On the Road to Ruins

With a title like 'The A303: Highway to the Sun' who could fail to be attracted to the book by Tom Fort? Many people, probably, but those of us who have a love/hate relationship with the eponymous route will be able to identify with the author's interest.

Tom Fort is a BBC radio journalist and has written much more than an anorak’s guide to a road. Like him, I have driven the A303 many times but I have not noticed things the way he has. He misses nothing, from pig farms by the side of the road to roadkill; from ancient burial mounds to the Little Chef, which Heston Blumenthal tried to update at Popham services. He is also obsessed, in a good way, with cars, traffic, maps, roads, routes, planning and byways. He particularly likes bridges — the older the better - and also discourses amiably on cafés in caravans, ancient milestones, extravagant monuments like those at Stourhead, and Fat Charlie, the emblem of Little Chef. (Not the same outside all Little Chefs, you may be surprised to hear - I was).

His interest in Stonehenge, by a mile the star attraction of the whole 92 miles the A303 runs, and the powerhouse of magic, is obvious as he drives and walks around it. One of the best views, he says, is actually from the A303 itself. ("You can always go once round the ‘Solstice’ roundabout for a second look from the other direction"). He gives a wonderfully ironic account of Stonehenge’s ups and downs in the hands of the Antrobus family, the military and — since 1918 — the nation. He particularly loves the eccentrics — "a multitude of antiquaries, historians, archaelogists, visionaries, prophets and crackpots who have studied it, speculated on its origins and promoted their accounts of its meaning and purpose". Inigo Jones, sent by James I, decided it was a Roman temple. And the truth is -  nobody knows! Digs have produced shards of pottery and some bones, but the people who built it are beyond the reach of science. The druidical claims for Stonehenge seem to belong to that bonkers but persistent strand of Englishness that believes there is something particularly mystical about the English themselves, who were clearly a chosen people. But, as he writes, "the fact is, there are almost no facts about Stonehenge".

It's a delightful read and I've enjoyed it. One of Fort's opening sentences struck a particular chord with me: "many of us have a road that reaches back into our past". For him, it is A303: for me it's the A468 in South Wales. As soon as I read his sentence and thought about it, memories of the 50's and early 60's came flooding back.  Why the A468? This was the road that was the start of the journey from the villages of my childhood (Bedwas & Trethomas) to the seaside glories of Barry Island! Summer outings from chapel and the 'club' (British Legion or Working Men's), on Caerphilly Grey charabancs were invariably to the jewel of the Costa South Wales. The journey took us up to Caerphilly and, by way of Nantgarw Hill, through Taff's Well (a spa a long time ago and the site of one of the few thermal springs in the UK) and past Castell Coch (to our young minds always a fairy castle but more prosaically associated with the mine-owning Bute family). Thence around the TV transmission mast at Wenvoe (at this point we always had the first to see the sea competition) and down onto the Island. With its coal dust impregnated sand and sea, it was not a tropical paradise but every trip was Fun with a capital 'f'. What was there not to like? It had swimming, rockpools, candy floss, cockles and not forgetting the funfair with its scenic railway and its air of being slightly disreputable. Happy days. Here's a strange thing, a few years ago we went to Bondi Beach in Australia and, guess what, it reminded me of Barry Island.