The A303

by Tom Fort

  * * *

  The Amesbury Turnpike Trust was formed in 1761 and was largely responsible for developing the first recognisable incarnation of the A303. At the time trusts were sprouting forth all over the place, charged with upgrading existing roads and building new ones. They were generally comprised of local business interests; and while investors undoubtedly hoped for a return through the tolls, there was also a strong element of public-spirited commitment to improving the infrastructure in pursuit of social as well as economic progress.

  The driving force and chief investor in the Amesbury Trust was the third Duke of Queensbury, owner of Amesbury Abbey and the surrounding estates. Apart from loaning the Trust the considerable sum of £6000, the Duke paid for the rickety old wooden bridge over the Avon in Amesbury to be replaced by the elegant stone crossing that takes the traffic to this day. The financial returns on his loan were meagre in the extreme, and his heir, the absentee whist-mad fourth Duke, made repeated efforts over the next thirty years to shift the debt onto someone else; in vain, for by 1835 the Trust was more than £60,000 in the red. Nevertheless, from the point of view of everyone bar the investors, the Trust was a great success. A modest scale of charges – three pence per carriage, one penny per pack animal, ten pence per score of drove cattle; mail coaches, churchgoers, soldiers, electors and ploughmen free – offered the prospect of a safe journey across what had previously been one of the uncharted wastes of southern England.

  The traveller who took the new road and came over the brow of the ridge rising from the west bank of the Wylye on any clear day between 1809 and 1825 would have been met by a bizarre spectacle on top of a wooded hill a couple of miles to the south-west. It was a monstrous octagonal tower 300 feet high – three quarters the height of the spire of Salisbury Cathedral – with eight Gothic spikes rising from the roof, the whole thing festooned with every species of stylistic extravagance and fancy. The tower formed the centrepiece of William Beckford’s famous Fonthill Abbey, which was no abbey at all but a folie de grandeur dreamed up by one of the most reckless spendthrifts of that prodigal age.

  Beckford, the fabulously spoiled only son of a fabulously rich owner of West Indian plantations, dazzled Europe with the publication in the 1780s of his Oriental fantasy Vathek, written – originally in French – when he was twenty-four. He commissioned the sham abbey and its tower after demolishing the vast mansion his father had built on the grounds that it was too conventional in design. The project consumed most of his fortune, and in 1825 the tower collapsed, an event widely interpreted as a judgement on Beckford’s own ambitions.

  Beckford’s Abbey

  To illustrate Beckford’s notion of how to enjoy himself while impressing the locals, I cannot resist lingering for a moment with the report in the Morning Chronicle of the Fonthill Fete in January 1797. Ten thousand of the peasantry and assorted riffraff were admitted to the park for bread and strong ale. Polite aristocratic society would have nothing to do with Beckford after he was accused (falsely, in all probability) of seducing the teenage son of the Earl of Devon, so the best he could manage by way of the quality was the Mayor of Salisbury. His Worship and an assortment of lesser dignitaries were received by Beckford in a Turkish tent from which they watched a display of sports before retiring to the Grecian Hall to be served with roast beef (‘the pride of Britons’ according to the Morning Chronicles correspondent) and punch (the ‘British nectar’). A succession of toasts culminated in Beckford’s to ‘Christmas Day, Twelfth Day, Old Times, and Old Names for ever, and may the ears of John Bull never be insulted by the gipsey jargon of France’.

  Outside, the ‘joy, gratitude and contentment’ of the lower orders were expressed in repeated acclamations. This served to show, according to the Morning Chronicle, ‘the vast influence which gentlemen of fortune and beneficent disposition . . . can still maintain in opposition to the effects of more modern habits and fashionable life . . .’ In fact, needless to say, Beckford was loathed by his tenants and workers for his foul temper and habit of thrashing them as if they were indistinguishable from the slaves on the Jamaican plantations which provided his vast wealth.

  * * *

  Fonthill is a lovely spot, folded so discreetly into its vale that it reveals itself only when you are almost upon it. A narrow lake curves along it, full of fat carp that cruise the shallows leaving bow waves to spread lazily along the reeds. The water sometimes turns milky with pale sediment stirred by the springs on the bottom. The approach from the direction of the A303 is through Fonthill Bishop, a cluster of picture-book houses and cottages. The road passes beneath a monumental arch, one of the few of Beckford’s absurdities to have survived, with gatehouses either side, urns, ballus-traded piers and rough rustications. Further on is a sweet little cricket ground which slopes down quite steeply from the woods, with a wooden shack of a pavilion at one corner and big clumps of daffodils at mid-wicket/extra cover, and a pitch that looked to me as if it would play low and slow.

  Lake at Fonthill

  Beckford’s Arch

  Another view

  On the far side of the lake is the site of Beckford senior’s mansion, known mockingly as Fonthill Splendens. Its predecessor was destroyed by fire shortly after Alderman Beckford bought the estate. A still earlier house was the home of one of the wickedest earls in English history, and the setting of events so dark and sordid as to make Beckford’s most lascivious Oriental masturbatory fantasies seem quite tame.

  On 25 April 1631 Mervyn Touchet, second Earl of Castlehaven and master of Fonthill, was tried before twenty-seven of his peers in Westminster Hall, London, charged with rape and sodomy. On the first charge he was found guilty by twenty-six to one; on the second the majority against him was fifteen to twelve. Three weeks later he was beheaded on Tower Hill, Charles I having rejected all pleas for clemency. The case was the scandal of the age, the events leading to it regarded as so shameful that almost two centuries later, Sir Richard Colt Hoare could not bring himself to mention them – ‘I shall not offend the delicacy of my readers by stating the cause of this trial,’ he wrote with a shudder. Our age is less delicate, and the story has been told fully and with great fairness by Cynthia Herrup in the splendidly titled A House in Gross Disorder. I cannot resist dipping into it.

  Fonthill Splendens

  The house in question, Fonthill, seems to have run on hatred and unnatural lusts. The earl’s accuser was none other than his own son and heir, James Touchet, one of six children by his first wife, the daughter of a rich London merchant. When she died, Castlehaven – having married money the first time – went for rank in the shape of Lady Anne Brydges, widow of Lord Chandos. She was twelve years older than he was, and after her arrival at Fonthill she soon discovered that her new husband much preferred the company of tobacco, heated wine, and his servants to that of his wife. One of the few matters on which they co-operated was in arranging a marriage between his son James, then fifteen or so, and her daughter by Lord Chandos, Elizabeth, then aged thirteen. The young couple could not stand each other.

  Wicked Earl

  By 1630 James had fled Fonthill. The state papers record that he appealed ‘for protection from the Earl, his natural father, to the Father of his country, the King’s Majesty’. He laid complaint before the Privy Council, accusing his father of having unnatural relations with a succession of male servants, and of urging one of them, Henry Skipwith, to conduct an illicit liaison with James’s stepsister and reluctant wife, Elizabeth. The Privy Council appointed a panel consisting of the Earls of Manchester, Arundel and Surrey, together with the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Nicholas Hyde, and the Bishop of London, William Laud, to investigate the goings-on in deepest Wiltshire. Further shocking allegations soon emerged. Lady Anne claimed that her husband had paid a page, Giles Broadway, £200 as an inducement to rape her. Her daughter Elizabeth said he had not merely encouraged Skipwith to have sex with her, he had watched them at it and had ‘used himself like a beast’ with another footman, Florence Fitzpat
rick (male, despite his name). Yet another servant was accused of seducing Castlehaven’s daughter Lucy. In his deposition, Henry Skipwith admitted offering to ‘lie with the Earl’, and said he had been ordered to have sex with Lady Anne as well as with her daughter.

  Castlehaven’s trial lasted one day. He seems to have made little or no attempt to defend himself. Cynthia Herrup is sceptical that he committed all the horrible acts of which he was accused, or even that he was legally guilty. His punishment seems to have been determined as much by general horror at the licentious behaviour in the house under his charge as by the specifics. His conduct was seen as undermining the standards necessary to bind society together – in particular, he had abandoned his responsibilities as a father to his heir, as a husband to his wife, and as an English nobleman. Charles I, a paradoxical Puritan in matters of sexual propriety, was resolved that he should pay the ultimate price.

  Five weeks after Castlehaven’s execution, two of the large cast of misbehaving servants – Fitzpatrick and Broadway – were hanged at Tyburn for sodomy. Others were given terms of imprisonment. Son James became a doughty soldier in the Royalist cause, mainly in Ireland, where he died in 1684. The estate at Fonthill was awarded to one of Charles I’s courtiers, Lord Cottington, of whom one contemporary, the historian Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon, remarked that ‘he left behind him a greater esteem for his parts than love for his person’. For ever afterwards the Castlehaven connection was referred to in hushed tones, or not at all.

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  One of my cycling circuits took me around Fonthill and over the A303 into Great Ridge Wood. A Roman road cuts through it and makes for pleasantly undemanding pedalling between the old oaks. After a while I cut down through Chilfinch Hanging towards the big road. Where the path emerged from the trees, the peace was fractured by a hell of a commotion ahead.

  The mechanised and depersonalised character of farming today means that an encounter with humans in much of the countryside is a rare event. On a mixed farm like Rob Turner’s at Winterbourne Stoke you will come across blokes attending to stock on a daily basis. But where arable rules, the chances of coming across anything more than the flight of birds, the popping of hare’s ears above the corn and the occasional intrusion of a deer are remote. The arable fields are ploughed one day, fertilised another, sown another, sprayed another, and finally harvested on the fifth day of their active lives. For the remaining 360 days of the year they are left to themselves.

  Tractor at work

  When you do encounter men at work, their business is a far cry from the tillage of the fields in the traditional sense; more like slum clearance or a military sweep-and-burn exercise. The field of yellow rape below Chilfinch was shrouded in a dun cloud. On the flanks of the cloud were two 4x4s piloted by men steering with one hand and holding a phone or radio in the other. At the head of the cloud was a terrifying machine, a kind of agricultural Grendel, with a mouth as wide as a cargo ship furnished with revolving, slicing gnashers. One section of the mouth devoured the flowers, another the stalks. Everything apart from the dust was contained within the machine, where its digestive system separated and stored the different components of the crop.

  High above the insatiable mouth, cocooned inside a bubble of air-conditioned glass, was the controller, the brains. He had headphones clamped to his ears to receive data from his outlying sentries. His hands gripped and pulled the levers, adjusting the height of the gnashing blades to the lie of the land. Ahead of him, the crop spread out in all its slightly fevered vitality. Behind stretched the trail of destruction – brown earth, stones, the stubble.

  Close up the noise was deafening. No one waved to me, no one noticed me. The task of feeding the ravening machine demanded complete concentration and precision. It was relentless and pitiless: a very far cry indeed from the image of the farmer leaning on his plough to light up his clay pipe, ready to offer an opinion on whether the way the rooks were gathering might be a sign of rain before evening.

  The A303 passes Great Ridge Wood and bisects a tiny hamlet called Chicklade. There is a handsome old house there once occupied by Neville Chamberlain’s brother, and a rectory where T. E. Lawrence’s brother lodged for a time – evidently a place for lesser-known brothers. From Chicklade the road rises over a ridge. Ahead the land is, if not bright, different.

  13

  THE END OF THE PLAIN

  From its start near Basingstoke, the road has been founded on chalk. Chalk has determined the character of the landscape. It shows beneath the pale grass and the growing barley and on the newly ploughed earth and the tracks of tractors and through the cattle-trampled mud beside the gates. It is the chalk that bestows on the streams their dazzling clarity, and with the chalk comes the flints that give the churches, old houses, barns and walls their look of strength and endurance. But now the road is finishing with the chalk.

  Its western extremity is a bulge like a fist thrust out north of Fonthill. This is the end of Salisbury Plain, the rolling sea of grass on chalk that unfolds below Beacon Hill beyond Amesbury. Its last bastion, which drops with startling suddenness into the fields due north of Mere, is Whitesheet Hill.

  End of the plain

  It is a fine name for a place of very ancient occupation. The flint flakes of Mesolithic axes have been found there. A Neolithic camp was established on its north-western flank; inevitably William Cunnington thrust his inquiring nose into the accompanying group of barrows, in one of which he found a skeleton ‘which grinned horribly . . . a singularity we have not encountered before’. An Iron Age hillfort came after the Neolithic camp, and a little way south of it. Among other innovations, the Normans brought rabbits to England, and on Whitesheet Hill are the remains of artificial warrens made to encourage the creatures to settle long enough to become rabbit stew. Across the top cuts an old road, possibly a very old road indeed, as it is identified by Mr and Mrs Timperley in The Ancient Trackways of Wessex as our old friend the Harrow Way.

  I first cycled along it on a damp, dank morning that followed a night of rattling windows and beating rain. The ruts were filled with water and the chalky mud was as slippery as ice. Cloud hugged the slopes, blotting out the views, and apart from a couple of hardy dog-walkers I met no one. I came back on a breezy, sunny Good Friday, and the world and his dog were there. Squads of cyclists and droves of walkers passed me. Hang-gliders swooped over the hillfort. A game of rounders was in progress near the Neolithic camp. I sat for a time looking across to Stourhead and the wooded hill from which Alfred’s Tower pokes its top. To the south-west the dark line of the Blackdown Hills formed the horizon. I could see a short stretch of the A303 over to the left, and its buzz was carried on the wind.

  Where I sat, the ground dropped abruptly to the eastern edge of the valley that contains the infant Stour. The change in the texture of the landscape is almost as abrupt, and from my vantage point as clear as the day itself. To the south and west extends a greener, gentler land of clay and loam, the beginnings of the Vale of Wardour. Like Salisbury Plain, it is a mixture of pasture and arable. But the meadows are lusher, and the fields are noticeably smaller than on the Plain. Most of them are defined by hedges along the lines of the eighteenth-century enclosures, and the effect is a striking contrast to the wide, sweeping downs. The lie of the land is more intimate. There is no obvious pattern: hills bunch and drop into wooded vales seemingly at whim. The stone of the old buildings inclines to dun and coffee rather than grey. Flint becomes less common the further you go.

  The A303 runs along the south flank of the chalk bulge that rises into Whitesheet Hill. It is right on the divide, and there passes at right angles over the A350 on a typically functional and aesthetically barren concrete bridge. There is no meeting of the ways, no inducement to east-west traffic to take notice of north-south traffic or the other way round, nothing to suggest that this could be one of the most ancient crossing-points in the civilised world.

  You notice the ‘could’, I hope. Mr and Mrs Timperley
asserted that this was the intersection between the two leading contenders for title of ‘oldest road’, the Great Ridgeway and the Harrow Way. The route they plotted for the Harrow Way has its intimate relationship with the A303 coming to an end about here. Between Weyhill and Thruxton the two are pretty much one and the same. At Amesbury the Harrow Way curves north across the Avon, south across the A303 at Longbarrow Crossroads, then follows the Grovely Wood ridge to Chicklade, where it is reunited with the road for a last few miles. At Willoughby Hedge – according to the account in The Ancient Trackways of Wessex – the Harrow Way leaves the A303 to deal with Mere while it sets off on a northern loop through Stourhead. It meets the A303 for the last time at Knoll Hill, between Wincanton and Sparkford. Thereafter its destiny is to the south.

  Mr and Mrs Timperley believed as an article of faith that the Harrow Way and the Great Ridgeway and the other ridgeways were established long-distance routes that would have been known as such to prehistoric people. The proposition is that they formed a recognised transport system that would have enabled a man in Dover to contemplate doing business in Devon, or enabled a recent arrival from Europe to be directed to the ceremonials on Salisbury Plain. It arose from the natural desire to find something of ourselves in our ancestors when we ponder the deep past, and to locate systems and ways of thinking that we can recognise. The fact that archaeologists have found no convincing evidence to support it has done nothing to lessen its appeal.

  The heritage and outdoor leisure industries, in particular, have embraced it with enthusiasm. The Great Ridgeway has been broken down into more manageable sections – the Wessex Ridgeway, the Ridgeway National Trail and the Icknield Way – which are promoted by the hiking associations and respective local authorities, and endowed with more or less fanciful historical associations. The underlying message is that your enjoyment will be enhanced by the thought that your boots are landing in the footsteps of the keen-eyed hunter-gatherers of old in the days when aurochs and wolves still roamed the land. There is no harm in it. As Hugh Davies points out in his From Trackways to Motorways: ‘The flimsiness of the evidence for long-distance paths need not detract from the enjoyment of using them – after all their existence is part of our history even though evidence for their use as a means of reaching Stonehenge from far-flung parts of the island is no more secure than the idea that the monument was built by the Druids.’