by Tom Fort
I stopped to look at the minute Church of St Barnabas at Ham, a hundred yards or so up a little lane off the A303. Built of sturdy light grey stone which I presumed to be chert, it was once a barn but was converted to serve the spiritual needs of the residents of Ham who were apparently reluctant to walk the two miles there and back to the nearest church at Combe St Nicholas. There were not many of them, which was just as well because the building is no more than twelve yards long and half that wide. They still hold services twice a month there, but not in winter because there is no electricity.
A little way on I passed a faint echo of an old battle cry, in the form of a broken sign hanging from a gate on which the words DUAL THE A30/303 could be made out. There is a junction ahead with a minor road leading south to Chard and north to Taunton – the devil for accidents, according to the Chard and Ilminster News, but very quiet when I walked past. A spacious roadside inn called the Eagle stands close by, where I had a welcome pint and a ham ciabatta before plodding on down the hill towards Marsh.
It was a day in mid-March, balanced between winter and spring. The hedgerows were largely bare of leaves but the daffodils were out and it was warm enough to walk in shirtsleeves. The traffic was very light, and on occasions ceased altogether for up to a minute. On one occasion I stood still right by the A303 and clearly heard a blackbird sing, and then a cow bellow from the field below.
Devon welcomes you as you reach the Marsh bypass, although car drivers don’t notice because they are too intent on slamming their feet down on their accelerators to wrest the maximum possible overtaking advantage from the short stretch of dual carriageway. Somerset also offers a welcome to those coming the opposite way, which is good of it (Hampshire, pay attention!). The border between the two counties is formed here by the Yarty, a river I had never heard of before but which looked distinctly trouty.
Slow down
Beyond Marsh the A303’s designation as a strategic highway to the west becomes absurd. There is a testing little hill which leads up to a 90-degree left-hand bend signalled in advance by a 20 m.p.h. speed limit sign. Twenty miles per hour! How is the mighty London– Penzance Trunk Road fallen! The sweet Devon air is filled with the dissonant hubbub of hissing brakes, grinding gear changes and straining engines as the trucks pant their way around the obstacle, hardly able to summon ten miles per hour, let alone twenty. The road’s spirit does not recover. It limps up and along Sandpit Hill and crawls into Newcott.
Newcott is a bit of a non-place, but there is a garage and next to it a large roadside diner, the Newcott Chef. As such it sported a white-on-red logo strikingly reminiscent of Little Chefs Fat Charlie – so strikingly that the Little Chef chain was moved to bring a fatuous and unsuccessful legal action to get it changed. ‘Simply better, definitely quicker’, the Newcott Chef boasted challengingly from beneath his bulging white hat. The place shut down for a while not long ago, and there were rumours that it had been sold and would be revived and renamed Route 303. But the last time I passed by, it was trading again under the old name.
No, I’m not Fat Charlie
The end is close.
17
THE END OF THE ROAD
And it comes without even a whimper.
But first there is Annie’s Tea Bar. Annie is Annie Harris, a silver-haired, motherly type with a West County accent moulded in Ilminster. The tea bar is a seasoned caravan whose very fabric is impregnated with the fumes from the bacon sarnies and full breakfasts – fried bread or toast, black pudding 50p extra – that she has been dispensing for the past dozen or so years. On my travels I have disposed of a good few of Annie’s breakfasts, and I can testify that they infallibly cheer up the dreariest morning and induce a sense of lasting well-being.
She is a friendly soul, Annie, and so is her friend Carol, who shares the duties. When I stopped by in the early spring of 2011 they were getting excited about going to London for the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, which was Carol’s treat for her friend. Their pleasure at the prospect of getting a glimpse of William and Kate was as warm and nourishing as the bacon sizzling on the griddle.
It’s hard work for the pair of them, on their feet all day, and Annie is not in the first flush. But she likes the chat with her regulars, giggles at the suggestion that she should put croissants on the menu (‘they can have toast instead of fried bread if they’re worried about their health’) and clings to the belief that she should really have been on the stage instead of flipping eggs.
Her smile fades if you mention the Highways Agency. For some reason they took away the loos that used to stand further along the lay-by from the tea bar. It was a blow to Annie’s trade and she does not forget or forgive. The Agency’s sign ahead of the lay-by does not hint at the existence of her enterprise. There is a WC on it, crossed out, a P for parking, a picture of a bench, and an I for information. This refers to a panel which may once have displayed titbits of interest to passers-by, but whose graphics and words are now as faded as a medieval fresco.
Annie on the left, Carol on the right, breakfast behind
The setting is splendid. The lay-by and Annie’s Tea Bar stand on the edge of a ridge that drops steeply into the valley of the River Otter – Coleridge’s ‘dear native brook . . . wild streamlet of the West’. Somewhere down there, out of sight, is the village of Upottery. This was once the seat of William Pitt’s friend and loyal colleague, the famously long-winded Henry Addington, who served in six governments, prompting his fellow politician George Canning to remark: ‘He is like the smallpox – everyone is obliged to have him once in their lives.’
Beyond the river a white lane wanders up the slope past Baxter’s Farm towards yet another Beacon Hill. To the left is curiously named Braddicksnap Hill, with Hartridge beyond. Whitewashed stone cottages and white bungalows are dotted around the edges of the fields, some pasture, others ploughed for barley and rape. Neat, flat-topped hawthorn hedges lead to much less neat copses. It is a good place for a road to die.
There is no sense in the A303’s sudden demise. It is done in, swiftly and without fuss, by its old rival, the A30. Back at Popham this historic highway was usurped by the upstart newcomer and relegated to a thankless penitential plod past Stockbridge, Salisbury, Shaftesbury, Sherborne, Yeovil, Crewkerne and Chard. It waits a long time for its revenge. A short stroll beyond Annie’s Tea Bar it strikes back.
In the end is my beginning
The means of dispatch is what road enthusiasts refer to as a TOTSO, an acronym for Turn Off To Stay On. It is a junction at which two roads become one, and the number of the lesser of them – the one that gives way – becomes that of the unified route. A simple diagram makes it obvious:
Clearly the Turning Off To Stay On applies only to east-bound traffic wanting to take the A30 for Chard rather than the A303. But whichever way you look at it, the designation of the single road born of the junction as the A30 is whimsical.
I asked the Highways Agency for an explanation, but it preferred to remain silent. The subject has been debated at length by contributors to the SABRE (Society of All British and Irish Road Enthusiasts) website, several of whom are as foxed as I am by this numerical anomaly; although – as is often the case with enthusiasts – there is little agreement on how it should be corrected. Comparable oddities abound across the land as a consequence of the adoption in the 1920s of a numbering system which at the time promised order and logic, but which, as the road network evolved, grew instead into a thicket bristling with absurdities and inconsistencies.
Computer power could, of course, now give us a truly coherent and rational system, if we wanted one. We don’t. We are used to the muddle we have, and the upheaval and expense that would accompany a root-and-branch reform are too frightful to contemplate. As Joe Moran points out, it matters not that the system makes no sense, because motorists do not navigate by road numbers anyway.24 The survival of numerical quirks does no one any harm and provides a ready source of interest and amusement to the
members of SABRE and like-minded groups.
The upshot of the TOTSO near Annie’s Tea Bar is that the A303 expires without a murmur of protest, and the A30 marches on in triumph past Honiton. It experiences a temporary reversal in its fortunes when it is subsumed into the M5 to the south of Exeter, but it soon springs back into life. Thereafter it sweeps around the north edge of Dartmoor, past Okehampton, Launceston, Bodmin and Redruth towards Penzance and its own last rites at the tip of mainland Britain. For most of the way it is a fine, wide dual carriageway – close to what the A303 would have been had the original masterplan been realised.
As it is, the A303 is left as a rump, an unmourned victim of changing attitudes and bureaucratic inertia of the small-minded, tight-fisted, mean-spirited variety. It does a job, not brilliantly but adequately. Considering the high ambitions that attended its conception, it is a disappointment. For roughly a third of its way it is on the grand scale. For a further third it aspires to grandeur and fails to reach it. And for its final stretch it abandons any pretence of aiming high and settles for meandering mediocrity. The A303 is the transport equivalent of a great public building project – a cathedral, an opera house, a bridge – begun with ample funds, tremendous intentions and the sound of trumpets; subsequently left unfinished because the first visionaries were succeeded by smaller, spiritually poorer men.
It is unfinished business, the A303, and likely to remain so. The odd thing is that we rather like it for that. The A30 that takes over the way to the west is big and fast and goes through some epic scenery. But it is bland. It lacks character. It does not inspire affection as the A303 does. We British have a soft spot for the gallant failure. We admire the gallantry and we feel for the failure. Maybe that is why this highway to the sun – when it shines – retains a special place in the hearts of those of us who know what it is to pass the walls of the Great Shed and the ramparts of Camelot, and to creep past the bluestones of Stonehenge.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alcock, Professor Leslie, By South Cadbury Is That Camelot, Thames & Hudson, 1972.
Allison, William, and Fairley, John, The Monocled Mutineer, Quartet, 1979.
Augé, Marc, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso 2008.
Belloc, Hilaire, The Old Road, Constable and Co., 1911 (available as free download).
Buchanan, Colin, Mixed Blessing: The Motor in Britain, Leonard Hill, 1958.
— Traffic in Towns, Penguin, 1964.
Chandler, John, The Amesbury Turnpike Trust, Wiltshire Industrial Archaeology Society, 1979.
— The Amesbury Millennium Lectures (ed.), The Amesbury Society, 1979.
Chippindale, Peter, Stonehenge Complete (new edition), Thames & Hudson, 2012.
— Who Owns Stonehenge? (ed.), Batsford, 1990.
Cunliffe, Barry, Wessex to 1000 AD, Longman, 1993.
Dakers, Caroline, Clouds: The Biography of a Country House, Yale University Press, 1993.
Davies, Hugh, From Trackways to Motorways: 5000 Years of Transport History, Tempus, 2006.
Defoe, Daniel, Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Dent, 1962.
Dennis, Kingsley, and Urry, John, After the Car, Polity, 2009.
Dudley, Geoffrey, and Richardson, Jeremy, Why Does Policy Change?, Routledge, 2000.
Featherstone, Mike, Thrift, Nigel and Urry, John (eds.), Automobilities, Sage 2005.
Greene, Harry Plunket, Where the Bright Waters Meet, Excellent Press, 2007.
Harper, Charles G, The Exeter Road, Chapman and Hall, 1899 (available as free download).
Herrup, Cynthia, A House in Gross Disorder, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Hill, Rosemary, Stonehenge, Profile, 2008.
Hoare, Sir Richard Colt, Ancient History of Wiltshire, W. Miller, 1812.
Hudson, W. H, A Shepherd’s Life, Nonsuch, 2005.
Hutton, Edward, Highways and Byways in Somerset, Macmillan, 1919.
— Highways and Byways in Wiltshire, Macmillan, 1917.
Huxley, Aldous, Along the Road, Chatto & Windus, 1925.
Johnson, Boris, Life in the Fast Lane, Harper Perennial, 2007.
McKenzie, W. A., Motormania, Cassell, 1972.
Masters, Gerry, Ilchester, available from Ilchester Museum.
Moran, Joe, On Roads, Profile, 2009.
O’Connell, Sean, The Car in British Society, Manchester University Press, 1998.
Raper, Anthony, The Weyhill Fair, Barracuda, 1988.
Rolt, L. T. C, Landscape with Machines, Longman, 1971.
Rowntree, Paul, From Trackway to Trunk Road: A History of the A303, 2004 (unpublished).
Sawyer, Frank, Keeper of the Stream, Unwin Hyman, 1987.
Setright, L. J. K., Drive On: A Social History of the Motor Car, Granta, 2004.
Smith, the Reverend Alfred, Birds of Wiltshire, R. H. Porter, 1887.
Thorold, Peter, The Motoring Age, Profile, 2003.
Timperley, H. W., and Brill, Edith, Ancient Trackways of Wessex, P. Drinkwater, 1983.
Woodbridge, Kenneth, Landscape and Antiquity, Oxford Clarendon Press, 1970.
Worthington, Andy (ed.), The Battle of the Beanfield, Enabler Publications, 2005.
Wyndham, Richard, The Gentle Savage, Cassell, 1936.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks must go first to Colin Midson, who had the idea for this book, and coaxed it from me with great enthusiasm, tact and good humour, as well as providing ingenious maps of the road; and second to my friend, Jason Hawkes, who is Britain’s leading aerial photographer, but consented to stay earthbound to take the pictures of the A303. I also owe a considerable debt to Paul Rowntree, for making available to me his invaluable history of the A303, thereby saving me a great deal of hard graft.
I would also like to thank my agent, Caroline Dawnay, at United Agents, for her unfailing support, and Sally Partington, who showed that the discipline of rigorous copy-editing was far from moribund, and thus helped make this a much better book than it would otherwise have been. I am most grateful to Jim Fuller for letting me reproduce two of the classic photographs of Stonehenge taken by his grandfather, Thomas Lionel Fuller. David Rymill, archivist with Hampshire Archives and Local Studies, helped with the illustrations of the construction of the A303; and Gill Arnott, of the Hampshire Museums and Arts Service, enabled me to reproduce the map of the Weyhill Fair. Gerry Masters, historian of Ilchester, gave me a copy of his collection of miscellanea which is full of good things. Rob Turner, of Winterbourne Stoke, gave generously of his time to enlighten me about farming past and present.
I am grateful to the staff of the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester, the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre in Chippenham, and the Somerset Heritage Centre in Taunton. Without them and their like the kind of book that I enjoy writing would not be possible. I would also like to thank my former wife, Linda, and my friend, Simon Walters, for their A303 memories.
Finally, I thank my wife, Helen, for her support and endless tolerance.
INDEX
AA, motoring organisation, ref1, ref2
AA patrolmen, ref1
AA Roadbook, ref1
Abbots Ann, Hampshire, ref1
acromegaly, condition associated with pituitary gland, ref1
Adams, Dr John, university lecturer, expert on traffic flow, ref1
Addington, Henry, Prime Minister 1801, ref1
Adonis, Andrew, Labour junior transport minister, ref1
Advisory Committee on the Landscape Treatment of Trunk Roads, ref1, ref2
Aethelwold, friend of King Edgar, murdered by King Edgar, ref1
Alcock, Professor Leslie, archaeologist in charge of excavations at Cadbury Castle, ref1
Alexander, Douglas, Labour transport secretary 2006, ref1
Alfred, King, ref1
campaign against Danes, ref1
statue of, ref1
rule of, ref1
virtues of, ref1
Allington, Wiltshire, ref1
Allison, William, co-author of
The Monocled Mutineer, ref1
American War of Independence, ref1
Amesbury, Wiltshire:
bypass ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
colonies of ragwort, ref1
celebrated in verse, ref1
abbey, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
and River Avon, ref1, ref2, ref3
Vespasian, ref1
search for identity, ref1
The Archer, ref1, ref2
Archer’s Gate, ref1
Queen Elfrida, ref1
Guinevere, ref1, ref2
Sir Launcelot, ref1, ref2
Countess roundabout, ref1, ref2
riotous nuns, ref1
railway, ref1
Harrow Way, ref1
snowstorm, ref1
Amesbury Society, ref1
Amesbury Turnpike Trust, ref1, ref2
Amport, Hampshire, ref1
Ancestor, The, sculpture:
appearance, ref1
message, ref1
breakfast, ref1
imagined meeting with The Archer, ref1
ancestors, ref1
Ancient Trackways of Wessex, The, book by Harold Timperley and Edith Brill, ref1, ref2, ref3
Andover, Hampshire:
bypass, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
traffic bottleneck, ref1
ufologists, ref1
borough council, ref1
airfield, ref1
danger of swallowing Weyhill, ref1
counting for little, ref1
Choral Society, ref1
great bustard, ref1
Turnpike Trust, ref1
Andover Advertiser, ref1, ref2