The A303

by Tom Fort

  The idea of Wessex endures in a way that is different from that of Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria. Its essence is a vague nostalgia for the disappeared past. One element might be Hardy’s ‘natural’ rural society, a rough-handed peasantry bound together by ancient customs and shared dependence. Another might be personified by Alfred himself, embodiment of valour, chivalry, public spiritedness and Christian charity. There is an apprehension of a pure Englishness at work long ago, a feeling of something noble and selfless in ourselves that we have somehow contrived to mislay, and could perhaps – if we tried hard enough – rediscover one day.

  * * *

  After crossing the A350, the A303 runs down the side of Charnage Down towards Mere. There is a well-known watering hole in a lay-by there, the Willoughby Hedge Café, where you can get a splendidly filling breakfast at half the price you would pay up the hill at the Little Chef. There are loos and a picnic table and a grassy bank to lie upon; and if you ask her, the cheery lady doling out the bacon-egg-and-sausage baps will tell you how Chris Evans praised them on the radio and how Norman Tebbit used to stop by.

  This stretch used to be enlivened by the appearance in an adjoining field of a life-sized bison made from plywood. For thirteen summers the creature surveyed the scene and advertised the presence of bison at a farm at West Knoyle. Then, in June 2007, the owners of the farm received a letter from some busybody at Salisbury District Council telling them to remove the beast or face a fine. ‘It’s bureaucracy gone mad,’ the farmer’s wife protested. Not so, droned the council spokesman. The bison was unauthorised, the location was an area of ‘outstanding natural beauty’, it might ‘represent a distraction to drivers’. A couple of miles up the road, Little Chefs Fat Charlie beams moronically, presumably no distraction at all. The mad pen-pushers won the day, of course, and the bison was carted off back to the farm, where it now stands under an oak tree by the entrance, unloved and unheeded.

  Does no one want a bison?

  One late January afternoon, having tramped the A303 for many wearying miles past Fonthill and through Chicklade and as far as Fat Charlie’s annoying face, I decided I had had enough of the noise. I took the lane behind the Little Chef that leads to West Knoyle. I turned off before the bison farm for Mere, whose lights were winking across the fields. The light was almost gone as I went through Charnage, which hardly even qualifies as a hamlet. But the footpath I was looking for showed up clear enough in the gloaming and I followed it through a herd of shadowy bullocks, reaching the outskirts of Mere as the church clock struck five.

  I spent the night at the George, where the bed was comfortable, the bath big enough for me, and the water hot. Charles II is said to have dined there before he was Charles II, on his flight from defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651. We are not told what he ate, but I doubt if it could have been better than my breaded mushrooms followed by sirloin steak washed down by four pints of Badger Bitter.

  14

  ALL KNIGHTLY DEEDS

  A little way out of Mere the A303 leaves Wiltshire and belongs for a few miles to the northern extremity of Dorset before entering Somerset. The brief Dorset phase is not recorded on the road signs and generally occasions little fuss. The one difference I noticed as I marched along the verge was that Dorset attends closely to its footpaths. At least three cross the A303 and each has a flight of brick steps leading up and down either side of the road, plus a marked cut through the central reservation, all of which must have cost someone a bob or two. The rambler still faces a somewhat anxious dash across the two carriageways, which here run straight and smooth, encouraging cars to scorch by. It requires a cool head, a spot of nerve, and a nice sense of timing to get it right.

  A couple of paths lead to Dorset’s northernmost village, Bourton. The Stour runs down to it from Stourhead, and although the stream is only a few feet wide it had enough latent energy to be exploited to Bourton’s advantage. The mill listed in Domesday subsequently evolved into a complex comprising a flax mill and a foundry. More than 200 people worked there, and it was a proud moment in Bourton’s history when a water wheel sixty feet high – then the largest in the country – was installed in the 1830s (some say it was the second-largest, but Bourtonians know better). The business was owned by a local family, the Maggs brothers, and towards the end of the nineteenth century it concentrated on the foundry where agricultural machinery, water pumps, steam engines and the like were manufactured.

  The outbreak of war in 1914 meant a new role for the company, now Maggs and Hindley. A clever young engineer from Sunderland, William Mills, had developed a hand-held grenade known as the Mills bomb. Its serrated casing made it easy to grip and fragmented to lethal effect when it exploded. The troops were taught to adapt their cricketing skills to lob them at the enemy, and it is estimated that 70 million were used up to 1918. Factories all over the country went over to making the Mills bomb, among them the Bourton Foundry, although production there came to an abrupt halt on an infamous June day in 1917, when a tremendous thunderstorm set off a flood which destroyed much of the factory and washed hundreds of bombs far downstream.

  By then the mighty water wheel was gone, and the company’s fortunes subsequently went into decline. After various later incarnations – one as a dried milk plant – it closed in 2002 and was left to rot. It’s a sad sight: walls covered in witless graffiti, roofs collapsed, rubble and smashed beams heaped everywhere. But the past is not forgotten. Just above the mill pool is a house occupied by a member of the Maggs family, with a pair of model Mills bombs on the gateposts. Outside the gate is an odd little tiled well-cover over a pair of blue china boots, which bears the inscription, ‘Faeces Tauros Sapientia Vincit’. My knowledge of Latin is not what it was but even I could work out the sentiment, though why anyone should wish to commemorate the triumph of wisdom over bullshit in such a way is beyond me.

  The Stour is hidden in a tunnel immediately below Bourton Foundry but emerges into the daylight a little way further on. I spent some time on the bridge inspecting it, for I can never resist a stream. Here it has covered two of the sixty miles that take it to the sea at Christchurch. It is very small and you wonder how – even in the days before abstraction when our rivers generally ran much fuller – it could ever have powered the mighty wheel. It flows quick and dark, although the water is clear: another clue to the transformation in the landscape between here and the chalkland to the east. The chalk has given way to a form of sandstone known as greensand which breaks down over the ages into fertile loam and clay. It makes for a greener, softer land.

  From Bourton I followed the ‘old’ A303 out of Dorset and up a gentle but persistent hill to Wincanton. All roads south led to Stoke Trister, a village I imagined to be prey to congenital melancholy. I went into a café just off Wincanton’s High Street for a bacon roll and a cup of tea. It was run by a young Portuguese man, and the TV was tuned to a Portuguese discussion programme. I sat next to a set of shelves stacked with dried beans and tinned fish and other foodstuffs from Portugal, listening to three Wincanton ladies discussing husbands and soap operas. I did wonder about the Portuguese dimension, but the provider of my bacon sandwich did not seem to understand my question.

  Wincanton is, apparently, the only town in England to boast a twinning link with a fictional place–Ankh-Morpork, which features in the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett. With the author’s approval, some of the titles of the novels have been adapted into street names in the housing development that now fills the space between the old market town and the A303 bypass to the south. Disappointingly, the twinning initiative seems to have been a marketing ploy dreamed up by PR people hired by the building company Wimpey, rather than a reflection of a particular burning enthusiasm among the people of Wincanton for Sir Terry’s work. But the town has done its best to join in; for a time the local butchers rebranded its popular wild boar and cranberry sausages as Discworld sausages, and the Discworld Emporium in the high street advertises itself as ‘the official Ankh-Morpo
rk consulate’.

  Never having read a Discworld novel and having no means to cook a banger, I did not linger. I had the sniff of older adventures and nobler chivalry in my nostrils.

  * * *

  There was a time, not so long ago, when it was still possible to believe that there had once been a King Arthur, a Camelot, a Round Table, a company of Knights.

  The Reverend James Bennett was one such believer. For twenty-six years until his death in 1890 he served as Rector of South Cadbury, a village just south of the A303. As well as ministering to the souls of his little parish, Bennett had a passion for deciphering and dating ancient ecclesiastical rolls and legal documents, and was a dedicated member of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society. In short, he was a model Victorian enthusiast for the past. In the words of the sweet and affectionate obituary in the Society’s Journal, ‘his vivacity and eager interest, readiness to receive and impart information, sunny good humour, with occasional vigorous thrusts and sharp retorts, but ever genial sympathy, will leave a long and pleasant remembrance of the friend who has been taken from us.’

  For Bennett and others of his admirable breed, history was living tissue, and the past was a land peopled by flesh-and-blood heroes and villains. His imagination was stirred by the echoes of deeds of valour and chivalry. How could it be otherwise when the ramparts of Camelot rose from outside the very windows of his rectory?

  Cadbury Castle – even more so than Yarnbury Castle, back up the A303 – is a natural stronghold, a place to fortify and look down on your enemies, not a place to relish attacking. It is shaped a bit like a conker, with sides whose testing steepness is concealed by a belt of sycamore and ash. It levels at the top into a smooth meadow like a monk’s tonsure big enough in times past to have been worth ploughing, although it is now left to grass. Four lines of still formidable bank-and-ditch loop around the summit, with a break on the south-west side where the entrance was positioned.

  Is it Cadbury? Or Camelot? Or both?

  Henry VIII’s itinerant recorder of the nation’s wonders, John Leland, started the mischief about Camelot. He inspected Cadbury in 1542, and wrote his record thus:

  Sometime a famose town or castelle, apon a very torre or hille, wonderfully enstrengthened of nature . . . much gold, sylver and copper of the Romaine coynes hath byn found ther yn plouing . . . the people can telle nothing ther but that they hav hard say that Artur much resorted to Camalat.

  ‘Hav hard say’ hardly qualifies as reliable source material. Nor is Leland’s citing of the nearby villages of Queen Camel and West Camel in support of his ‘Camalat’ any more convincing.

  Leland’s successor, William Camden, also reported that ‘the local people call it Arthur’s Palace’, though he clearly did not believe them. The Druidical William Stukeley, a century and a half after Camden, asserted that the name Camelot ‘generally obtained among the learned’ and that ‘the country people are ignorant of it.’

  But Leland’s seed germinated and took root. By the time James Bennett succeeded his father as rector, the country people believed entirely in Camelot and a great deal else. The hill, they said, was hollow – a gentle clap over the well on the eastern face could be clearly heard at a spring on the opposite side. The fairies, they said, lived there and left their gold behind them when the fitting of bells at the church forced them to abandon the hill. When the moon was full, they said, Arthur and his men rode around on horses shod in silver, and watered their animals at the well; and at Christmas came down to the village of Sutton Montis to use the spring by the church wall.

  The rector listened to these tales and doubtless smiled. But his soul was roused. ‘There is no smoke without fire,’ he wrote about the legends. He went in search of evidence to support his conviction that ‘the peaceful green mounds of Cadbury were once a living city, the very heart of the life of a gallant race of men.’ He had a trench dug below the crown of the hill in which he found considerable quantities of pottery – and the deeper they dug, the coarser it became. From this Bennett deduced that ‘the rude race that began it had to give way to another in a higher state of civilisation.’

  But whose civilisation? Bennett also uncovered Roman coins. It was known that the Roman era had ended in the fifth century AD, and that the Saxon invasions had started soon after. But who came in between? Bennett posited a ‘British’ kingdom protected by the Mendips in the north, the great forest of Selwood in the west, and ‘the trackless valley of the Stour’ to the south. After the taking of Sarum (Salisbury) by the Saxons in the middle of the sixth century, the Britons had withdrawn west making Cadbury their new capital. Their leaders were ‘such men as the race has loved to sing of in the story of Arthur, Geraint and all the noble knights.’ But the Saxons would not be denied. Arthur beat them at Mount Badon, which Bennett placed at Badbury Rings in south Dorset. They came again, and were beaten again, at Cathbregion (Cadbury). Back they came, and at last they triumphed and bested the great British king, who was slain and whose body was carried to Avalon (Glastonbury).

  Bennett located the last stand of the ancient Britons and their leader in a little valley to the south-east of Camelot/Cadbury. The place is called Sigwells, from ‘siege-quelle’ which he translates as ‘Victory Springs’. He imagined ‘the Saxon host panting and weary from the long, hot fight here stopping a while to drink’ before chasing the enemy up the ramparts of Cadbury and slaughtering them where they stood. In a field called Westwoods at the foot of the western side of Cadbury were trenches filled with the bodies of men and boys. ‘Here, it seems,’ wrote Bennett, ‘we have the graves of the last of the Britons of Camelot.’

  The rector’s castle of imagining was built on a shifting sand of dubious chronologies and dodgy etymologies. But he had unwittingly stumbled upon one important clue. Later analysis of the pottery he found showed that Cadbury had indeed been occupied in pre-Roman times as well as by the Romans themselves. Ploughing of the crown of the hill in the 1950s turned up more remains, some Neolithic and some Iron Age, but most intriguingly some fragments of pottery contemporaneous with pottery found at Tintagel in Cornwall and dated to the fifth or sixth century AD. This was the age of the Round Table. Back onto the public stage galloped Arthur, Launcelot, Geraint, Merlin and the rest.

  Between 1966 and 1970 the secrets of Camelot were laid bare by a team of archaeologists led by Professor Leslie Alcock of Cardiff University. They were able to show that the hill had been occupied for several hundred years before the Romans arrived. For some unknown reason it had been unused for much of the Roman period. Then – thrillingly – it was reoccupied around 500 AD and remained in use for the best part of a century. During that period the fortifications were mightily strengthened with a stone top or even an added wall. A gatehouse was built at the south-west corner over a cobbled access road. At the highest point of the hill, the archaeologists revealed the foundations of a great timber hall, inevitably named Arthur’s Palace.

  The coincidences were almost too good to be true. At the very least, Cadbury/Camelot had been the military headquarters of a powerful and wealthy warlord, and it took no time for the Arthurian connection to be made. Thousands of tourists gathered to watch the digging. Some colourful and excitable press coverage was exploited in a calculated fashion – principally to attract funds – by the organisers of the dig, who called themselves the Camelot Research Committee. Professor Alcock himself, in a book which he wrote at high speed as soon as the excavation was over and called By South Cadbury Is That Camelot, stated baldly that ‘Camelot has no historical authenticity: it is a place that never was.’ But what about Arthur? The spirit of the Reverend James Bennett must have been in the air, because Professor Alcock declared himself a believer.

  In later years he came to regret his boldness, as a succession of medievalists and archaeologists exposed each and every one of the written sources attesting to the historical Arthur as being riddled with absurdities. Arthur the great king who fought the Saxons and defended the anci
ent British virtues has steadily receded into the mist. But Arthur the legend, Arthur the fabulous, Arthur the idea – that Arthur is immortal.

  What was President John F. Kennedy’s favourite song? It came from Lerner and Loewe’s Arthurian musical extravaganza:

  Don’t let it be forgot

  That there once was a spot

  For one brief shining moment

  That was known as Camelot.

  Soon after Kennedy’s funeral his widow gave an interview to Theodore White during which she played the song over and over again. White wrote later that Kennedy’s association with Camelot ‘represented a magic moment in American history when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers and poets met at the White House, and the barbarians beyond the walls held back.’

  I feel that the erstwhile rector of South Cadbury and the assassinated American president would have recognised each other as kindred spirits.

  North Cadbury stands across the A303 from South Cadbury. It is not as imposing, but still represented a taxing ascent at the end of a trudge that had begun the day before beyond Wylye, and when the one bus of the afternoon to the railway station at Castle Cary was imminent. It has a fine church and an even finer manor house, Elizabethan in origin, whose high windows look to Camelot across the ceaseless movement of the road. Apart from the traffic noise, North Cadbury is a quiet place and there was not a soul to be seen when I came into the village with a good ten minutes before the bus was due. It has two main streets, one heading north, one breaking off to the east. But which had the bus stop?

  Eventually I spotted a postman doing his deliveries and I urged my blistered feet after him as he negotiated his van from house to house down the street past the church. When I finally caught up with him and gasped out my question he was nonplussed. Bus? He’d never seen one of them, certainly not down this road, mate. Maybe back on the main road. I lolloped back to the other road and heard the bus before I saw it breast the hill. I waved my arms like a shipwrecked mariner hoping for rescue, and the driver – surprised, I think, to encounter a fare in North Cadbury – took pity on me.