Road to ruins

This is a delightful book, nostalgic, slyly witty, perceptive and at times flirting — deliberately — with old fogeyism.

Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that ‘many of us have a road that reaches back into our past’. For him, this is the 92 miles of the A303 — as he subtitles his book, the ‘Highway to the Sun’.

At first glance I imagined there might a be a sort of literary suicide in store; but I quickly discovered that Fort had much more in mind than an anorak’s guide to a road. By looking closely at the history of the A303, the surrounding villages and historical sites, and by examining our love affair — cooling — with the motor car, he has in fact written a plain man’s state-of-the-nation book. It is about England, and a small tranche of England at that, but it achieves an admirable universality in its insights into travel, holidays, agrarian longing, conservation and the general sense that things were better some time in the past.

In fact, Fort has discovered the A303 quite late: on his journeys to various chalk streams, famous for their trout and grayling — the Test, the Avon and the Wylie — and onwards, when he had a family, to the liberating and bracing holidays of the south west. The A303, he says, is a road of ‘magical properties’.

Like him, I have driven the roundtrip on the A303 for an afternoon’s trout-fishing on the Avon many times, and I, too, am deeply affected by the magic of the chalk streams and the surrounding villages they flow through. But I have not noticed things the way Fort has. He misses nothing, from pig farms by the side of the road to roadkill; from ancient burial mounds to the Little Chef, which Heston Blumenthal tried to update at Popham services.