The A303

by Tom Fort

  Windsor ’74 may have been, as one journalist called it, ‘the last stand of the psychedelic underground’. But the hunger it represented – for the freedom to take drugs, have unlimited casual sex, not to have a job or a mortgage, to lie around in the open listening to eardrum-battering rock music – did not go away. At no time did it involve more than a minute sliver of the population. But the counterculture of which the free festival movement was a basic element developed to a point at which it came to represent – or seemed to – a genuine threat to the established social order. And the establishment reacted as the establishment must.

  Ten years after Windsor died, an estimated 100,000 people gathered for the free festival at Stonehenge, held over nine days around the summer solstice. Access to the monument was unhindered – one photograph shows Sid Rawle within the circle of the stones, naked to the waist, holding his arms out to the sun while the tom-toms beat. The event passed off peacefully, but by the time it ended the forces of reaction were building. The political climate had changed radically since Labour’s reforming Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, had in effect sanctioned a free festival at Watchfield in Oxfordshire in 1975. Under Margaret Thatcher the principle was established that disorder or anything resembling it or threatening to turn into it should be met with force. The treatment of the miners in 1984 showed a government entirely comfortable with the proposition that the police should be used as a weapon against dissent. Mrs Thatcher was no more inclined to look kindly at a rabble of travellers, squatters, druggies, hippies, anarchists, diggers, levellers, bikers, layabouts and free-lovers than at the sooty cokemen of Orgreave.

  So when a group of Wiltshire landowners approached the police after the 1984 Stonehenge Festival to say that they no longer wished to have their property invaded, their fences trampled down, their copses felled for firewood, their livestock alarmed and their meadows dug up to make impromptu latrines and left shin-deep in rubbish, they got a sympathetic hearing. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu – chairman of English Heritage, the quango that had taken charge of Stonehenge in 1983 – obtained injunctions banning eighty-three named people from coming within two miles of the monument.

  At the end of May the permanent core of the festival movement, the self-styled Peace Convoy, was parked among the beeches of Savernake Forest in north Wiltshire. The solstice was approaching, and the pull of the stones was on them. Canny Sid Rawle, one of the banned as well as the beautiful people, was aware that trouble was coming. He urged the others to delay leaving Savernake until reinforcements arrived. Rawle believed that their only chance of beating the forces waiting for them would be with weight of numbers. But others did not share his acute appreciation of how the battle lines were drawn. On 1 June the bulk of the Convoy, 140 cheerfully painted buses, caravans, trucks and cars, trundled down the A338 Marlborough–Salisbury road towards its junction with the A303 at Cholderton, where they would turn right for Stonehenge. Flags were waving. Bob Marley boomed from ghetto blasters.

  Just short of the junction – more than four miles outside the exclusion zone secured by the Wiltshire landowners – the A338 had been blocked by a mound of gravel. As the Peace Convoy came to a halt, a version of war broke out. Police in riot equipment came down the line of vehicles smashing windscreens and windows and dragging out the occupants and arresting them. Most of the Convoy then broke through a hedge into a field of beans in the shape of a triangle with the A338 and the A303 forming two of its sides.

  Several hundred police officers followed them. They were led by Wiltshire’s acting Deputy Chief Constable, Lionel Grundy, who informed the travellers that they were being stopped because of their clear intention to break the Stonehenge exclusion zone. He refused to let them turn around and go back to Savernake, saying that they would have to abandon their vehicles, which for many of them were their homes. A lengthy stand-off ended with the police being ordered to arrest everyone. Buses and caravans were wrecked; members of the Convoy were chased, beaten and dragged around by the hair. One of the very few journalists present, Nick Davies of the Observer, said afterwards: ‘Over the years I had seen all kinds of frightening and horrible things and always managed to grin and write it. But as I left the Beanfield, for the first time I felt sick enough to cry.’ An ITN reporter, Kim Sabido, described the assault as ‘the most brutal police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career’ – although, mysteriously, both his voice and the footage of the worst of the savagery were missing from the report broadcast that night.

  Unfortunately for Mr Grundy, there was a witness to the events in the beanfield who was neither a journalist nor an unwashed hippy but secretary of the Marlborough Conservative Association. Lord Cardigan had become acquainted with the Peace Convoy because his father, the Marquess of Ailesbury, owned the part of Savernake Forest where they had parked. He decided to follow them towards Stonehenge on his motorbike and saw what happened. He publicly described the behaviour of the police as brutal, and when challenged by one of his fellow Wiltshire landowners, he replied: ‘If I see a policeman truncheoning a woman I feel I’m entitled to say it’s not a good thing.’

  Largely because of his testimony, the charges against more than 400 Peace Convoy members arrested during the Battle of the Beanfield had to be dropped. Cardigan himself, having been widely denounced as a class traitor, successfully sued The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror for libel (The Times called him ‘barking mad’, a condition it attributed to his notorious ancestor at the Charge of the Light Brigade). Six years later, twenty-four of those charged by Wiltshire Police won an action for wrongful arrest.

  No matter. These were minor setbacks to the Thatcher government’s offensive against the free festival movement and its highly subversive message. The year after the Battle of the Beanfield, the Public Order Act came into force, redefining what the state regarded as disorder and giving the police enormously enhanced powers to control, ban and disperse assemblies. The era of free love, free music, free festivals, of the Wallies and hippies and Hengists, of the Tibetan Ukrainian Mountain Troupe and the Mystic Wankers, the Albionists and the Freaks and all the rest was over.

  So too, by coincidence, was Britain’s time as a world leader in making motor cars. In 1960 we were the second-biggest car manufacturing nation. By 1974 we had slipped to sixth place, and the slide continued. In November 1979 Derek Robinson, known as ‘Red Robbo’, the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers’ convener at British Leyland’s Longbridge plant, was sacked for publicly criticising the plan proposed by the new chairman, Sir Michael Edwardes, to save the company from collapse. The BBC credited Robinson with having instigated more than 500 industrial disputes over the previous two and a half years. BL, by then the last wholly British volume car producer left, became a terminal victim of what became known around the world as ‘the British disease’, namely industrial anarchy. In 1986 the Japanese car maker Nissan – where such problems were unknown – opened its first European plant. The location it chose was Sunderland.

  As for me, the green Saab 96 marked a decisive break with my own country’s automotive heritage. It was followed by another 96, orange and not so appealing. After that came two Volvo estates and a successions of Peugeots. I never owned a truly British car again.

  7

  ANCESTRAL VOICES

  The road rises steadily from the Beanfield over the south end of a long ridge that reaches towards the Berkshire Downs to the north. Up to this point the environs of the A303 have been pleasant enough (when not despoiled by the Great Shed) but nothing special. But suddenly, as it crests the ridge, it is as if a curtain had been whipped away. To get the best of what is revealed, you need to stop somewhere and ascend the chalky path on the north side of the road. It leads to the top of Beacon Hill, so named for the same reason that Popham Beacons is called Popham Beacons. The top is a rounded knoll of rabbit-nibbled rough grass dotted with gorse bushes and wind-battered little thorn trees, and populated at certain times o
f year by a large number of snails. There is a tapered GPS marker stone and, close by, a bristling radio mast defended by a formidable fence with signs warning of terrible consequences for trespassers. This installation detracts somewhat from the charm of the place, as does the thunder from the road below. But on a clear day nothing can diminish the wonder of the panorama.

  The view south from Beacon Hill

  The land drops away steeply on three sides. To the north Beacon Hill becomes Dunch Hill then Sidbury Hill, with its Iron Age fort. Far beyond is the blue line of the Marlborough Downs and Tan Hill, another prehistoric fortified settlement. West is the valley of the Avon, the trees along the river making it look as if a fat finger had been dipped in green paint and dragged down the middle of Salisbury Plain. Either side is spread the Plain itself, a rolling plateau of tawny grass. Somewhere far away are the artillery ranges of Larkhill and Westdown, and the army’s training grounds reach as far as Warminster, although the distances cover all the details in a dun-coloured haze. Closer, you can see the tank and transport tracks snaking across the bare terrain, almost white against the grass. The Old Marlborough Road, originally a droving way and for a long time the main route to Salisbury, cuts a pale, empty line due north.

  Bulford, the first of the military camps, is at the foot of Beacon Hill. Due west is Amesbury, hidden by trees, and beyond it Stonehenge, sufficiently straight ahead for the line between it and Beacon Hill to be listed in the web of routes radiating from the monument that have been identified over the centuries by stargazers, Druids, ley hunters, ufologists and other seekers after spiritual illumination – some visible, many invisible, all regarded as being of immense importance. Salisbury is away to the south, the spire of its cathedral showing like a dart when the air is clear; and the great oval mound of Roman Sorviodunum, Old Sarum. Most of this southern tract of country is arable land, dotted with woods and copses. The eye that roams across it is likely to be held by two unmissable military sites with dark associations: Boscombe Down and Porton Down.

  I cycled in and around them both one blustery summer’s day and came back to tell the tale. Boscombe, the aircraft testing station, is spread over the high ground to the southeast of Amesbury, its two enormous runways forming a cramped L-shape with its apex close to the town. It appeared to be entirely deserted when I pedalled past, apart from the occasional MoD jeep glimpsed far inside the perimeter fence. There was no one to say ‘good morning’ to or to ask about the various hush-hush activities that bring a glitter to the eye of the conspiracy theorists – in particular the alleged accident involving an alleged hypersonic spy plane that allegedly happened in September 1994. There weren’t even any guard dogs, just a long, long barrier of wire fencing hung at intervals with signs stating: ‘Prohibited Place Under The Official Secrets Act’. Inside the fence, half buried in the ground and grassed over (presumably to make them invisible from the air), were bunkers with green nodules like hose connectors on top. Was there anyone inside, looking out?

  Porton Down is a couple of miles south-east of Boscombe Down. The name is indelibly associated with the experimental station established by the War Office nearly a hundred years ago to test chemical weapons. Since then scientists have developed and researched a host of horrible agents of death, disease and paralysis, from mustard gas and phosgene to anthrax and botulinum to LSD and sarin. In the process a mushroom cloud of rumour concerning hideous experiments on unsuspecting victims has settled over the Porton Down labs; and other tales have been told, of alien organisms retrieved from the scene of UFO collisions with earth being analysed and producing results too terrifying ever to be mentioned again.

  But to botanists and nature lovers, Porton Down means something else entirely. Its appropriation in the cause of inflicting death and suffering meant the abrupt end of farming. Since 1916 the down itself has been untouched by plough, fertiliser, herbicide or pesticide. As a result of this accidental return to nature, it is now acknowledged as the most important large (3500 acres) expanse of pristine chalk grassland in Europe. Amid the sheep’s fescue and meadow oat-grass, rare orchids brush against toadflax, milkwort, fleawort, squinancywort, viper’s bugloss, horseshoe vetch and other curiously named flowers. More than forty species of butterfly and moth shimmer between the clumps of spiky, black-berried juniper. Skylarks soar and the stone curlews flute their sad cry. An estimated thirty billion ants occupy the three million anthills that resemble an outbreak of green measles. And none but a very few authorised humans may go there.

  I cycled somewhat nervously down the long avenue into the Porton Down Science Campus, unable entirely to suppress the thought that, if apprehended, I might be liable for use for experiments by mad virologists. I kept going briskly past an enormous complex of buildings, including the Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory where thousands of mice, pigs, ferrets, rats and monkeys experience horrible (though possibly useful) deaths each year; and the Health Protection Agency’s Emergency Centre for Preparedness and Response, where men and women in white coats work out what should be done in the event of a bio-terrorist attack or the arrival of plague. A notice stated that the current response level – I was unclear what to – was ‘heightened’. Back on the road I paused briefly opposite a closed gate beyond which a dead-straight, clearly very private indeed way rose steeply to a cluster of low buildings where – it seemed to me – ANYTHING MIGHT HAPPEN. I urged my bicycle back to the village of Porton.

  It is probably the least interesting of a string of villages along the lower part of the River Bourne, which is a tiny chalkstream that wriggles south through the eastern sector of Salisbury Plain and eventually joins the Avon in Salisbury itself (its theoretical source is far away towards Marlborough but in these thirsty times much of its course is dry for much of the year). Idmiston is the next village upstream from Porton, where there is a very beautiful old flint church. The vicar there in the late eighteenth century was the Reverend John Bowle, known by his friends (who included Doctor Johnson) as ‘Don’ Bowle on account of his great accomplishments in Spanish. He edited Don Quixote and wrote a Life of Cervantes in Spanish; the Dictionary of National Biography calls him ‘an ingenious scholar of great erudition and varied research in obscure and ancient literature’, which is a nice thing to have said about you. ‘Don’ Bowle loved his dog Pedro, and wrote these lines to him: ‘My dog, the trustiest of his kind/With gratitude inflames my mind.’ After Pedro’s death his owner had his skin used to bind a few favourite books so that he might continue to pat him in the absence of his animating spirit.

  A couple of big loops further up the Bourne is Boscombe, huddled below the western runway of the airfield. Another cleric of great learning, Richard Hooker, was rector here in the 1590s, when he was writing his epic treatise on church governance, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie. Hooker is pretty much forgotten now but was revered after his death for his simple piety and erudite theology. Izaak Walton wrote an admiring biography of him, in which he attributed Hooker’s domestic troubles to poor choice of wife. She nagged him incessantly, on one occasion – according to Walton – rousing him stridently from his study of Horace to get him to rock the baby’s cradle. Walton alleged that he only married her because he was bashful and had poor eyesight.

  Edward Hutton, in his marvellous Highways and Byways in Wiltshire, speculated that there must have been something that inspired scholarship in the ‘thin and pure and musical air’ that wafted over these downs. At the same time that Hooker was toiling over his Ecclesiastical Politie in Boscombe, Nicholas Fuller, the Rector of Allington – not much more than a mile away – was up to his ears in the studies that would eventually, in 1612, bear fruit in the publication of his Miscellaneorum Theologicorum, a great brantub (written in Latin) of reflections on the relationship between languages and religion.

  A further mile upriver is Newton Tony, another appealing little place. That tireless traveller on the atrocious pre-turnpike roads, Celia Fiennes, came from there.7The Fiennes had the big house in Newt
on Tony. After they were gone, a bigger one was built by a rich landowner, William Benson, who was celebrated for his passionate love for the poetry of Milton. He paid for the marble monument to him in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, and forked out the amazing sum of £1000 to have Paradise Lost translated into Latin hexameters. It was not obvious to Benson’s contemporaries why anyone should wish to read it in someone else’s Latin rather than Milton’s English; but it was still a considerable act of homage.

  From Newton Tony I took an old droving track called the Green Way to Cholderton, the last village before the A303 crosses the Bourne. It was dark, hemmed in by beech and oak trees, worn into a rounded dip by sheep hooves long ago but firm and flinty beneath my wheels. It was very quiet and I did not meet a soul. When I emerged into open country, I immediately heard the buzzing of the A303 ahead.

  * * *

  From Beacon Hill the road slopes down to Amesbury. I came across some verses about the place that appealed to me. They were dated 1946 and were composed by ‘G.E.G.’, a modest poet. Part of the poem goes as follows:

  In crook of wandering Avon’s elbow do I lie

  At peace secure. . .

  Vespasian’s legions from the wooded camp above

  My reedy vale have marched my ancient straeds

  The centuries have passed and poets sang of love

  Within the confines of my peaceful Abbey glades.