A303: Highway to the Sun

50 miles from London, I'm heading into the southwest of England

to tell the story of a road.

A humble road, you may think.

But it's a surprising road.

It's called the A303.

The A303 is famous as the road that passes Stonehenge on the way to Cornwall.

And infamous for its traffic jams and bank holiday bottlenecks.

I've used it for years to take me to the rivers where I love to fish.

But like everyone else speeding up and down it each day, I never gave it a thought.

Then it struck me that the road was more than just a means to an end,

a way to have some fun,

that it was an entity in its own right.

I realised that the road could lead me into the past...

Alfred the Great, where are you?!

It shows up blue.

I'm looking at a Roman fish!

..but it could also bring me back to the present.

It's fresh. It is warm!

I kid you not,

Margaret Thatcher was on her hands and knees with me, poring over maps.

The A303 catapults us through the stories of a thousand lifetimes.

Horns, boys, horns!

Most of the time we just keep driving.

But on this journey, I intend to stop.

Because the A303 isn't just a piece of tarmac.

It's helped shape an ancient landscape at the heart of England...

..and to satisfy our restlessness,

the urge within us to explore the next horizon.

The A303 starts round about here, just outside Basingstoke,

on a sweeping slip road off the M3.

It's the start of a 100 miles or so

reaching into the heart of deepest Devon.

It's only been called the A303 for about 80 years.

But it's been around a lot longer than that

as the prehistoric Harrow Way, or the Roman Fosse Way.

In the 19th century, it was known as the New Direct Road,

running all the way from London to Exeter.

Much of the modern A303 makes use of the old 19th-century road.

Occasionally, you come across some interesting relics of that past.

Such as a hedge, a surprising hedge, right down the middle of the road.

Now, on the whole, the modern road has no pretentions to beauty.

The central reservation is just concrete and scrubby grass.

But here, for several miles at Micheldever,

extends this neat and tidy hedge, which is quite clearly left over

from when the road was a single carriageway affair.

And here ahead, an oak tree, a fine oak tree

left in glorious isolation in between these two carriageways,

giving a touch of class, if I may say so.

It's unnoticed history, isn't it?

I mean it's been here for... Who knows?

The Edwardian man of letters Hilaire Belloc described roads

as "one of the primal things which move us."

"Like fire, a roof above us, or two voices in the night."

"The road", he said, "is the most imperative and the first of our necessities."

In the case of the A303,

that imperative has become ever bigger, bolder and more urgent.

This is Picket Twenty, which is a nice, quaint sort of name

for what used to be a quiet hamlet on the outskirts of Andover -

the first big town on the A303, heading west from Basingstoke.

And, as you can see, I'm under a bridge.

The 1960s road didn't have much time for Picket Twenty,

or any other hamlet, for that matter.

It couldn't quite bring itself to obliterate the place completely.

But it did rise up and over it.

Modern Britain needed modern roads.

Never again would speeding drivers see

the whites of Picket Twenty's eyes.

On September 11th 1969, the white heat of technology came calling.

That phrase summed up the much-trumpeted ambition

of Harold Wilson's Labour Government, to transform Britain

into a thrusting, dynamic society fit for the late-20th century.

Key to that was a massive road improvement programme.

Now we could all go somewhere in our shiny new cars.

For every five people in Britain today there is now one car or lorry on the roads.

There are 200,000 miles of public highway.

The old A303 at Picket Twenty was, like so many others,

a product of the Victorian age.

Not any more.

I have here the front page of the Andover Advertiser for Friday 12 September, 1969.

And the main photo is of the junior minister of transport, Mr Bob Brown,

standing probably not very far from where I am now, with a pair of scissors in his hand,

cutting the tape that declares the Andover Bypass open.

For Andover, the bypass was a chance to compete with close rival Basingstoke

which was calling itself "The Space Age Town Of The South".

But to the men from the ministry, there was a bigger dream,

to upgrade 200 miles of the old road

into a super highway, all the way to the beaches of Cornwall.

The dream already had a name - The London-Penzance Trunk Road.

It began with the Andover Bypass.

And at Hampshire's county records office

you can still see the original masterplan.

Book number seven. Here we are. Picket Twenty Interchange.

And it's conveniently marked on the masterplan in pink.

If I turn the page of this,

I think maybe you can get an idea of the quite extraordinary complexity

and detail, and actually sort of beauty, of these drawings.

Now this is the position that I was occupying, looking down on that roaring maelstrom of traffic.

Down here there is a list of everything they show.

Lamp posts, every lamp post, fire hydrants...

The quality of the draftsmanship, all obviously pre-computer, is quite phenomenal.

Not merely is there a reference to "tree to remain",

but there's actually a drawing of the tree.

What is fascinating, in a way, is that they're completely divorced

from the extremely messy reality.

And you get some idea here of the devastation to previously peaceful countryside.

The surface just torn away. You can't get away from it.

It's an ugly scar across the Hampshire countryside.

To speeding drivers though, the Andover bypass IS the landscape.

Never mind all the stuff either side.

Here, it slices through one of England's ancient woodlands, Harewood Forest.

A long time ago, this forest formed part of the ancient kingdom of Wessex.

Within touching distance of the road, is the scene of a 1,000-year-old crime,

that involved lust, betrayal, and violence.

At the centre of it, was the King of England, Edgar.

Rather misleadingly known as Edgar the Peaceful.

Edgar, so the story goes, was about to marry.

His bride to be, Elfrida,

was said to be ravishingly beautiful.

But the King had never actually seen her.

So, just to make sure, he sent one of his Earls, Aethelwold,

to check her out.

Aethelwold found that Elfrida was indeed a corker.

In fact, so bewitching was she,

that Aethelwold promptly married her himself.

So, the treacherous Aethelwold went back to Edgar.

"Well", says the King,

"What's she like?"

"I'm sorry, your majesty - a base, commonplace girl.

"Not really worthy of your attention,

"certainly not worthy to be your Queen."

Aethelwold was playing with fire.

And here, within shouting distance of the A303,

he was about to get his comeuppance.

The King was no fool and he soon found out that his old friend

had made a monkey out of him, which was not a good idea.

And here or just about here,

the King killed him, stuck a javelin right through his middle.

This is where the deed was done. It's called Dead Man's Plack,

a monument erected in the 19th century by local land owner,

William Iremonger.

"Upon this spot, Edgar, King of England,

"in the ardour of love and indignation,

"did slew with his own hand,

"the base and treacherous Earl Aethelwold."

I really like this place.

I like the fact that this cross is hidden among the trees.

I like the idea of the romantically inclined local land owner.

Colonel William Iremonger, veteran of the Peninsula War,

200 years ago, went to the trouble and expense of putting this up

and yet nobody comes here any more, it's virtually neglected.

I like the fact that down there is the A303.

You can hear it but you can't see it.

Dead Man's Plack is hard to find,

but it's not the only piece of history round here that's receded quietly into the landscape.

A few miles west, a web of old pathways converges on the old A303.

One of them was more than just a local track.

Known as the Harrow Way,

it ran from Dover across southern England to the Devon coast.

And it could've been around even before humans arrived.

There is a theory, I put it no more strongly than that,

that the track I've just been walking down

was first walked by, believe it or not, reindeer,

tens, tens of thousands of years ago,

from somewhere in the frozen north of Europe

when we were still joined to Europe by the hip across what is now the Channel.

Be that as it may, they were tracks. They were certainly tracks,

they were certainly locally used, and this is certainly one of them,

and one of the most important ones.

After the animals, reindeer or otherwise,

the tracks and roads were adopted by human feet,

turning this part of England into an intricate transport hub.

It's still a transport hub today.

And not far from where the Harrow Way meets the A303,

they're building a new track.

I like these trees. Look.

HE LAUGHS

They call this the Great Shed,

for obvious reasons,

and its size, well...

I read somewhere, 20 football pitches

and the height of four double decker buses.

The building is a quarter of a mile long,

and designed to handle 100 lorries an hour.

It's a food distribution warehouse owned by the Co-op.

Yet it's also a mysterious place.

To drivers passing just yards away,

the shed presents itself as a huge expanse of windowless steel,

a building which offers no apparent clue as to its purpose.

But feeding the nation wasn't always like this.

Nearby, in the village of Weyhill,

the road once helped move our next meal around in a very different way.

This is what I've come upstairs to show you.

This is a painting recreating the events that made Weyhill,

in its time, the most important agricultural fair in the country,

one of the commercial hubs of southern England.

The earliest record of the fair dates from 1126,

when Henry II ordered some pigs for five shillings.

And it also gets a mention in the 14th century epic poem, Piers Plowman.

Daniel Defoe, the indefatigable traveller and chronicler of England

at the beginning of the 18th Century,

he was told that they sold 500,000 sheep in the week.

Well, even allowing for a bit of local exaggeration, the numbers were enormous.

In the bar downstairs, local historian Tony Raper

has a map of the fairground from 1683.

Basically, the whole area would've been full of sheep, horses,

geese, cattle, everything.

And this would've been the auction area,

so you've got the cheese fair here, in the rectangle.

We've got a joiners fair down here.

If you look closely, there's wooden prams,

there's chairs and armchairs, all kinds of things.

Leather sellers fair, with all the skins and everything.

This is the horse fair in this area.

And this along here is the old A303, before they built the bypass?

That's right. This is the Andover side,

and here we are travelling towards Amesbury.

They say you could even sell your wife at the Weyhill fair.

There's record of a girl called Betty Duck being sold in these parts for half a crown.

There was a funfair, too, with boxing booths and freak shows.

One year, a woman billed as a mermaid was put on display.

She'd been fished out of Southampton water.

And there was drinking, lots of drinking,

including a Weyhill tradition that turned boys into men.

They called it the horning of the colts.

These are the genuine horns of an old-fashioned breed of sheep.

That's right. On here, there'd be a receptacle full of beer,

and the whole thing would've been balanced on the head

and whilst they were in the room, he would've been joggled

and jostled, and they would've been singing him a song all the time.

It was basically, "Horns, boys, horns,

"horns, boys, horns, and sing like his daddy with a large pair of horns."

Horns, boys, horns. Horns, boys, horns, sing like...

# Horns, boys, ho-o-o-orns! #

I think that's enough of that!

The song goes on, "So swiftly runs the hare, so keen runs the fox,

"why shouldn't this young colt grow up to be an ox?"

They haven't sung it round here for decades.

# It's I have been to Weyhill fair

# And, oh, what sights I did see there

# To tell my tale would make you stare

# And see the horses showing

# They come from east They come from west

# They bring their worst They bring their best

# And some they lead And they drive the rest

# Unto the fair at Weyhill. #

In the end, two things killed the Weyhill Fair -

tough rules on testing for TB,

and the new era of railway and motorised transport.

Shepherding your flock long distances to market just wasn't worth it anymore,

and in 1959, after almost 1,000 years, the Weyhill fair sold its last sheep.

It's not easy to imagine this place as it once was,

thronged with beasts and shepherds and cattlemen

in a dry autumn with the dust rising in a huge cloud over here.

But it's also nice to report that the place hasn't been completely wiped away.

But rather, a history lives on.

The Weyhill fair is not entirely dead.

Beyond Weyhill, Hampshire soon turns into Wiltshire,

the second of five counties the A303 cuts through on its way west.

The road beneath me is late 20th century vintage.

But the landscape around it has a much older story to tell.

Here we are, just turning off. Oh!

Oh! Not an easy manoeuvre in a Morris Traveller from the old days.

Here we go. I hope the suspension can take it.

'This is one of my favourite places along this road -

'Beacon Hill.

'There's a tremendous view of the landscape falling away to the south.

'The A303 is just below,

'but our impact on this part of the world goes back much further.'

From where I'm standing, in all directions dotted around the place

are ancient prehistoric burial mounds, tumuli, barrows.

Some of them disappeared under the plough or under buildings.

Many of them still visible.

And when you drive along the A303, through this part of the world,

you're in fact driving through a prehistoric graveyard.

'Who were the people who first lived and died on the Neolithic 303?

'Drive a mile further on to the Solstice Business Park,

'and you can, in a manner of speaking, get to meet one of them.'

Here he is.

'He's called the Ancestor,

'and he was made from welded steel by two local sculptors.'

As we can see from his prognathous forehead

and wide nose and sunken eyes,

he's ancient. "Ancient man", says the text here, on his knees,

head thrown back,

arms open wide, reaching up to the skies.

Rooted into the moon. Protected by three magical hairs.

Unfortunately, the magical hairs seem to have hopped off.

I like to think of him as one of the first travellers round here,

and I like to think of him maybe one day getting up off his knees

and having a look round at the Holiday Inn behind

and the A303 up there.

Maybe the Harvester pub round the corner,

and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut.

'Of course, the Ancestor's a product of someone's imagination.

'But the real thing is closer than you think.

'This is the Amesbury Archer, an early Bronze Age traveller

'from the Alpine region of Central Europe who was buried

'within a stone's throw of the A303.

'Hidden for over four millennia, his grave was disturbed

'by builders in 2002.

'This wasn't just a pile of old bones -

'it was the richest Bronze Age burial site ever found in Britain.

'16 barbed flint arrowheads, knives, wrist guards

'and metalworking tools suggest he was a craftsman

'who was also useful with a bow. But that wasn't all they found.'

I'm holding in my hand the two oldest gold objects

ever found in Britain, and to be honest,

I'm a bit terrified - they're so fragile.

These are believed to be ornaments for the Archer's hair,

and how extraordinary it is to think that, 4,300 years ago,

when these were made,

that they were thinking of decoration in those terms.

It raises the question - who was the Archer,

and what was he doing here?

One of the critical things that we know about him is that

he was a metalworker.

He knew how to transform metal into objects,

and this would have been an amazing process.

And the locals here didn't have that, did they?

Absolutely - it was a new technology.

So he was a man on a mission,

a man who may have been on a pilgrimage

to show other people how to work metal.

But he was obviously a person of some importance,

and the gold ornaments we looked at earlier indicate this.

Absolutely, because the gold was very unusual,

there probably was no-one else

who would have had objects like that,

And very few people would have owned objects made from copper.

And one of the really unusual things about this burial

is that he was found with five pottery beakers.

Hardly any burials of this period have been found with so many.

The average beaker burial would be one beaker -

this chap had five.

So he was five beaker man,

whereas you and I might have been...

We probably wouldn't even have been one beaker.

Suffering from a slight attack of beaker envy,

I'm leaving the Archer behind.

He was a man who would have known the Neolithic 303

like the back of his hand.

But did he come all that way across Europe

just to impress the locals with his metalworking skills?

Or did he have a more specific reason for coming here?

I suspect he did.

And that's because of what lies over the hill ahead.

OK, whoa, this is going to cause trouble.

CAR HORN BEEPS

Well, here she is, let's get out and have a look.

It's the A303's most famous landmark -

Stonehenge.

We're quite a distance away,

and the stones look rather small, don't they?

From here, they're also overwhelmed by the traffic.

But, step to one side, and you'll see why I've stopped here.

They do look small,

but what you get from here is a sense of their context,

of where they stand in the landscape.

The great open sky,

the wide open spaces, the rolling grassland,

and the monument in the middle of it...

..and I know English Heritage will hate me for saying this,

but, actually, we're just close to the road,

it's not a bad place to be stuck in a traffic jam,

because it'll give you perhaps the best view of Stonehenge there is.

A proper car, a real car.

What do you think of it?

I think she's beautiful.

-"She", I like it.

She has to be.

Robert Key grew up in Wiltshire.

In 1983, he became the local MP.

MP for Stonehenge, you might call him.

The A303 runs right through his old constituency.

This must have been one of the first cars

that has flashing orange indicator lights instead of flippers.

Oh, instead of those things!

Today, Stonehenge is a World Heritage Site,

which, loosely translated, means, "Interfere with it at your peril."

But we weren't always so protective of it.

During and after the First World War...

The Flying Corps were based here.

And the military were allowed to do pretty much as they wanted.

I've seen a photograph of an army Land Rover perched on top

of the stones, brought here in the middle of the night

after a particularly good evening in the officers' mess over in Larkhill,

which is only a couple of miles,

and goodness knows how they got it up there, but they did.

They wouldn't get away with it today.

They certainly wouldn't, no.

But would they get away with this today?

In the 1950s, cranes were brought in to rearrange the stones -

sacrilege, some said.

These are the stones that were, as it were, re-erected,

-these massive ones.

-Yeah, absolutely.

And the smaller ones, they were OK?

Some of them were tilted, so they were straightened up a bit.

You can see on that stone there,

there's a great big wodge of concrete holding it up,

which people don't really think about when they go past the stones.

-Were they at an angle, were they lying down?

-Yes.

Leaning how far?

Mostly lying down.

Some, the tops of the stones had disappeared,

so they put them back on top,

and it was a major reconstruction, really.

I think over the years, something like 23 stones have been re-erected,

with the lintels put back on top.

In the early days of motoring, the A303 was a mere slip of a thing

which didn't trouble the stones at all.

How things change.

Today, the road's a scourge - noisy, dirty and often gridlocked.

There have been many plans to re-route it - over 50, in fact -

including one to bury the A303 in a tunnel.

All fell by the wayside, despite Robert's best efforts.

In the '90s, he struggled to find a solution

as competing government departments, public pressure groups

and even the druids locked horns.

I thought there's only one thing to do - go to the Prime Minister.

I kid you not, Margaret Thatcher was on her hands and knees with me

in her room in the House of Commons,

poring over maps of all the possible routes around,

discussing which land belonged to the Ministry of Defence,

which was National Trust, which was English Heritage.

She was really engaged on it.

Even Margaret Thatcher was defeated by Stonehenge.

Even Margaret Thatcher!

John Major, bless him, did the same.

Pored over the maps but then absolutely nothing happened.

Now at least everyone can shut up about it.

Oh, no. This problem's never going to go away. The A303's going nowhere.

Apart from the monument itself,

the place that's paid the heaviest price for the Stonehenge stalemate

is the next village along, Winterbourne Stoke.

Every rescue plan for Stonehenge

included a bypass for Winterbourne Stoke.

It was promised a thousand times.

It never came.

Weep for Winterbourne Stoke,

the village that the bypass forgot.

A couple of miles further on, the A303 has been improved.

No bypass, but new dual carriageway.

After Amesbury, the road develops a slightly split personality.

One minute, superhighway, the next, super bottleneck.

I wouldn't like to do that too often.

They'll all be very pissed off.

This delightful spot

could be...

the oldest crossroads in this country,

quite possibly one of the oldest crossroads in the world.

Today, the A303

crosses the A350 Blandford-Devizes road.

But if you scrolled back 4,000-5,000 years,

two paths crossed here.

One north-south...

..known now as the Great Ridgeway,

and going east-west the Harrow Way, which we bumped into before.

3,000 years after the Amesbury Archer,

I might have met another European traveller here.

This time, however, he would have been no wandering metal worker.

This man would have been a warrior from Denmark

with plunder and slaughter on his mind.

A couple of miles north of the road,

I've come to pay my respects to the man who, I like to think,

would have done his best to save me from the bloodthirsty Dane.

Is that not an amazing sight?

This 18th century folly was built to honour King Alfred,

the only one of our kings we still call "The Great".

It was completed in the 1770s,

cost £6,000 - three-quarters of a million, at today's prices -

but that was a mere flea bite to Henry Hoare,

the colossally wealthy banker who commissioned it.

He'd already built Stourhead, the mansion down the hill,

and the gardens around it.

This tower was designed to complete his vision.

The Danish invaders swept all before them

until they had a go at Alfred's Wessex.

And it was here, or round about here, in AD879

that he gathered his men

to march north

to the edge of Salisbury Plain,

where he inflicted a devastating defeat on the invader

and brought peace to this country for more than 100 years.

It's 160 feet to the top, 205 steps.

That is a staggering sight.

Below me, the woods of Stourhead,

silvered with frost, waving in the breeze.

Well done, Henry Hoare.

Where I'm standing here, I'm pretty much astride

a geological fault line that marks a complete transformation

in the landscape along the A303.

Away to the east - you can't see it on a day like this,

but you can take my word for it -

is Salisbury Plain and the chalk downland.

Just about here, the chalk gives way to greensand.

From here on, the fields are smaller,

greener, lusher, defined by hedges.

The stone is browner. The land has a more intimate,

more friendly feel, if you like.

Alfred The Great! Where are you?

The Danes weren't the only invaders

to send a chill down the spine of the A303.

Long before them,

the greatest empire builders of them all were here.

At Ham Hill, just across the county border in Somerset,

I've come to see if I can find them.

It's a terrific view from up here -

some people might say slightly spoilt

by having a road running slap bang through the middle of it.

But it's a very special bit of road, this.

It runs dead straight for miles.

There's a clue for you.

What we have down below me here is not just A303,

but Roman 303.

It's called the Fosse Way.

Built soon after the Roman invasion of AD43,

it runs diagonally across England between Exeter and Lincoln.

The one thing every child knows about the Romans is their roads,

that they built straight roads and it happens to be true.

For part of its journey, the Fosse Way merges with the A303.

So here we have the long, straight stretch of A303 Fosse Way,

one and the same.

Then at this point, the 303 deviates off to the right,

and the Fosse Way continues in a dead straight line.

I think we should go and see what lies down there.

So we're going down this little turn here.

If my calculations are right, we should come back onto the Fosse Way.

Does that look like it?

It's Tarmac now, but as recently as 250 years ago,

remnants of the original Roman surface survived,

described even then as tightly paved and looking like a wall on its side.

I would guess this is probably about 14 or 15 feet wide

and this would have been the width they needed for

moving soldiers, carts and chariots and what have you.

In places, the Fosse Way has cut

what looks like a canyon into the ground.

You can see the trees and banks absolutely soaring high above.

Now the road runs along the very bottom of a very dark crevice

..and ahead continues...

..pretty much in a straight line.

The Romans were here for almost four centuries, and having come

all this way, their high-flyers and bigwigs

would certainly have demanded a decent place to live

Ten years ago at Lopen, half a mile from the Fosse Way, archaeologist Alan Graham

helped unearth evidence of some very impressive accommodation.

I thought you were planting your spuds but it can't be that.

Too deep even for my potatoes.

After digging it up, the extraordinary find was covered over again to preserve it.

So you and I are going to kneel side by side. I have been given

a very elegant implement.

Just show me where we're going to start.

Basically, pull the earth towards you

and see what happens. Does it feel solid?

It feels extremely solid.

You've got red there, look.

It's a mosaic approaching 2,000 years old and part of a once-palatial Roman villa.

You have to think of it as a standing building with stones walls and stone-tile roofs.

Today we're only revealing a small part of it.

The whole thing measures 12 metres by six.

That's the start of the next panel.

-This is going to be the exciting one.

-Right.

Oh, look at that. Two magnificent worms side by side.

I don't want to cut them in half. It would be unkind.

Look at them. Beauties.

We're revealing... What do you think it is?

This is one of the designs in a panel.

If I was asked to guess I would say some sort of water creature.

-Am I getting warm?

-Yes.

Scores of Roman villas have been found in Somerset, many of them

two-storey buildings with luxurious bath houses and under-floor heating.

The Roman invasion of this part of the world was led by Vespasian, was it not?

-They say apparently he started his working life as a street cleaner in Rome.

-So you've been told.

Eventually when he got back, became Emperor, went back to Rome, built the Coliseum.

All a bit murky and muddy at the moment.

You can see how filthy it is, but already the paler ones are showing up paler.

I'm lost for words! I'm looking at a Roman fish.

Come and stand beside me and let's look down on.

It looks so much better from up here.

You get a great view of it.

It's wonderful. It's there, just as it was.

They certainly had a sense of style, did they not?

I think they did.

And the creature -

dolphin, sea snake, marlin, whatever - looks fantastic.

It's a tribute to the skill of the people who made it.

Beautifully engineered roads like the Fosse Way were part of the Roman legacy.

But for hundreds of years, we let them go to ruin.

By the mid-1700s the A303, like so many other roads,

was in such a bad state that the Government was forced to act.

"Yes," they told the public.

"You can have new roads but you'll have to pay for them."

In return for filling in all the potholes and ruts,

the local groups of business men and investors

were told they could charge for the use of the roads.

They could demand tolls, which was a bit of an outrage, really.

Fancy having to pay to use the king's highway.

Toll roads, or turnpikes as they were known, sprang up everywhere,

including here along the A303 near Ilminster,

where you can still see the odd 19th century milestone.

The section we're on now

was probably a rather narrow lane that was heavily rutted.

It was often said of pre-turnpike roads, the sloths

that would fill with water would be so deep they could swallow a horse.

Using income from tolls, rutted and waterlogged surfaces like this

could now be upgraded to hi-tech engineering like this.

The method was inspired by the Romans,

but reinvented by a new breed of road-builders.

Men like the Government's General Surveyor of Roads, John McAdam.

McAdam realised that what you need were stones

which were smaller than the width of the wheel.

And they would lock together.

I see. Who... It must have been a tremendous

business, getting all these stones down cut to the right size?

Well, it was the lowest form of manual labour, but it wasn't

necessarily an unpopular form of labour.

Because it was a kind of jobs that families could do.

So the men would break the larger stones, and the women

and children would sit by the side of the road,

-breaking the stones.

-Children!? Poor little children?

Well, it's said the way they'd check the smallest stones had got to the

right size was you would be able to get it in your mouth.

-Whether it was the children's mouth or the surveyor's mouth is not clear.

-Dear, oh, dear.

The McAdam method transformed long-distance travel.

But the new roads didn't come cheap.

In the early 1800s,

the Honiton Ilminster Turnpike charged one and six for each horse,

almost as much as the average man earned in a day.

Overall, in your view, the system worked?

It had a very bad press towards the end.

There were charges of local corruption and inefficiency,

but I think if you take the broad view

of it - the difference between what the road system was like

before the Regency Period and by the middle of the Victorian Period,

they made a significant improvement.

The improvement didn't just happen at Ilminster.

By the early 19th century, the entire A303 had been turnpiked,

with incredible results.

Before turnpikes, a journey from London to Exeter took four days.

After turnpikes, it came down to 16 and a half hours.

The Exeter London Royal Mail Coach, Quicksilver, led the pack,

priding itself on the brevity of its rest stops.

Ten minutes in Exeter, 13 minutes in Andover.

And you were expected to eat

your dinner in that time at 1.00 in the morning.

And the necessary changes of horses were like Formula One pit-stops.

Executed in a matter of seconds.

At the Dillington Estate, close to the A303, William Hanning architect

of the Honiton-Ilminster Turnpike Trust,

basked in the glory of his achievement.

But, for him, 16 and a half hours to London still wasn't fast enough.

Which is why Hanning decided to invest in a new idea.

Brainchild of the Victorian inventor Sir Goldsworthy Gurney,

it was a stagecoach powered not by horses but by steam.

To hear more, I'm meeting Dillington's present custodian and descendant of William Hanning.

So, here we have Sir Goldsworthy Gurney's new steam carriage.

Now, can you give me some idea of how this beast actually worked?

It was this jet steam engine that

was so much lighter than an ordinary steam engine.

That was right at the back of the carriage.

The big problem was that you had to ride on top of the actual boiler,

and here's your chimneys.

So I imagine a) it was quite dangerous

and b) I suspect quite hot and probably dirty.

Despite support from celebrities like the Duke of Wellington,

seen here on a road test,

the idea struggled to make a profit.

The machine was targeted with sky-high toll charges

and also on one occasion by an angry Luddite mob.

Goldsworthy Gurney had blood coming from his head as a result

of the attack, and they had to go and retire to an inn.

Mind you, retiring to an inn was probably quite a good idea.

Possibly this one where it says "good ales." That's what we need.

The stagecoach managed to see off Gurney's steam carriage,

but its own days were almost up, thanks to the coming of the railways.

Toll roads were rapidly phased out, and the train reigned supreme.

But when the age of motorised road transport finally dawned,

the A303 was ready.

This is the successor to Hanning's Turnpike.

The modern A303 Ilminster bypass.

With three lanes and no central reservation,

it's one of the road's most notorious accident black spots.

But it's not just drivers who are dicing with death.

Joining me on the bypass is Arthur Boyt.

I think that was a well-mashed badger, actually.

Oh, really?

Arthur is a man with a particular interest in the A303.

It's my road of choice up to the London area.

Partly because it's more direct than M4,

but because there's always a lot of stuff to be found on it.

I've picked up a lot of good dinners off the A303.

A roe deer on one occasion.

Look, look, look, look. We have a fox.

A bit mashed up.

There was a lovely badger right in the middle of the A303.

And I knelt down in the middle of the road to photograph it

as a lorry was coming the other way.

I don't think he was sure what to do, but it made a beautiful picture.

There's a badger! That's quite good condition.

And this is very close to the spot where I picked one up,

I would think, 15 years ago.

And I took that home and ate it, yeah. Here's something coming up.

What's this? That's a pheasant.

Well, I think if we turn around somewhere here,

maybe we can stop and investigate the pheasant.

Where is the pheasant?

Somewhere up here.

Here it is here. Looks OK to me.

The first thing is to get it out of the way.

Pull it over here.

Right, now, let's have a look.

If I saw that, I'd say...

It's a bit of all right.

"A bit of all right," he says.

It's had a bit of a wallop, but it's fresh. In fact, it is warm.

It's still warm?

It's been killed within the hour, I would say.

No rigor mortis, see? It's had its head bashed a bit.

It's a bit ironic that this bird has survived the shooting season

and has now died on the road.

But at least we can console ourselves with the thought

that it has not died in vain.

No, it's not going to be wasted.

It'll probably get hung for a day or two, then I shall prepare it for a casserole.

Can I ask you whether you'll be able to persuade your wife to share it with you?

No. She's a vegetarian.

And she doesn't really want to.

This is it - the end of the last bit of dual carriageway on the A303 heading west.

The last bit of big road.

From now on,

it turns into more of a country road.

Bending and twisting its way into the Blackdown hills,

and it's quite extraordinary

how diminished it is from the grand highway that we remember back in the beginning.

And we're now in Devon.

The road is on its last legs, in a manner of speaking.

For me, it's one final breakfast.

Annie's Tea Bar is on the last lay-by, just yards from the end.

Good morning, ladies.

-Well, hello!

-I need some breakfast.

It's urgent.

-Is it?

-Nice morning, isn't it?

It is. There we are. One large tea.

Oh, look at that, eh? Brown sauce.

You're a fine woman.

We get asked now for cappuccinos and things like that.

It's a truck stop, at the end of the day.

That's what it is, you know.

So if I came in and said, "Can I have a cafe latte?"

-you'd just laugh at me.

-I would, yeah.

God bless Annie. The Highways Agency have taken her loos away,

leaving her to install her own.

The big chain diners have tried muscling in on her action.

But she's a survivor.

So, where you off to, Tom?

Well, this is almost it. We're nearly at the end of the road.

92 miles after I began, the A303 just ends.

In a way, you could say it ends nowhere.

No fanfare, no flourish, no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The A303 finishes just here,

as the A30 comes in from the left,

and the road west from now on is the A30.

It's a cruel trick.

Exeter is only 25 miles away,

but the A303 is denied the glory of going all the way.

I think there's something rather satisfying in a way,

in this sudden ceasing to exist just at this point, at the whim

of some highway engineer or the man who does the road signs.

One thing I've learnt is that the bigger and faster the A303 gets,

the less it reveals of itself.

In 1969, at Andover,

it was full of confidence in its present and its future.

As I've travelled westwards, I've seen it narrowing,

almost as if squeezed by a dawning uncertainty about itself.

Frustrating for drivers, I know.

But maybe not such a bad thing all round.

Perhaps the A303 best serves its landscape

not when shutting you off from it as you speed to the next horizon,

but when it persuades you to slow down or stop,

so you can revel in the horizon you've already reached.

# You can find your way home on the 303

# Let yourself go on the 303

# Oh, on the 303

# Well, hard times well, all I know is that

# Dark times? Gotta let it go

# Because I got my friends

# And I love my friends

# Got my friends, yeah right till the end. #