The A303

by Tom Fort

  Between the Cadburys the A303 curves north to circumvent Sparkford. Near the roundabout stands an abandoned Little Chef, mouldering quietly away on the edge of its car park. It is a mournful sight – red paint peeling, windows covered in metal sheeting, weeds sprouting, Fat Charlie gone. The roundabout signifies the end (or beginning) of what is – at fourteen miles – the second-longest stretch of dual carriageway after Popham– Amesbury. It thus tends to be the target of much resentment on the part of westbound drivers and their passengers and, conversely, a place of liberation for those heading east. Between Sparkford and the start of the Ilchester bypass three miles or so further west, the road reverts to humble single-carriageway status. The Mere–Sparkford dual section was completed by the opening of the Bourton bypass in July 1992. Although no one realised it at the time, this was to be the last major upgrading of the A303. Thereafter the great vision of the London–Penzance highway was sucked into the morass of the Stonehenge issue and swallowed as if it had never been.

  A similar fate overtook the road-building ambitions of the Blair government. For a while the snappy talk of ‘smart choices’ and ‘better use options’ was matched by the allocation of very considerable funds for construction. As Joe Moran has pointed out, the term ‘road-building’ had become dirty and was replaced by less provocative expressions – ‘widening’, or ‘enhancement’ or ‘extension’ or just ‘improvement’. Enormous projects for widening the M25, the M6 and the M1 went through without fuss or fanfare. Labour’s spending on roads was twice that proposed in the Tories’ Roads For Prosperity blueprint. But they were canny enough to make a tenth as much noise about it.

  Nevertheless the intractable realities continued to squeeze the network. The number of cars on the roads continued to increase in line with disposable incomes. Congestion worsened, but no more than any other government, Blair’s would not look this situation in the face. In 2006 Alistair Darling was elevated from Transport to the Treasury, to be replaced by Douglas Alexander, another Scotsman, although not in the same league for lawyerish dullness. Alexander was keen to make a splash with exciting initiatives, among which was a £10 million project to introduce road-charging. ‘If we do nothing we simply face eternal gridlock,’ Alexander said grimly. They did nothing.

  We knew then, as we know now, as a child could have told them, that there is one way to alleviate congestion, and that is to deter people from driving; in effect to ration it. But to do so requires a resolve – a courage, if you like – that no government has been able to summon. Blair and his ministers walked in fear of the loud and bolshy voice of Mondeo Man Middle England. This was regularly heard in the columns of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, and pretty much non-stop on websites set up by the likes of the ABD, the Association of British Drivers. The ABD is for ‘drivers who THINK for themselves’, and its mission is to speak out fearlessly and at high volume on behalf of the bullied and exploited and previously mute British motorist. The ABD fulminated against fuel tax, speed bumps, the traffic police and their mobile speed checks, the hated cameras, environmental campaigners (particularly those of the global warming tendency), and the reluctance of the powers-that-be to spend enough on building new roads. The mention of road tolls is sufficient to send the ABD’s committee of Mondeo Men wild.

  Mr Alexander and his colleagues immediately lost their nerve. He did what ministers do when trying to disguise inaction as a dynamic, carefully considered and meticulously costed new policy, and ordered a review. By the time it was completed and published, Mr Alexander had been shunted off by Gordon Brown (at last Prime Minister) to take charge of International Development. His replacement was Ruth Kelly, previously regarded as one of the party’s rising stars but at that time – July 2007 – levelling off in preparation for disappearing from the political landscape altogether. The review found that the Department of Transport’s procedure for considering and adopting new road schemes was a joke. Any relationship between projected and actual costs was accidental. The programme set out by Tony Blair in 2004 was unaffordable. The words in his foreword – ‘where it makes economic sense . . .the long-term solution lies in the sustained programme of investment and innovation started under this government and the courage to take difficult decisions’ – chimed with more than usual hollowness. The appendix to the 2007 review listed a modest number of projects that would proceed, mainly for widening motorways. The A303 did not feature.

  * * *

  Beneath Sparkford Hill the road heads south-west for Ilchester. To the north unfolds a flat, tranquil tract of green, hedged fields broken by patches of woodland and traversed by narrow, wandering lanes. The exception is the rulered line of the Fosse Way, which cuts north-east towards Shepton Mallet.18 A dark little stream, the Cary, winds an unhurried course through the meadows northwest of the junction between the Roman road and the A303 at Podimore. It lends its name to a place of extraordinary, almost unreal beauty.

  It is called Lytes Cary, the first part of the name belonging to the family that occupied it for 500 years until financial pressures proved too much for them in the middle of the eighteenth century. Different Lytes left their mark at different times: the little three-windowed chapel built in 1343; the manor house and Great Hall with its beefy chimney-stacks, dating from the fifteenth century; the oriel, entrance porch and parlour added in the reign of Henry VIII. They are built of the local blue lias stone, and of hamstone from the Ham Hill quarry, a few miles down the A303. Over the centuries they have grown together as if they had risen from the dark Somerset soil. Together with the severely formal gardens and the orchard added in the early twentieth century, they – in Pevsner’s words – ‘blend to perfection with one another and the gentle sunny landscape that surrounds them’.

  Lytes Cary

  The Lytes were an English family of a particular kind. They were not aristocrats, they did not aspire to assist in empire-building or slaughtering the monarch’s enemies, they did not seek to ally themselves with powerful dynasties. They were gentry, intensely proud of their lineage and their land, and were generally content to stay quietly at home, glorying in their bloodline, attending to their tenants, their acres and their fine old house. They were clever, educated, and somewhat prone to innocuous battiness.

  The only one to cause any ripples beyond Somerset was Henry Lyte, who was born in 1529. According to the famously venomous diarist Anthony à Wood, Henry travelled extensively abroad after leaving Oxford and became a ‘most excellent scholar in several sorts of learning’. In 1578 he published his Herbal, or History of Plantes, which was based on his own translation, extensively annotated, of a Dutch text. It was a mighty volume of more than 700 pages and was popular enough to go into several later editions.

  Henry Lyte’s other published literary work was a much more modest and eccentric affair. It consisted of twenty-six small pages, one of which bore a portrait of Queen Elizabeth and another a woodcut of the Lyte family crest, a chevron with three swans beneath another swan with the motto Laetitia et Spe Immortalitatis.19 It was called The Light of Britayne, a Recorde of the Honourable Originall and Antiquitie of Britaine, and it attempted to prove, through the author’s ingenious etymological deductions, that the British were descended from the Trojans. Two subsequent treatises – both unpublished – developed the theme. Henry Lyte also compiled a table which showed how ‘Lyte of Lytescarie sprang from the race and stock of Leitus (one of the five capitaynes of Beotia that went to Troye) and that his ancestors came to England first with Brute’ – ‘Brute’ being Brutus, a descendant of the Trojan hero Æneas, whom Henry Lyte credited with the founding of Bruton, a town north-west of Castle Cary.

  In a history of the family published in 1910, Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte commented of his Trojan forbear: ‘How a man capable of such scholarlike work as the translation of Dodoen’s Herbal could occupy himself with fancies of this sort is a psychological problem.’ I could not have put it better myself.

  Limington Church

  A few miles sout
h of Lytes Cary, on the other side of the A303, is a village called Limington. There is a nice old church there, with a sturdy, square tower. Two effigies lie side by side in the north chapel: those of Sir Richard de Gyverney, Lord of the Manor in 1329, and his wife Gunnora. Sir Richard is in full armour, with bascinet, vambrace, couters, hauberk and gambeson (the knightly idioms are irresistible), and there are flecks of the original turquoise paint still visible.

  But Limington’s chief claim to notice does not reside in the recumbent knight and the fair Gunnora, but in the rector instituted – so the parish register records – on 10 October 1500. He was the son of a butcher, born in faraway Ipswich, and his destiny was to become the most powerful figure in the country after the king himself (and there were those who disputed that order of precedence). Thomas Wolsey secured the living at Limington because it was in the gift of the Marquess of Dorset, whose sons he tutored at Oxford and on whom he lavished his considerable talent for flattery. Subsequently Wolsey accumulated clerical offices as other men collect butterflies or pewter mugs, and he was not inclined to boast of the rectorship of an obscure parish in Somerset. But he could not shake off the place altogether: a story connected with it stuck to him like a birthmark.

  It was said that one day he attended the fair at Lopen, a village down the Fosse Way to the south-west; that he was drunk and excessively merry; even that he pinched a female bottom or two. His conduct came to the attention of the Sheriff of Dorset and Somerset, Sir Amyas Paulet, a distinguished soldier who had fought for Henry VII against the Yorkist rebels at Stoke Field in 1487. Sir Amyas ordered the boisterous rector to be placed in the stocks by his feet, an indignity made all the worse because, under the law, he had no right of jurisdiction over a priest. Wolsey did not forget.

  The historian Clarendon takes up the tale: ‘When Wolsey mounted the dignity of Chancellor of England he was not oblivious of the old displeasure ministered unto him by Master Paulet but sent for him and after many sharp and heinous words enjoined him to attend upon the council until he were by them dismissed . . . so that he continued within the Middle Temple the space of five or six years or more.’ Other reports suggest that Sir Amyas was accused of fomenting heresy through his position as Treasurer of the Middle Temple. Eventually he was able to appease Wolsey by paying for a splendid new gateway for the Temple which prominently displayed the Chancellor’s badge.

  ‘Who would have thought,’ commented Clarendon sententiously, ‘that when Sir Amyas Paulet punished this poor scholar that he would have attained to be Chancellor of England considering his baseness in every condition . . . these be wonderful works of God and fortune.’

  Indeed they be.

  * * *

  So to Ilchester on the old road, the A303 far enough away to the north to be inaudible. It was a long plod in the fading light of a February afternoon, much of it past the high fence surmounted with razor wire that defends the Royal Navy Air Station, Yeovilton. These days the likelihood of a ground attack against our military installations seems remote, but they all have these fences, so there must be a reason.

  These places are very distinct; they could not be confused with a university, say, or a boarding school or prison or some other institution where people live and work. It’s partly to do with the glimpses of blokes and occasionally women in uniform, partly with the fondness for displaying military memorabilia to remind passers-by what their business is – in the case of RNAS Yeovilton, a superannuated helicopter here and there. They are also distinguished by their disorderly appearance, which is curiously at odds with the model of the serviceman or woman on parade. There is no planning, in the conventional sense of trying to make a large complex appear tidy and vaguely pleasant to the eye. Everything at Yeovilton – offices, accommodation blocks, runways, football pitches, fuel tanks, hangars – looks as if it had been thrown down wherever the need for it has arisen, by people with their minds on other matters. The resulting mess is a statement: we have the space, we help ourselves, we haven’t the time for looking nice.

  As the darkness gathered, the orange lights lining the perimeter of the base and the roadways and verges and standing at every corner grew brighter. Overhead, the granite sky was pricked by the clear front lights and winking red tail-lights of Lynx helicopters returning from training flights. I passed the main gates, guarded on either side by mighty anchors that once held HMS Ark Royal and HMS Eagle steady against storms and tides as they defended the nation’s interests across the Seven Seas. My hips and knees ached and my blisters – one on the ball of each foot – smarted as my steps slowly closed the distance between me and the beer, the sustaining food and the welcoming bed for which my soul was yearning.

  Outside RNAS Yeovilton

  15

  ROMAN WAYS, BLOODY ASSIZES

  It may be that Edward Hutton had a bilious attack or suffered some kind of outrage when he visited Ilchester in preparation for writing his Highways and Byways in Somerset. Normally a warm-hearted as well as a splendidly inquisitive guide, he does not have a good word to say about the place. ‘An ancient decayed town with very little to interest the traveller’ is his grumpy verdict. He concedes that Ilchester had ‘some importance’ in medieval times, due to its position on the Fosse Way. But now (in 1912), Hutton says, it is once more what it was when the Romans built the road, namely ‘a poor and unimportant village’.

  He quotes John Leland, who found it ‘in wonderful decay as a thing in a manner raised by men of war’. Of the old buildings and monuments described by Leland, three of the four parish churches, the Roman walls, the town gate, the Dominican Priory, the Augustinian nunnery, the Hospital of St Margaret, the almshouses, the Guildhall and even the gaol – all had been destroyed. Hutton makes it sound like a charge sheet. Only the Church of St Mary Major (‘small . . . contains little to attract us’) and the Market Cross (‘merely a fine and lofty pillar crowned by a sundial’) had survived Ilchester’s neglect of itself. Its sole glory, Hutton declares, is the memory of its one great son, the medieval scholar and mage Roger Bacon.

  Ilchester, 1736

  Hutton’s deepest scorn is reserved for Ilchester’s Roman pretensions – ‘a fictitious greatness. . . that never belonged to it,’ he snorts. He was plain wrong, although he was not to know it, since the excavations that revealed Ilchester’s very considerable importance as a Roman trading centre did not begin until the late 1940s and were not fully described until the 1980s. In fact Lindinis or Lendiniae was a substantial walled settlement built around a junction between the Fosse Way and two other roads – one leading to Dorchester, the other going north-west – with a grid of residential streets and ribbon development leading to suburbs on the higher ground to the south-east and north-west. By the fourth century AD Ilchester covered an area of fifty acres. Its centre was densely filled with stone dwellings, some of which boasted that defining measure of Roman affluence, mosaic floors. Evidence has been uncovered pointing to the existence of a glassworks, metal works, builder’s yard and at least one farm. River trade almost certainly played a major role in the town’s commercial life. Several cemeteries have been identified, one containing at least 1500 dead Romans.

  Unlike Edward Hutton, I warmed at once to Ilchester. This may have had something to do with finding a friendly bed-and-breakfast which provided me with a limb-caressing hot bath, a mattress sprung ideally between resilience and give, and a sustaining fried breakfast (homemade fig jam with my toast) that set me up perfectly for the next day’s labours. It may also have had something to do with the steak-and-ale pie and several pints of Great Bustard Bitter that I put away for supper in the Bull Inn. My opinion was most certainly influenced by Ilchester’s river, which flows in from the east, chatters cheerfully beneath its handsome seven-arched stone bridge, and winds away past one of the Roman cemeteries.

  Edward Hutton was not much of a water man, though very strong on churches. He notes bridges but does not linger on them, which shows he cannot have been an angler. To me a bridge with water
underneath it is simply irresistible, and I enjoyed Ilchester’s both on the evening of my arrival and on the morning of my departure – my one complaint being the amount of traffic using it, presumably generated by the Yeovilton base.

  Ilchester persists in calling its river the Ivel, while everyone else prefers to call it the Yeo. Ilchester has antiquity on its side – Ivel is of Celtic origin – but not much else; and one wonders why it does not call itself Gifelecestre (as it was in the fourteenth century) if it is so keen on the old names.

  Call it Ivel or Yeo

  Whatever you call it, the stream alternates pleasingly between still, reedy pools and speedy shallows, the water clear over a dark, marly bed and highly suggestive of good artisan fish like chub and perch. It is eventually subsumed into the Parrett at Langport away to the north-west. The Parrett is one of the few rivers in this country on which commercial fishing for elvers, infant eels, still takes place. Since eels migrate far up rivers, as well as to the Sargasso Sea, an eel connection for Ilchester (?Eelchester), may be presumed. As a keen eel fancier myself, you may imagine that my interest quickened when I came across a reference to the Ilchester Eel Fair. I pictured a quaint celebration of country ways with its origins lost in the mists of time – perhaps a procession with eel spears to a favoured spot on the river, or an eel dance or eel song. To my disappointment, I found out that the Eel Fair was a recent and short-lived promotional exercise dreamed up with the ostensible objective of raising money to restore a dilapidated eel trap somewhere upstream, although in the end the funds went to provide flowerbeds on one of Ilchester’s roundabouts.