The A303

by Tom Fort

  For a long time Ilchester was Somerset’s official county town. As such it had the county gaol, which stood on a damp piece of ground on the east side of the Ivel/Yeo just downstream from the bridge. Hutton complained that it was entirely gone by 1912. In fact some fragments of wall do survive, but nothing to suggest the imposing scale of this grim institution where up to 270 inmates – men, women and children – were confined until its eventual closure in the 1840s.

  The town was also the appointed scene of executions. Traditionally these took place on common ground beside the road and were the occasions of riotous merrymaking on the part of the locals, who called them ‘hang-fairs’. In time, the scenes of drunken disorder became such that the authorities ordered the gallows to be moved to the gaol, where they were installed on top of the entrance block. The decision prompted one Ilchester innkeeper to declare: ‘ Damn me if Ilchester is worth living in without there are hang-fairs and good elections’ – the latter reference was to its reputation as one of the rottenest boroughs in the land. A good view could still be had, however, either from the wharves across the river or from the bridge, which was invariably packed with spectators on execution days.

  Between 1808 and 1822, Ilchester Gaol was run by William Bridle, previously chief mate on the Retribution, one of the convict ships moored in the Thames off Woolwich. The seventeenth of May 1820 was an evil day in the life of Mr Bridle. At ten o’clock that night he took delivery of one of the most notorious troublemakers in the kingdom. He had no inkling of it at the time, but it was the prelude to his eventual ruin and disgrace.

  The prisoner was Henry Hunt, widely known as ‘Orator’ Hunt. Described by Captain Gronow in his celebrated Memoirs as ‘a large, powerfully-made fellow who might have been mistaken for a butcher’, Hunt was the son of a well-to-do Wiltshire farmer. As a young man he quarrelled with his father, married the daughter of an innkeeper in Devizes, had two children by her before eloping with his best friend’s wife, and served a prison sentence for challenging the colonel in charge of the Marlborough Troop to a duel. He later joined William Cobbett, John Horne Tooke, Sir Francis Burdett and other reforming spirits in challenging the political establishment, and embarked upon a career as a tub-thumping firebrand whose creed embraced universal suffrage, the repeal of the Corn Laws, annual parliaments and voting by ballot.

  William Bridle, Gaoler

  On 16 August 1819, Hunt was due to deliver some rabble-rousing to an enormous crowd that had gathered at St Peter’s Field in Manchester. The local magistrates, fearful of a riot, banned the meeting. When that order was ignored they ordered a mounted force drawn from the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry to arrest Hunt. The horsemen charged the crowd with swords drawn. At least eleven people were killed and between 400 and 700 were injured in what the radical newspaper, the Manchester Observer, dubbed the Peterloo Massacre. Hunt himself had his trademark white topper bashed in, but escaped the mêlée unhurt. He was charged with sedition, and the following spring was sentenced to spend two years at Ilchester Gaol.

  Initially the Orator seemed content with a quiet life of confinement, and devoted himself to writing his incredibly prolix and tedious memoirs (the three volumes he managed to complete got him no further than 1812). But his nature was to make mischief wherever he could, and a year after his arrival at Ilchester, a London printer produced a one-shilling 24-page pamphlet entitled A Peep into a Prison – or the Inside of Ilchester Bastile. It was anonymous, but everyone knew that the author was the prison’s most celebrated inmate.

  Society in Hunt’s day expected their prisons to be severe, horrible places. But the picture he painted shocked – and was carefully designed to shock – their hardened hearts. Indecencies between male and female prisoners in church on the Sabbath; debtors ‘having connexion’ with their wives in the privy or on a table in the tap-room; carousals, dancing and gambling on election nights; boys as young as seven sharing a bed with male inmates, one of them a convicted bestialist; cruel and unusual punishments, including shaving a manacled prisoner’s head and applying an ‘irritable pungent’ to blister it and chaining a man’s hands to his feet so that he ‘resembled a parachute’.

  Hunt also laid formal charges against Gaoler Bridle. Among the twenty-one accusations were: gross neglect of duty, drunkenness, gambling, ‘swearing horrid oaths’, absence from Divine service, dancing with ‘women of the town’ on election night, encouraging ‘drunkenness, debauchery and riot’, cruelty, stealing prisoners’ provisions, embezzling candles, compelling boys to sleep with men, fathering at least one bastard, and altering the Occurrence Book to ‘hoodwink the magistrates’.

  Bridle did his best to defend himself. He produced his own account, under the snappy title A Narrative of the Rise and Improvements Effected in His Majesty’s Gaol at Ilchester in the County of Somerset Between July 1808 and Nov 1821 under the Governance and Superintendence of Wm. Bridle, Keeper. The substance of his defence was that Hunt had turned against him after the withdrawal – by order of the magistrates, not Bridle – of exceptional privileges, which had included daily visits in his room from his mistress, Mrs Vince, and the provision of ‘dinners, wine and other liquors’ from the town. The result was ‘a crocodile egg of mingled falsehood and villainy . . . all malice and perjury’. It was no good. The Orator may have been hated and reviled by the Establishment, but he was listened to. He was a Somebody. Poor Bridle was a Nobody and in December 1821 he was dismissed.

  The following year Hunt was released and resumed his mission of agitation, forming the Radical Reform Association with William Cobbett, although the two of them later fell out in fine agitating fashion. In 1830 he contrived to get himself elected as MP for Preston, but he soon managed to infuriate his constituents by declining to support Lord John Russell’s Reform Bill on the grounds that it did not go far enough. Following his defeat in the 1833 election, the Orator concentrated his energies on the manufacture and marketing of annatto, a colouring for cheeses, as well as a new kind of boot polish. In 1835 this exceptionally quarrelsome man died of a stroke and was buried at the insistence of his mistress, Mrs Vince, in her family vault, much to the fury of her relatives.

  As for the wretched William Bridle, information is scant, as you might expect with a Nobody. But there is a pathetic footnote to his life in the form of a newspaper cutting dated 12 September 1843. It records that Bridle – ‘an elderly man of good address but evidently reduced to great distress’ – appeared before Bow Street magistrates in London charged with using his crutch to break a window at the Home Office. The accused told the court that he had taken the action because of his state of destitution. He embarked upon an account of his undoing at the hands of Henry Hunt, which, he said, had led to his ruin. He was ordered to pay a fine of six shillings or spend six days in prison.

  In that same year Ilchester Gaol was closed, and its inmates were moved to Taunton and Shepton Mallet.

  * * *

  The Fosse Way approaches Ilchester from the north-east as the A37, bisects it partly as an unclassified road and partly as the High Street, and departs south-west as the A303. On the OS map its name is inscribed in antique script, as if it had somehow retained its classical roots. In fact it is no more than a modern functional highway – a fast modern functional highway in the case of the A303, which has dual-carriageway status restored to it for several miles between Ilchester and South Petherton. The map also shows it pretty much dead straight, which – being Roman – it should be, since the one thing every child knows about the Romans is that they built straight roads. (There is an underlying assumption, which is that straightness equalled efficiency which equalled superiority in battle, which equalled conquest over nations reliant on winding paths and tracks.)

  Actually the Fosse Way section of the A303 is not straight. If you stand on the bridge over it near Tintinhull you can see that it curves perceptibly this way and that. Furthermore, when Fosse Way and A303 part company at South Petherton, the Roman road becomes a very minor country lane
heading south-west; and between the villages of Lopen and Dillington you get a excellent view of its alleged straightness. It quite clearly wiggles, in the way a ribbon or piece of string wiggles when pulled taut and then let drop. It is direct, undeniably so, but straight it is not. It follows the way of the track that preceded it, and why would it not? They were efficient, those Romans, but they were not fanatics for straightness.

  Straight? I think not

  I walked west from Ilchester not on the road but along the Monarch’s Way,20 across flat meadows where the early frost sparkled around and in between knots of sheep. I could hear the tearing, rending noise of the A303 over to my right. A couple of times a rise in the ground interposed itself between it and me to silence the racket, and I could then hear the birdsong from the hedgerows. From Tintinhull I took a lane that led towards a place of ancient usefulness, Ham (once known as Hamdon) Hill. It rises quite steeply above the A303 in the shape of a pasty or bloomer loaf lying at right angles to the road, and forms the northern extremity of a ridge of limestone that extends towards Yeovil. It thus looks north across the flatlands between the Parrett and Ivel/Yeo rivers. Ham Hill has been occupied and exploited since Neolithic times, and probably longer. Three miles of ramparts encircle the top, doubtless breached and repaired many times until the Romans finally dislodged the local tribe, the Durotriges, and pacified the whole region by force.

  The hill had much more than just military value. The evidence is all around you if you wander the heights, which are pitted and gouged and excavated into a moonscape of ridges and hollows. A sheer stone face shows the scars left by tools: picks, wedges, hammers, adzes. The hill is built on a type of sandstone known as hamstone, which has been dug here for more than two thousand years, and is still being dug. The Romans used it to make the Fosse Way, and when the road-builders returned to widen the A303 they sent trucks up Ham Hill to remove 25,000 tons of spoil to make the foundations. But it is as a building material that hamstone has made its distinctive imprint on this part of England.

  The architectural writer Simon Jenkins has called it ‘the loveliest stone in England’, and one of its charms is that it suits the humblest cottage as well as the mightiest mansion. In this second category belongs Montacute – ‘that glorious great house’, as Edward Hutton called it – which rises in a vale immediately to the east of Ham Hill. It was built to reflect the wealth and self-esteem of Sir Edward Phelips, Speaker of the House of Commons and one of the prosecutors of Guy Fawkes under James I. Montacute’s wonders are well enough known, but its incomparable general effect owes much to the stone from the quarries above it. In sunlight the building glows as if the blocks had somehow been made from clear honey. In shadow the glow fades, but the warmth is magically retained. It is soft stone, soft enough to be cut easily into ornamental features, and its texture is slightly roughened, like home-made fudge – vanilla, rather than coffee or chocolate. It is ardent, generous stuff.

  The problem with Montacute, as with so many great piles, is that it was built to be lived in and no one lives there any more. It is a National Trust museum, beautiful beyond description and lovingly looked after, but lifeless – more of a monument or a document than a house. The Phelips family clung on there for 300 years, then left because one of them went off his head and gambled away the family fortune. Besides, who would want to live in a place so vast, so echoing, so impossible to heat?

  The glory of Montacute

  Montacute from below

  The answer, for a while, was the ineffably vain and proud Lord Curzon, who considered it a suitable symbol of his enormous grandness. In 1916 he asked his mistress, the romantic novelist Elinor Glyn, to supervise the refurbishment and furnishing of Montacute. Curzon himself was required in London, attending to matters of state and reserving what little spare time he had to conduct an affair with a wealthy American widow, Grace Duggan. It was a pinchingly cold winter. Elinor Glyn shivered in Somerset, feeling neglected. Newspaper deliveries were somewhat patchy out in the sticks and Montacute had no telephone, so it was not until 17 December that Glyn read in The Times of six days beforehand the announcement that Curzon was to marry his American lady.

  ‘Oh, that he whom I adored,’ she wrote, ‘whose nobility I treasured, whose probity I worshipped, could prove so faithless and so vile.’ Who would have guessed that romantic fiction was her calling?

  Hollow Lane

  A sunken lane leads down from the back of Ham Hill to Montacute. I cycled down it one evening to view the great house. Late sunshine lit the beeches soaring above the high banks but where I was it was gloomy enough for dusk. Walls of dark earth held up by slabs of hamstone and pale writhing knots of tree roots rose twenty feet on either side. They had been munched and nibbled by the action of water over the ages, and were splashed with thick mantles of ivy and ferns. High above me the branches clasped each other. I felt squeezed, slightly threatened.

  It may have been down Hollow Lane that Betty Hayne rolled one snowy night when she missed her footing during a blizzard and turned into a snowball by the time she reached the bottom. There she was found the next morning by her husband with her pipe still going, giving rise to a ditty called The Snow Dumpling:

  He was mazed such a smoke from a snowball to see

  He gave it a kick – Lor! How stared he

  When out bundled Betty as brisk as a bee.

  Although stone is still quarried from Ham Hill, its main function these days is as a place of recreation. It is managed as a country park by the county council, and offers mountain biking and horse riding, and swarms with dogs and their owners. There is a stone pub where the dog people meet for coffee and beer, the inside of which smells more strongly of dog than anywhere I have ever been.

  A circle of stones stands in a flattened grassy bowl near the northern edge which is frequently mistaken by visitors for a lesser-known, miniature cousin of Stonehenge. In fact it was put up in 2000 to mark the two millennia of stone-cutting on Ham Hill. An innocent enough idea, you might think, but not in the eyes of the vicar of the village of Stoke-sub-Hamdon, the Reverend Peter Kerton-Johnson. At his behest the parochial church council requested the removal of the circle on the grounds that it would inevitably attract pagans wishing to engage in outlandish and revolting rituals. Drawing on his experience as a priest in Africa, Mr Kerton-Johnson hinted at the possibility of children being used as sacrifices, described the flat stone at the centre of the circle as a mockery of the Lord’s Table, and quoted a passage in the book of the Prophet Jeremiah referring to Israel’s pagan neighbours engaging in sexual acts on hilltops in order to put them in touch with their primitive gods.

  Looking down on Ham Hill and its stones

  Mercifully this terrifying vision of orgiastic Druidism seems to have remained where it originated, in Mr Kerton-Johnson’s imagination; either that, or the pagans have been unusually discreet in their observances. I tend to agree with a long-departed stalwart of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society, Richard Walter, who was moved to deep reflection by contemplating the history of Ham Hill. ‘This classic spot,’ he wrote, ‘which resounded with the clang of arms and the clamour of consanguinary strife is now the retreat of rural quiet and silence . . . It is a matter for grateful felicitation that we are now living in an era when the progress of civilisation, the march of intellect, above all the benign influence of Christianity have rendered such fortresses unnecessary.’ You don’t often come across the word ‘consanguinary’.

  The views from the hill are glorious: to the line of the Mendips in the north, to Alfred’s Tower in the east, to the Dorset downs in the south, to the Blackdown Hills in the west. More mundanely, it looks down on a long stretch of the A303. I sat for a time by the war memorial watching the traffic pass. The road seemed possessed by some mysterious and irrepressible vitality. All around, the green Somerset countryside was still and tranquil, and through it cut this channel of ceaseless noise and motion. So many cars and trucks, so many drivers, so many people in
a hurry to get somewhere to do something. That’s all you could tell of them, that they were in a hurry.

  * * *

  The old part of Stoke-sub-Hamdon is an attractive advertisement for the qualities of the hamstone, but the charms diminish as you reach the modern developments down the hill towards the A303. To the west of the village are fields densely packed with blackcurrant bushes, from which – so I was told by a Ham Hill dog-walker – Ribena obtain the fruit for their famous cordial. As a toddler my younger son was so addicted to it that he began to turn purple from the inside out. ‘I want Bena,’ he would yell, and then sob and shake with grief when we told him he couldn’t have any. Ribena was credited with having kept the nation’s children healthy during the 1939–45 war, when it was distributed free, although more recently it has been accused of promoting tooth decay and even obesity.

  Beyond the blackcurrant bushes the lane peters out close to where the A303 crosses the River Parrett on an ugly concrete bridge. On the north side of the bridge, a little flight of steps leads down to a curious memorial set into the side of the structure. It comprises two very small statues or reliefs with facial features entirely worn away. The figures are said to be those of a boy and girl who were drowned in the river some time in the seventeenth century, and were originally incorporated into the stone bridge which was replaced when the A303 was dualled in the 1970s. Who they were and the circumstances of their deaths remain unknown. But ignorance did not inhibit one of the lesser lights of late eighteenth-century poetry, one Mr Gerrard, from composing an affecting elegy on the subject entitled ‘Petherton Bridge’. This stanza conveys something of the flavour: