Stockton and Heytesbury. It is a lovable stream: a pleasure to look at, but a double delight if you are in it, wading the firm gravel bottom, pushing up beside beds of thick, waving weed, ducking between trailing willow branches, searching ahead for the rings on the water that betray feeding trout and grayling. I have promised no fishing, and I will keep my promise, but I could not pass this jewel of a chalkstream without paying my respects. It has given me joy and will, I am sure, give me more. The happy hours would have been happier still if they had been free of the pestilential roar of the A36.
* * *
A mile west out of Wylye the bypass ends and the A303 reverts to single carriageway. To the left is Wylye Down, the terracing of a Celtic field system clearly visible on the grassy slope. Ahead, nudging against the road, is a sweep of woodland known collectively as Great Ridge Wood; although it is composed of lesser woods with their own names, of which the most intriguing is Snail-Creep Hanging. The ridge of Great Ridge Wood continues to the south of the road in another great sw
athe of trees. This is Grovely Wood, which looks down over the lower Wylye almost to its junction with the Nadder.
Since time immemorial the people of two villages in the shadow of Grovely – Great Wishford on the Wylye and Barford St Martin on the Nadder – had the right, known as ‘estover’, to help themselves to wood. Each could take home as much as he or she could carry, although only the Wishfordians were entitled to cut greenwood. To maintain the entitlement, a delegation from each village had to dance their way into Salisbury Cathedral on Whit Tuesday where the Wishfordians cried out ‘Grovely, Grovely and all Grovely!’ and the Barfordians clamoured ‘Grovely, Grovely, Grovely!’
In 1539, with the dissolution of Wilton Abbey, Grovely Wood and everything around it fell into the hands of Sir William Herbert, first Earl of Pembroke and builder of the great house of Wilton. At intervals thereafter various Earls of Pembroke tried to curtail the fuel-gathering forays into the wood, but the Wishfordians and Barfordians clung strenuously to their rights. In 1825 the elderly eleventh Earl, George Augustus Herbert, announced that he had had enough of the incursions, and banned them. A spirited Barfordian girl, Grace Reed, and three Wishfordian women resolved to resist the haughty Earl. Returning from Grovely with their armfuls of wood, they were summoned before the magistrates and locked up when they refused to pay fines. So furious was the outcry that the next day the Earl, or those who acted for him, backed down, and the quartet were released. Grace Reed lived another sixty-nine years in her cottage in Barford, warmed by proud Pembroke wood.