Sometimes, it is the journey we remember, rather than the destination. Julie Harding travels the long, winding–and sometimes frustrating– road to the West Country, taking in the sights along the way
HURTLING west, bound perhaps for the soft sand beaches of south Devon or the thunderous surf of Cornwall, brings the promise of lazy days, picnicking alfresco, immersion in an absorbing book, invigorating clifftop walks and a brief hiatus from the humdrum of everyday life. The destination is utopian, but reaching it can be as far removed from paradise as it is possible to imagine, for there are few fast roads that join the A30, which has the ultimate responsibility for transporting travellers into Britain’s deep South-West.
The three-lane M5, which begins at West Bromwich and ends in Exeter, is businesslike, monotonous and built for swift journey times, barring when accidents induce tailbacks or sheer volume of traffic forces cars and lorries to a crawl. By contrast, the more southern A303, the best bet for Londoners leaving the capital or Home Counties residents escaping the likes of Sussex, Kent and Surrey, is renowned for its quirkiness, its frustratingly lengthy queues and its indecision—it switches from one to two lanes and back again with alarming regularity once past Solstice Services. Its twists and turns can necessitate repeated stomping on the brakes and its hills bring articulated lorries to a near standstill, together with their following packs of lighter vehicles. According to National Highways, there are in excess of 100 accidents along the route annually.
Officially opened on April 1, 1933—but for the next two decades regarded as a country cousin to the more popular 284-mile London-to-Land’s End A30—the A303 is today a truly indispensable trunk road that springs into life at M3 junction 8, just south of the Hampshire village of North Waltham, wends its way, river-like, for 93 miles and then fizzles out, free of fanfare, to morph into the A30 near Upottery in Devon. Parts of the route, some of which historians believe evolved from the ancient Harrow Way and Fosse Way, are as captivating as any highway in Britain, as Tom Fort notes in his entertaining book The A303: Highway to the Sun: ‘It can take the adventurer from cosy, commuter-belt Hampshire to the threshold of another land entirely, one of the wooded dales enclosing tumbling streams, steep hillsides and old stone farmhouses, purple treeless moors, eventually rocky headlands and sandy beaches and the surging sea. It is a road of magical properties.’
At Stonehenge, that most magical, mysterious and famous of landmarks on the route, where sarsen stones and bluestones have circled and fascinated for 5,000 years, 26,000 vehicles hurtle past da
