Far from madding crowds As holidaymakers jam up motorways, the smart way to travel is on old A-roads, as Jeremy Seal discovers on the A30 Daily Telegraph, 9/8/1997
Wilton, Wilts had ham sandwiches wrapped in grease-proof paper, a dinky bridge over the River Wylye, a sign banning 'perambulators' from the cemetery, and the tiny church of St Mary whose key could be collected from the hardware store on North Street. The ancient capital of Wessex didn't have a bypass, nor a cash-point machine. 'Nowhere in town?' I asked, cash-strapped after the sandwiches. 'This is Wilton,' the man in the hardware store reminded me, digging out the church keys from under a somnolent cat. 'Be fair.'
I was 'touring'. Admittedly, in a modern Britain varicosed blue by motorways and honorary motorways (A roads with bracketed Ms after them), I had wondered whether touring was still possible. It struck me as a quaint idea of the sort that went out with cockling, wood-framed Morris Minors and blackberry picking, and about as safe as canoeing shipping lanes - until I got to Wilton.
I had chosen the A30 which rises in Hounslow and finally decants, with a sense of scale rare for British roads, into the sea at Lands End over 300 miles later. I was focussing on a 70-mile stretch west from Wilton towards Exeter, a timewarp, Tarmac backwater. Here, dual-carriageway signs, hard shoulders and superstores give way to ivy-clad milestones, overhanging barns, signs warning of oncoming traffic in the middle of the road, Bellamy-beard hedges, mud on the road moulded by the tread of tractor tyres and even the odd flock of collie-supervised sheep.
There are very occasional moments of white water, such as the dual-carriageway approaching nondescript Yeovil, but for the most part this meandering old coach road to the West Country doubles as village and town high street, so much so that it is as often referred to in terms of the nearest town. 'Just down the Sherborne road,' said a man when I asked him for the nearest phone box. This gentle road seemed tailor-made for my 16-year-old orange Mini, all at sea in buffeting motorway traffic. I was carrying Tess of the D'Urbevilles (the road cuts through prime Hardy country), and the 30-year-old AA Book of the Road 1967 whose roadmaps showed my chosen stretch of the A30 to be almost entirely unchanged despite revealing a Britain with no M3, an M4 only as far as Maidenhead, a four-mile M40, and a total six miles of motorway in the whole of Scotland. 1967, incidentally, was also when this stretch of the A30 was superseded by the high-volume A303 running parallel to it just five miles to the north. While the rest of Britain's road system was being made to understand the meaning of work, the A30 found itself semi-retired.
I took my bearings at Old Sarum. From the hilltop site of ancient Salisbury, I looked out over the ruins of the Norman castle to the modern city, its great cathedral spire flashing like a lighthouse brilliant, stroboscopic sunshine between racing curtains of rain. The sun caught the high chalk escarpment that runs west to Shaftesbury, turning it emerald while the A30 [, rising in Hounslow, London and finally decanting, with a sense of scale rare for British roads, into the sea at Lands End over 300 miles later,] footled unseen along its base.
Beyond Wilton, scrawled signs touted eggs, fresh honey and horse manure at £1 a bag. The roadside hedges, a thick thatch of elder, ash, thorn and hazel, were as wide as double beds and neatly shorn with winter flattops. At Fovant, a military township in the Great War, a series of regimental crests had been cut high in the chalk downs. The town once had hospitals, parade grounds, rifle ranges and even a cinema. A sign saying 'Fovant Blondes' suggested only the brothel had survived - somehow. 'Blondes are the local breed of cattle,' explained a patient woman at the village stores. The suitably period ad on the shop's gable end read 'Colmans Wash Blue for Snow White Linen'.
Near Ludwell, I drew up by an inconspicuous milestone which indicated 'To Sarum XV' at my back, and 'Shaston V', as Shaftesbury was once known, lying ahead. The views from the old abbey were shot through with rain and shine, roofs glittering after a soaking. A Midlands couple stood under an umbrella on Gold Hill, the town's cobbled, cottage-flanked street where that Hovis ad was shot, conducting each other through persistent attempts at Dvorak's New World Symphony.
To the west, the landscape fell sharply away into the Blackmore Vale, described by Hardy as 'untrodden as yet by tourist or landscape painter', a patchwork of soft fields and streams shining like veins of mercury as if seen from the air. I was headed for Marnhull. If Fate finally caught up with Tess, Hardy's 'pure woman', just off the A303 at Stonehenge, It had clearly had it in for her since her father had got drunk at the Marnhull pub Rollivers, just off the A30.
'A few Japanese come in here because of the Tess connection,' explained Roger Hiron, landlord of the 'Blackmore Vale Inn - Hardy's Rollivers', as it advertised itself. 'They have the whole story off pat,' he continued; Tess taking the place of her drunken father to make the nighttime delivery of beehives to Dorchester (on the B3092?), and the subsequent death of the family horse which kickstarts her tragic journey. Clearly, literary precedent suggested this was no place to be drinking. I took my half of shandy and sat by the window to watch a ferret calmly cross the road between two passing cars.
At nearby Henstridge, another pub beckoned me. 'Well, we haven't got photos,' said the barman of the Virginia Ash. 'But it says so on the beer mats.' The mats quoted the British Gazeteer of 1813; 'for it is related that it was here that a waiter entering the room where Sir Walter Raleigh was sitting and smoking hastily threw over him a pail of water conceiving that he was on fire.' 'Well, if you think that's exciting,' said an elderly woman as I returned from buying some cigarettes - if I couldn't smoke here, then where? - 'Templecombe's got the Turin Shroud. In the church. See for yourself.'
I would, and after an overnight visit to my mother nearby, drove the two miles north to Templecombe, ancient regional seat of the Knights Templar. There was a new housing development going up called Templars Barton. At the church (keys from the pub or the rectory), a woman was replacing the old flower arrangements.
On the south wall, a wooden panel showed a faded, reasonably Turin-Shroudish portrait of Christ. 'A Mrs Drew found it plastered away in the roof of the old priest's house in the last war,' explained the woman, binning tired daffs. 'They say the Knights may well have captured the shroud during the Crusades, brought it back here and made this copy of it. Then, when the Knights were suppressed in the 14th century, they hid it away - worship of icons and all that.'
Whatever next, I wondered, passing Sherborne and its old castle, Smokin' Sir Walter's temporary home before he built new across the lake in the 1590s. Correctly, I held out little hope for Yeovil (where Sherborne had boasted a thicket of brown tourist signs - the two castles and the glorious, peach-coloured abbey - Yeovil had just one - the golf course). So I pushed on. The roadsigns were becoming increasingly outlandish. We'd had Fifehead Magdalen, Buckhorn Weston and Purse Caundle. Now, we were among Hazelbury Plucknetts and and Cricket Malherbies. Approaching Crewkerne, a man emerged from a roadside thicket clutching firewood which he secured to the saddle of his bike. Since he had become something of a Wide Vehicle, he led the way as the A30 dipped into a gorge overhung with dank ferns and holly before proceeding straight through the middle of town, full of handsome Georgian facades and old bookshops, and a barber's advertising Players Bachelor Tipped.
But it was the next town - 'Welcome to Chard; Birthplace of Powered Flight' - that brought me skidding to a halt. Shouldn't the Wright Brothers' lawyers be told? Unsurprisingly, a passing rubbish cart playing 'Hound Dog' at full volume, with a picture of Elvis taped to the front, distracted me. 'Oh, I've been playing music in my cart ever since I started,' the rubbish collector told me. 'Rock n' roll, country, wartime, you name it.' Yes, but what about this powered flight nonsense? 'You're parked right opposite it,' said the rubbish collector, pointing to the old lace mill on Boden Street. A man called Stringfellow, it transpired, successfully flew a ten-foot model plane, powered by a steam engine, the length a long room in the mill in June 1848, 55 years before an engine finally lifted man into the air. The fact that Chard, as I discovered at the museum, was also known for one James Gillingham, pioneer of artificial limbs, did not seem entirely unconnected.
The road wound up through beech trees towards the border with Devon. After refuelling at a petrol station ('We serve you'), the A30 joined with the fast-flowing A303 which it gave way to in everything, being the senior road, but name. A bypass sluiced round Honiton. At Fairmile, it was sheeting with rain. I asked a passing farmer in a tractor about the tunnels. 'Ah, Swampy,' he said with a broad grin and gave me directions.
I could see the line of the new A30. It ran behind pretty Escot church, set among fields at Fairmile, a muddy gash impaled with marker posts linked by fluttering red tape. At the top of the hill, a group of security men were standing around a digger. Tunnels, they replied suspiciously, wiping the palms of their hands together. Nothing to do with them. As I walked back to the car, I spotted a dank pile of bedding in the field by the church. There were sleeping bags, blankets, towels, old knapsacks, plastic bags, mugs and cider bottles, the abandoned kit of the Battle for Fairmile. The security men had been standing right above the tunnels.
Another section of the old A30 was disappearing before my eyes. Not only were new landscapes being carved up for bypasses - the chief concern of the road protestors - but the A30 was being 'improved'; straightened and widened to carry high-volume, fast-moving traffic at the expense, I feared, of the many quirks - geographical and historical - that made this road a journey in the broadest sense. Certainly, it was hard to imagine a father far in the future turning to his backseat children here and saying, 'Look, they say that's where Primeminister Swampy spent his glorious week down a tunnel in the last years of the twentieth century'.
At Exeter, the great current of the M5 caught the bow of my mini and swung it to the north, for home.
ENDS
FACT BOX
Tourism Information:
Shaftesbury; 01747 853514
Crewkerne; 01460 73441
Chard; 01460 67463
Sherborne Old Castle; open 22nd March - 31 October daily, 10am-6pm. Admission adults £1.50.
Chard Museum; open 1st May - 1st Nov Mon to Sat, 10.30am-4.30pm. Admission adults £1.70
Old Sarum; open daily 10am-4pm November to March, and to 6pm April to October.
BRITAIN'S UNSPOILT A ROADS; THE BEST OF THE REST
A1; When Britain's road-numbering system was introduced in 1919, the original London/Edinburgh road was the obvious choice for first place. It's not until Morpeth, however, that this major road retains its backwater feel as it runs through beautiful Northumberland scenery, past the Farne Islands and Holy Island to Berwick.
A6; Between Derby and Buxton, the old London-Carlisle road runs single-carriage though the heart of the Derbshire Dales and Peaks including Matlock, Bakewell and Buxton.
A9; At 276 miles, Scotland's longest road used to connect Edinburgh with John O'Groats but has now been rerouted to nearby, busier Thurso. North of Perth, the A9 is the classic Highlands route to Inverness.
A15; Roman Ermine Street once ran from London to York. Its most attractive and unspoilt stretch is the B6403 off the A17 south of Lincoln to the A1 south of Grantham.
The Foss Way; This Roman road once ran from near Exeter to Lincoln. A classically straight stretch runs north from Cirencester on the A429, through the Cotswolds and through Warwickshire on the B4455.
Wilton, Wilts had ham sandwiches wrapped in grease-proof paper, a dinky bridge over the River Wylye, a sign banning 'perambulators' from the cemetery, and the tiny church of St Mary whose key could be collected from the hardware store on North Street. The ancient capital of Wessex didn't have a bypass, nor a cash-point machine. 'Nowhere in town?' I asked, cash-strapped after the sandwiches. 'This is Wilton,' the man in the hardware store reminded me, digging out the church keys from under a somnolent cat. 'Be fair.'
I was 'touring'. Admittedly, in a modern Britain varicosed blue by motorways and honorary motorways (A roads with bracketed Ms after them), I had wondered whether touring was still possible. It struck me as a quaint idea of the sort that went out with cockling, wood-framed Morris Minors and blackberry picking, and about as safe as canoeing shipping lanes - until I got to Wilton.
I had chosen the A30 which rises in Hounslow and finally decants, with a sense of scale rare for British roads, into the sea at Lands End over 300 miles later. I was focussing on a 70-mile stretch west from Wilton towards Exeter, a timewarp, Tarmac backwater. Here, dual-carriageway signs, hard shoulders and superstores give way to ivy-clad milestones, overhanging barns, signs warning of oncoming traffic in the middle of the road, Bellamy-beard hedges, mud on the road moulded by the tread of tractor tyres and even the odd flock of collie-supervised sheep.
There are very occasional moments of white water, such as the dual-carriageway approaching nondescript Yeovil, but for the most part this meandering old coach road to the West Country doubles as village and town high street, so much so that it is as often referred to in terms of the nearest town. 'Just down the Sherborne road,' said a man when I asked him for the nearest phone box. This gentle road seemed tailor-made for my 16-year-old orange Mini, all at sea in buffeting motorway traffic. I was carrying Tess of the D'Urbevilles (the road cuts through prime Hardy country), and the 30-year-old AA Book of the Road 1967 whose roadmaps showed my chosen stretch of the A30 to be almost entirely unchanged despite revealing a Britain with no M3, an M4 only as far as Maidenhead, a four-mile M40, and a total six miles of motorway in the whole of Scotland. 1967, incidentally, was also when this stretch of the A30 was superseded by the high-volume A303 running parallel to it just five miles to the north. While the rest of Britain's road system was being made to understand the meaning of work, the A30 found itself semi-retired.
I took my bearings at Old Sarum. From the hilltop site of ancient Salisbury, I looked out over the ruins of the Norman castle to the modern city, its great cathedral spire flashing like a lighthouse brilliant, stroboscopic sunshine between racing curtains of rain. The sun caught the high chalk escarpment that runs west to Shaftesbury, turning it emerald while the A30 [, rising in Hounslow, London and finally decanting, with a sense of scale rare for British roads, into the sea at Lands End over 300 miles later,] footled unseen along its base.
Beyond Wilton, scrawled signs touted eggs, fresh honey and horse manure at £1 a bag. The roadside hedges, a thick thatch of elder, ash, thorn and hazel, were as wide as double beds and neatly shorn with winter flattops. At Fovant, a military township in the Great War, a series of regimental crests had been cut high in the chalk downs. The town once had hospitals, parade grounds, rifle ranges and even a cinema. A sign saying 'Fovant Blondes' suggested only the brothel had survived - somehow. 'Blondes are the local breed of cattle,' explained a patient woman at the village stores. The suitably period ad on the shop's gable end read 'Colmans Wash Blue for Snow White Linen'.
Near Ludwell, I drew up by an inconspicuous milestone which indicated 'To Sarum XV' at my back, and 'Shaston V', as Shaftesbury was once known, lying ahead. The views from the old abbey were shot through with rain and shine, roofs glittering after a soaking. A Midlands couple stood under an umbrella on Gold Hill, the town's cobbled, cottage-flanked street where that Hovis ad was shot, conducting each other through persistent attempts at Dvorak's New World Symphony.
To the west, the landscape fell sharply away into the Blackmore Vale, described by Hardy as 'untrodden as yet by tourist or landscape painter', a patchwork of soft fields and streams shining like veins of mercury as if seen from the air. I was headed for Marnhull. If Fate finally caught up with Tess, Hardy's 'pure woman', just off the A303 at Stonehenge, It had clearly had it in for her since her father had got drunk at the Marnhull pub Rollivers, just off the A30.
'A few Japanese come in here because of the Tess connection,' explained Roger Hiron, landlord of the 'Blackmore Vale Inn - Hardy's Rollivers', as it advertised itself. 'They have the whole story off pat,' he continued; Tess taking the place of her drunken father to make the nighttime delivery of beehives to Dorchester (on the B3092?), and the subsequent death of the family horse which kickstarts her tragic journey. Clearly, literary precedent suggested this was no place to be drinking. I took my half of shandy and sat by the window to watch a ferret calmly cross the road between two passing cars.
At nearby Henstridge, another pub beckoned me. 'Well, we haven't got photos,' said the barman of the Virginia Ash. 'But it says so on the beer mats.' The mats quoted the British Gazeteer of 1813; 'for it is related that it was here that a waiter entering the room where Sir Walter Raleigh was sitting and smoking hastily threw over him a pail of water conceiving that he was on fire.' 'Well, if you think that's exciting,' said an elderly woman as I returned from buying some cigarettes - if I couldn't smoke here, then where? - 'Templecombe's got the Turin Shroud. In the church. See for yourself.'
I would, and after an overnight visit to my mother nearby, drove the two miles north to Templecombe, ancient regional seat of the Knights Templar. There was a new housing development going up called Templars Barton. At the church (keys from the pub or the rectory), a woman was replacing the old flower arrangements.
On the south wall, a wooden panel showed a faded, reasonably Turin-Shroudish portrait of Christ. 'A Mrs Drew found it plastered away in the roof of the old priest's house in the last war,' explained the woman, binning tired daffs. 'They say the Knights may well have captured the shroud during the Crusades, brought it back here and made this copy of it. Then, when the Knights were suppressed in the 14th century, they hid it away - worship of icons and all that.'
Whatever next, I wondered, passing Sherborne and its old castle, Smokin' Sir Walter's temporary home before he built new across the lake in the 1590s. Correctly, I held out little hope for Yeovil (where Sherborne had boasted a thicket of brown tourist signs - the two castles and the glorious, peach-coloured abbey - Yeovil had just one - the golf course). So I pushed on. The roadsigns were becoming increasingly outlandish. We'd had Fifehead Magdalen, Buckhorn Weston and Purse Caundle. Now, we were among Hazelbury Plucknetts and and Cricket Malherbies. Approaching Crewkerne, a man emerged from a roadside thicket clutching firewood which he secured to the saddle of his bike. Since he had become something of a Wide Vehicle, he led the way as the A30 dipped into a gorge overhung with dank ferns and holly before proceeding straight through the middle of town, full of handsome Georgian facades and old bookshops, and a barber's advertising Players Bachelor Tipped.
But it was the next town - 'Welcome to Chard; Birthplace of Powered Flight' - that brought me skidding to a halt. Shouldn't the Wright Brothers' lawyers be told? Unsurprisingly, a passing rubbish cart playing 'Hound Dog' at full volume, with a picture of Elvis taped to the front, distracted me. 'Oh, I've been playing music in my cart ever since I started,' the rubbish collector told me. 'Rock n' roll, country, wartime, you name it.' Yes, but what about this powered flight nonsense? 'You're parked right opposite it,' said the rubbish collector, pointing to the old lace mill on Boden Street. A man called Stringfellow, it transpired, successfully flew a ten-foot model plane, powered by a steam engine, the length a long room in the mill in June 1848, 55 years before an engine finally lifted man into the air. The fact that Chard, as I discovered at the museum, was also known for one James Gillingham, pioneer of artificial limbs, did not seem entirely unconnected.
The road wound up through beech trees towards the border with Devon. After refuelling at a petrol station ('We serve you'), the A30 joined with the fast-flowing A303 which it gave way to in everything, being the senior road, but name. A bypass sluiced round Honiton. At Fairmile, it was sheeting with rain. I asked a passing farmer in a tractor about the tunnels. 'Ah, Swampy,' he said with a broad grin and gave me directions.
I could see the line of the new A30. It ran behind pretty Escot church, set among fields at Fairmile, a muddy gash impaled with marker posts linked by fluttering red tape. At the top of the hill, a group of security men were standing around a digger. Tunnels, they replied suspiciously, wiping the palms of their hands together. Nothing to do with them. As I walked back to the car, I spotted a dank pile of bedding in the field by the church. There were sleeping bags, blankets, towels, old knapsacks, plastic bags, mugs and cider bottles, the abandoned kit of the Battle for Fairmile. The security men had been standing right above the tunnels.
Another section of the old A30 was disappearing before my eyes. Not only were new landscapes being carved up for bypasses - the chief concern of the road protestors - but the A30 was being 'improved'; straightened and widened to carry high-volume, fast-moving traffic at the expense, I feared, of the many quirks - geographical and historical - that made this road a journey in the broadest sense. Certainly, it was hard to imagine a father far in the future turning to his backseat children here and saying, 'Look, they say that's where Primeminister Swampy spent his glorious week down a tunnel in the last years of the twentieth century'.
At Exeter, the great current of the M5 caught the bow of my mini and swung it to the north, for home.
ENDS
FACT BOX
Tourism Information:
Shaftesbury; 01747 853514
Crewkerne; 01460 73441
Chard; 01460 67463
Sherborne Old Castle; open 22nd March - 31 October daily, 10am-6pm. Admission adults £1.50.
Chard Museum; open 1st May - 1st Nov Mon to Sat, 10.30am-4.30pm. Admission adults £1.70
Old Sarum; open daily 10am-4pm November to March, and to 6pm April to October.
BRITAIN'S UNSPOILT A ROADS; THE BEST OF THE REST
A1; When Britain's road-numbering system was introduced in 1919, the original London/Edinburgh road was the obvious choice for first place. It's not until Morpeth, however, that this major road retains its backwater feel as it runs through beautiful Northumberland scenery, past the Farne Islands and Holy Island to Berwick.
A6; Between Derby and Buxton, the old London-Carlisle road runs single-carriage though the heart of the Derbshire Dales and Peaks including Matlock, Bakewell and Buxton.
A9; At 276 miles, Scotland's longest road used to connect Edinburgh with John O'Groats but has now been rerouted to nearby, busier Thurso. North of Perth, the A9 is the classic Highlands route to Inverness.
A15; Roman Ermine Street once ran from London to York. Its most attractive and unspoilt stretch is the B6403 off the A17 south of Lincoln to the A1 south of Grantham.
The Foss Way; This Roman road once ran from near Exeter to Lincoln. A classically straight stretch runs north from Cirencester on the A429, through the Cotswolds and through Warwickshire on the B4455.
