As a title, Harry Potter and the Potholes of Devon wouldn’t survive the editor’s pen – but sometimes life is more spellbinding than fiction. Just ask the villagers of Lustleigh, a few miles from where I live on Dartmoor, who have J. K. Rowling’s franchise to thank for making one of the lanes of their chocolate-box home usable again.
For years, Lustleigh residents have been cursed by gaping holes in the road surfaces. But last week the TV company HBO, which is filming in the village for its adaptation of the young wizard’s exploits, was forced to do what Devon County Council apparently couldn’t and fill in the holes on one path themselves. Quite why it has taken people who play make-believe for a living to do the job of politicians is a magical tale of incompetence without a happy ending.
The story of Lustleigh’s potholes is a magical tale of incompetence without a happy ending
Lustleigh, like many villages in the county, sits in a web of unclassified rural roads and lanes. Devon has the longest road network in England, measuring more than 8,000 miles. A great deal of these are falling apart.
Planned maintenance on the roads, which are vital to poorly-connected locals but not used enough to be seen as important, has all but collapsed. Drains and gullies, untended for years, have become stuffed with debris, forcing water to soak into the tarmac and erode the fragile surfaces. Devon County Council now has a road repair backlog of around £390 million – a backlog that could have been avoided had the council (which is responsible for the task) simply stayed on top of basic maintenance.
But it’s not the deterioration of the roads that rankles, it’s the mad approach to fixing them. For seven years, I dutifully reported a series of potholes on the main road that connects to our lane on the council’s website. Each time, the council sent out a contractor who ignored every hole except the latest one I’d photographed and proceeded to patch it up with a material about as resilient as Play-Doh. Each time, the holes formed again. Recently my water provider realised there was a leaking pipe further uphill, which appeared to be the cause of this endless circus. Officials finally stopped the problem – but at what cost?
The lack of co-ordination between council contractors and other utilities here on Dartmoor makes the hapless Ron Weasley look like a genius. Road repairs that do take place often occur at the same time on different access roads, with either no notice or incorrect information trapping us in our villages. It makes the school run seem like a challenge from the Triwizard Tournament as bewildered drivers are funnelled into gridlocked diversions on roads made for carthorses. The local Facebook page for our area is littered with divine guesswork as to when and for how long road repairs, water works, broadband installations or replacing National Grid infrastructure will keep us hostage. None of these firms seem to work together or – if they do – seem utterly unbothered by the chaos and stress they unleash.
You might think this is a first-world problem for people like me, fortunate enough to live in one of the most beautiful parts of England. Lustleigh, with its beautiful cricket pitch and thatched cottages, will not be found in any national index of deprivation. But close by are pockets of real rural poverty and isolation, which broken roads make worse.
In my locality, the average annual salary was around £36,000 last year while house prices have risen to more than ten times that amount. We sit in an eternal ‘not-spot’ for digital connectivity, while funding pressures and green initiatives have left the local national park authority with little ability to promote entrepreneurialism.
In the absence of a reliable bus service, people rely on their cars here for everything. But the state of the roads is too dangerous for vulnerable drivers to risk, leaving them cut off from the community shop, the GP surgery and even the food bank. Try walking on unlit lanes with high hedges and no pavements even during the day, when death by lost delivery driver is not an abstract threat.
These days, it seems the only thing our authorities will respond to is embarrassment. Devon County Council has clarified that HBO offered to pay for the footpath’s repairs through an approved contractor, and did not offer ‘to repair any roads’. But hopefully it will be sufficiently mortified by the handiwork of the studio that brought us The Sopranos, that it will start looking beyond the highways of Plymouth and Exeter. Still, unless HBO goes into the construction industry, its burst of alchemy is unlikely to be repeated. We may have all the potholes, but prioritising their repair is unlikely to make a significant enough dent in the council’s budget. As Tony Soprano himself observed: ‘In business, you’re either round the table or on the menu.’ Or, in our case, on the roadside going nowhere fast.
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