We were surprised the other day to see, at the farm gate, a new notice saying: “Sorry, no eggs – visit of fox”. This was the farm where we had for years regularly picked up our freshly gathered eggs. It lies just off a little cul-de-sac that once formed part of the old east-west trunk route to Devon, which used to pass through the heart of Wincanton with its once fine coaching inns.
For many years now, traffic has skirted the town on the modern A303, and travellers seeking refreshment stop at the out of town supermarket café rather than at the former Greyhound Inn, where the future Queen Victoria was a guest in 1825.
And the current plan is for the A303 to become a “superhighway”, diving underground at a cost of £1.8m 30 miles to the east of us, where the sheep graze and tourists marvel at Stonehenge, and near home (as elsewhere) becoming a dual rather than single carriageway past the air station at Yeovilton.
But, away from trunk routes, on the way to get eggs, we have passed the toll house of the Blackmore Vale Turnpike Trust, with its notice of charges made for use of the road in 1824 by coaches, curricles, barouches, wagons, landaus and hearses as well as horses, oxen and mules, laden or unladen (one penny-halfpenny).
Now that former turnpike road, winding as it does between the hedgerows and through narrow village streets down into Dorset, must cope, not with curricles and landaus, but with huge intercontinental freight carriers, tankers, cars and vans, coaches, giant tractors and agricultural machinery.
The volume and speed of such traffic has led to the construction of new traffic lights and a series of six traffic-calming chicanes in the village of Templecombe. We are reminded that, back in the 1960s, in the nextdoor village of Henstridge, we found that our front door had already been securely nailed up by the previous owner, as it would otherwise have opened directly into the path of passing traffic, unseen until too late.
