by Tom Fort
The Heston wagon rolled on (oddly enough, Popham Fat Charlie never got the chefs jacket). The Pegler cart soon followed. But the Popham Little Chef lives on, and from my extensive acquaintance with it does solid business. Most of Blumenthal’s daring innovations – the ox cheeks, the coq-au-vin, the mussels, the beer and vegetable casserole, the trifle with sponge soaked in green tea – proved too radical for Little Chef regulars to stomach, and have followed their creator out of the door. Fish and chips, steak and ale pie, and prawn cocktail survive from the Heston reformation. His influence is still felt on the ‘Today’s Specials’ board, casually scrawled as if in response to a sudden inspiration in the kitchen. When I first visited in October 2009, two of these specials were Lamb Shank with Creamy Mash and Belly Pork on a Bed of Salad. Fifteen months later they were still there – today’s, yesterday’s and tomorrow’s specials.
The only dish I have eaten there is the ‘Olympic Breakfast’, and very good it is. I do tend to reflect, as I wipe the brown sauce from my plate, that a slice or two of fried bread to complement the outdoor-bred sausages, the rashers of Wiltshire-cured bacon and the griddled free-range eggs would hardly contravene the Olympian spirit. But the coffee is good and the service genuinely cheery, even though I could do without the foodie quotes from George Bernard Shaw and A. A. Milne on the backs of the uniforms and the stand-up comic jollifications piped into the men’s lavatories.
Outside I pause to pay my respects to Fat Charlie, a notable survivor. Famous chefs may come and go, and food fads blaze and die, but Charlie’s grin stays as wide as ever. ‘Little Chef Has Changed’, the sign proclaims. It hasn’t, not really. It can’t. It can only go on as it is, or disappear.
* * *
The Black Wood presses against the A303 just beyond Heston’s Little Chef. It is well named. The tall, straight beeches stand close, the canopy blocking the sunlight from reaching the mantle of leaf-fall and dry, cracked beech nuts that covers the ground. An old Roman byway runs along the western flank of the wood, forming a junction to the south with the great Roman highway between Winchester and Silchester. The assumption is that it provided access to Popham Beacons, a vantage point on the north side of the A303 from which an eye could be kept on a wide tract of country extending to Winchester in the south, Alton in the north, and across the Test Valley in the west to the military camp at Quarley Hill.
It’s a while since the centurions tramped along in the shade of the beeches, but the surface of the road – compacted chalk and flint – is firm enough beneath the dead leaves and twigs. It still has its uses. Someone has driven down here to dump old lorry tyres, broken plastic chairs, and a heap of propane gas canisters.
Popham Beacons gets its name from the anxious time when Philip of Spain menaced Elizabeth of England, and signal-fires were heaped on hilltops across the land to warn of the expected Catholic invasion. The fire-builders left no trace; nor did the Roman guards. But there is a cluster of Bronze Age burial barrows close by, which does speak quietly of the very ancient history etched into the landscape of this very modern road.
‘The Road is the humblest and the most subtle but. . . the greatest and most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest pioneers of our race. It was the most imperative, and the first, of our necessities.’ These words were written by Hilaire Belloc in a book called The Old Road, which appeared in 1904. It is a typical product of Belloc’s warm-hearted and energetic personality; typical, too, of its time and of a particular way – amateurish in the best sense, you might call it – of embracing and identifying with the past. Belloc was no archaeologist, nor a professional historian, but he was an enthusiast. He was a meat-eating, ale-quaffing Englishman, and a devout Roman Catholic, and he invested his Road with sacred significance. As our ancestors travelled it, he wrote, they brought with them ‘letters, customs, community of language and idea’ – and, inevitably, religion. The Road came first. Everything else followed.
In that innocent Edwardian age, interpreting prehistory was simple. Belloc’s book included a map showing five great ridges of southern England: North Downs, South Downs, Dorset Downs, Cotswolds/Mendips, Chilterns/ Berkshire Downs. His thesis was that to follow the ways of our ancestors you merely had to step along one or other of these ridges. He himself, for reasons of faith, chose the eastern way, between Winchester and Canterbury. But he could just as appropriately have tramped the Icknield Way and Great Ridgeway, or one of the others. On his map, and in his mind, they all converged on Stonehenge. To walk any of them was, Belloc enthused, ‘to plunge right into the spirit of the oldest monument of the life men led in this island’.
This belief in the interconnectedness of southern England from the earliest times inspired others to investigate the ancient routes more closely than Hilaire Belloc had time to. Among them were a retired Manchester schoolmaster and his wife, Harold Timperley and Edith Brill, whose inquiries resulted in an influential and much-quoted book, The Ancient Trackways of Wessex. One of these trackways is of special interest to students of the A303, the Harrow Way. According to Mr and Mrs Timperley, the Harrow Way had its eastern ‘terminus’ near Dover and its western near the mouth of the Axe in Devon; it was, they maintained, the Great Ridgeway’s ‘only competitor’ for the title of Oldest Road.
They sketched its path from Dover over the North Downs into Surrey and Hampshire, thereafter plotting its course in majestic detail around the north of Basingstoke, Whitchurch and Andover to meet the A303 at Weyhill, and then on past Amesbury to Stonehenge, and from Stonehenge on towards Devon. The sober presentation and wealth of topographical referencing lent considerable plausibility to their route for the Harrow Way, and subsequent writers tended to accept it as established fact. Paul Rowntree, in his invaluable pamphlet From Trackway to Trunk Road: A History of the A303, notes the coexistence and often coincidence between the ancient way and the modern road from Weyhill to between Wincanton and Sparkford. ‘By the time of the Bronze Age,’ he writes, ‘the Harrow Way was a major arterial route.’
Well, maybe. It is certainly a beguiling picture, of an ancient land traversed by time-honoured tracks along which our enterprising and inquisitive forbears roved; some seeking a pagan festival, others trading drinking vessels and weapons, others impelled by the eternal hope that life would be better across the next valley and over the next hill. Unfortunately evidence to support this account of primal travel is sparse. For instance, it used to be asserted confidently that the prehistoric tracks connected the upland settlements preferred by prehistoric people on the grounds that they were safer than the wooded, predator-infested valleys – until it was shown that settlements were established and maintained on all kinds of terrain except bog, and at all levels. It was also pointed out that, in some cases, supposedly primordial paths overlaid Celtic and even Roman field systems, which strongly suggested that the fields must have come first and the paths later. Nor did they appear on the earliest medieval maps, and no convincing evidence has ever been produced to indicate that a coherent system dependent on a network of trading routes ever existed.
The sceptical view was well put by the road historian Hugh Davies in his book From Trackways to Motorways: 5000 Years of Highway History: ‘What seems to have happened is that the ridgeways are the outcome of an idea of what ancient Britain was like, promoted by Victorian and earlier antiquaries keen to reconstruct a communication system worthy of those who built such dramatic monuments as Stonehenge and Avebury.’ The desire to seek patterns and infer meanings in the landscape is understandable, but can lead to trouble – witness the theory of ley lines advanced by Alfred Watkins in the 1920s and subsequently promoted by some of his followers with an ardour bordering on lunacy. At the same time, however, debunking need not go too far. The A303 may not have been Neolithic man’s way to the west. Nevertheless marvellously ancient ways do lie buried beneath that smooth band of asphalt and chippings, and a vast amount of ancient history is stored along its way.
* * *
The hur
tling motorist is most unlikely to notice a melancholy relic below the bridge that takes the A303 over the A34 between Basingstoke and Andover. I spotted it only because I was walking, which is no fun but does reveal a thing or two that you would otherwise miss.
It is a battered pub sign displaying a faded, flaking silver cross, and is all that remains of the Bullington Cross Inn. Researches in the Hampshire Records Office and elsewhere have failed to reveal anything much of the history of this hostelry, possibly because it was isolated from any village. It was certainly in business in the nineteenth century because it is described as ‘a lonely inn that stood where four roads meet’ in a book called On Southern Roads by a popular late-Victorian travel writer, James John Hissey (other titles include Over Fen and Wold and On the Box Seat). It stood right beside the Newbury–Winchester road. When the massive interchange with the A303 was built in the 1980s, the A34 was diverted away from the Bully, as the regulars knew it, allowing it a garden and some breathing space. Sadly for the Bully, the interchange also incorporated the resuscitated A30, as a result of which its design – involving two roundabouts and nine slip roads – was so complicated that the way into the pub became almost impossible for passing motorists to find. The Bully fell into decline, and now the site is occupied by a car-crushing and metal-recycling yard. Giant grabbers nod at transporters heaped high with shattered vehicles, and the murmur of beer drinkers and the music of the juke-box have been replaced by the sound of yesterday’s Mondeos and Escorts being reduced to manageable size.
Farewell the Bully
The fate of the Bullington Cross has been replicated up and down the A303. The old coaching inns have either been bypassed (the George in Andover, the George in Amesbury, the George in Ilminster, for instance), fly-overed (the White Horse at Thruxton), turned into fancy hotels (the Park House at Cholderton), or have disappeared altogether (the Deptford Inn at Wylye). The only hostelries still standing on the road are the Bell at Winterbourne Stoke, and the Eagle a few miles west of Ilminster, which is a sad state of affairs.
* * *
The enormous bridge over the A34 is followed a couple of miles later by another bridge, flat, functional and insignificant. Beneath it is a thing of beauty. There is a big alder one side and a little willow the other, and between them water as clear as glass hurries in a band of competing threads of current over a bed as pale as bleached bones, and over and around tresses of bright green weed. Another stream joins from the side, swirling through a pool scoured from the gravel. They come together briefly, then slip either side of an island as they head south through Bransbury Common for Chilbolton.
Upstream, the two flows are briefly united, but divide again at Middleton before becoming one below one of the mills at Longparish. There are three bridges between Longparish and the A303, each built of red brick, each full of charm, each paying courteous attention to the river, which is the Test. Now, I have made a promise not to write of fishing in this book. My mother and one or two others whose opinions I value objected that there was too much fishing in previous books of mine. But there must be rivers, because my road crosses them. And surely, with rivers I must be allowed fish; and with fish perhaps an angler or two.
A mile or so above Longparish the Test is joined by another stream, even more graceful. This is the Bourne, whose source is a spring far to the north, towards the Berkshire Downs. In 1902 a very tall Irishman of striking presence and with a fine baritone voice brought his wife and infant son to live in Hurstbourne Priors, a village of brick-and-flint houses and thatched cottages straggling along the lower valley of the Bourne. His name was Harry Plunket Greene and in his day he was one of the best-loved singers in the world. He was also a keen angler and he grew to love the Bourne almost as if it had been another member of his family. When his seasons on it were done, he wrote about the joy and occasional sadness it had given him, and called the book Where the Bright Waters Meet, a quotation from the Irish poet Tom Moore. In time, Plunket Greene’s fame in the musical world faded, but this book bestowed on him a sort of immortality.2 Since its first publication in 1924 it has almost never been out of print. It regularly appears on shortlists of angling classics for the simple reason that it bursts with an irrepressible and irresistible delight in people and nature and flowing water and the business of trying to persuade a trout to take a fly – in the end, a delight in life itself.
There used to be a footpath by the meeting of the bright waters – where the Bourne flows into the Test – but it has been diverted so that the owners of the big cream house overlooking it can enjoy it in peace. But you can still stand on the bridge at Hurstbourne Priors and look across to the undulating cricket ground where Plunket Greene captained the village side against The Artists and Old Marlburians and other wandering clubs, and at the creeper-clad church where he worshipped and sang. The clarity of the water deceives the spectator on the bridge into thinking that it is no more than a few inches deep. A little way up there is a pool where you may, when the light is right, make out the shapes of grayling. Plunket Greene referred to them as ‘the grey squirrels of a trout stream’, observing the orthodoxy of the time which was to treat them as vermin. In fact they are wonderful fish, just as fine as trout, and as wild as can be, which cannot always be said of their spotted cousins.
Cricket pavilion Hurstbourne Priors
These streams – Hampshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire and Dorset have them, and they crop up in parts of East Anglia and Yorkshire as well as across the Channel in Normandy – are different from streams elsewhere. They look different and they behave differently. The special quality is given to them by the rock over which they flow and which forms their valleys and watersheds. Its influence spreads far beyond the bright waters where the trout and grayling grow fat.
4
DEAD MEN AND ALGEBRAIC EQUATIONS
Chalk is the bedrock along more than half the overall length of the A303. It sets the tone of the landscape from Popham as far as the Wiltshire/Somerset border south of Penselwood – ‘a rolling ocean of green’, as the travel writer Robert Byron characterised it, ‘over which the cloud-shadows play like a cinematograph – an ocean suddenly frozen, as it were, into green cliffs whose pastoral escarpments guard the valleys and vales like giant fortifications.’
The chalk gives the land its pallor. It determines its texture and what will grow. There are comparatively few oaks on the chalk downland; its trees are beech and yew. There are not many ponds or ditches, and little bracken. Left to itself it reverts to a scrub of hawthorn and dogwood. Cleared and opened to sheep and rabbits, the thin soil favours a cover of springy turf, a carpet of grasses and flowers like hawkweed, ribwort, buttercups, daisies and burnet. For many centuries the high ground was left for grazing, while the growing of crops was concentrated in the valleys. During the second half of the twentieth century the development of modern fertilisers and the advent of the tractor made it possible to convert much of the upland to arable use. But the chalk is still at the surface, and after ploughing the furrows gleam white in the sun, speckled with flints. The flint is hard and glassy to the touch and is extensively used in the chalk country to face houses and cottages and farm outbuildings and churches.
The chalk was laid down around seventy million years ago in the convulsions that signalled the end of the Cretaceous period (creta is the Latin for chalk). As the oceans receded, a layer composed of algae and the crushed shells of molluscs was deposited. The depth of the layer varied from a few metres to several hundred. There are extensive chalk deposits in Russia, America, Australia and Israel. But the greatest of them was left in a crescent across eastern, southern and south-eastern England, under the Channel and into northern France.
Chalk is composed almost entirely of calcium carbonate grains that are uncemented and hence unusually porous. It is the geological equivalent of sponge. Beneath the surface it is split by vertical, horizontal and sloping fissures. The rain seeps down and along these cracks. Sometimes, through erosion, they become rivulets w
hich combine into subterranean rivers. Where a layer of marl or flint blocks the downward seep, the water will migrate sideways, for miles if need be. There may be two or more such strips at different angles in the same block of chalk, so that the water falling on the different sides of the same hill can end up flowing in opposing directions.
The water that feeds the chalkstreams is filtered through the chalk and enriched by the minerals within it. It is these minerals that nourish the weed that nourishes the molluscs, crustacea and invertebrates that nourish the trout and grayling in their turn. The volumes of water stored in these hidden sponges of rock are enormous, and guarantee that the streams flowing from them will not dry up. They hardly ever flood, either, because even the heaviest and most sustained downpours will mostly soak into the hillsides rather than run off the sides gathering silt. Sustained winter rains will, however, cause the water levels within the chalk to rise. Where that water finds a break in a slope, it will gush forth in a spring, causing a fine little stream – known in these parts as a winterbourne – to flow until the water table drops again.
* * *
By and large the list of ministers who have taken charge of transport over the past fifty years amounts to a rollcall of political mediocrities. Not one went on to become Prime Minister. One – Alistair Darling – became Chancellor. One – Malcolm Rifkind – became Foreign Secretary. Among Labour holders of the office, Barbara Castle (December 1965 to April 1968) is the single indisputable heavyweight to have done the job. Some might make a claim for John Prescott, but in his case transport had to compete for his energy and questionable talents within a ludicrously bloated department that also included the environment and ‘the regions’. For the Conservatives Nicholas Ridley (October ’83 to May ’86), Rifkind (November ’90 to April ’92) and possibly Brian Mawhinney (July ’94 to July ’95) might be reckoned to have risen above the run-of-the-mill.
