Motoring Alan Judd
Penny Phillips, esteemed custodian of this column, recently travelled the A303, that great highway linking London and the M3 with the West Country.
Normally we hear about the A303 only if there are holiday jams or in connection with Stonehenge, by which it passes.
Penny’s experience was different: needing to get home in time for lockdown, she drove the length of it back to London at midnight on a Sunday. The only other car she saw in Somerset was a taxi. Thereafter, all the way to London, she passed a few lorries but saw no other cars at all. Not one. It was surreal and spooky, like surviving a nuclear war.
When was the last time anyone drove that distance on the A303 with no other cars? The Second World War? Or before there were cars?
It’s a road I grew to love many years ago following a few lucky journeys on summer evenings when it was relatively uncrowded and the great sweeping cornfields of Wiltshire and north Hampshire made me feel as though I was surfing a golden ocean.
In those distant days, Stonehenge was not a fenced-off heritage site with car park and visitor centre; just a circle of big stones a little way off the road. You could pull onto the verge and wander across the field, stroking them and sitting on them while wondering about the people who put them there. Much as antiquary John Aubrey described them 400 years ago.
Lack of traffic during lockdown has made it easier to appreciate many of our great roads. The novelist Ford Madox Ford wrote of the beautiful, empty high roads of England in the late-19th century, formerly busy with coaches and wagons but then deserted by all but a little local horse-drawn traffic and the occasional tramp. The reason was the railways. It took a few decades for cars and lorries to repopulate those roads.
There are still many you can enjoy, even in normal crowed times. One of my favourites is the A66, which runs across the spine of England, linking the A1 at Scotch Corner with the M6 at Penrith. Heavily used, much of it is now dual carriageway, but the hills and valleys of Teesdale never fail to lift the spirits.
I recall one night especially, guiding my last Discovery eastwards through near-blizzard conditions as far as Brough, then branching high up into the dale on narrow roads in search of our favourite inn. The signposts were snowed over, the descents treacherous, the corners abrupt and not a light to be seen.
But the Discovery coped with aplomb until at last we found the inn, the glow from the windows reflected by the snow, a coal fire in the bar, supper and room waiting. That’s the kind of motoring I like.
Or take the A9 to Inverness, then the A835 north to the A832. That carries you in a great loop through glens, lochs and mountains and back along the spectacular west coast.
Choose your time and you can still do it in solitary splendour, but if you don’t – and thanks to Prince Charles’s naming it as part of his favourite 500-mile route around Scotland – you may find yourself amid swarms of motorbikes and herds of caravans.
Other favourite roads, both main and minor, I selfishly keep secret.
It’s the paradox of prosperity: too little and life is brutish and short; too much and we’re too many. The answer? Drive with discretion.