Winterbourne Stoke is a small Wiltshire village that sits
astride the A303. If you’ve ever
travelled along this road at any time from Thursday lunchtime to Monday evening
– at any time of year – you’ve probably been stuck in a traffic jam in the
village.
For that reason alone, you might appreciate why local
villagers have been campaigning for a by-pass for over 30 years and why we are
now losing patience with those in local, regional, national and even
international government who have blocked every attempt to improve the
situation.
Why has nothing been done to bypass the Winterbourne Stoke? The answer is simple – Stonehenge and
English Heritage.
It has been suggested that those in authority have
demonstrated, by their actions in relation to Stonehenge and their inaction
with respect to the local population, that they care more for the dead than
they do the living.
Actually, that isn’t true.
They only care about the ancient dead. They clearly don’t give a tuppeny damn about those recently
killed, permanently maimed or injured on the A303 around Winterbourne Stoke
despite their fine words and pretence of concern regarding accident statistics.
English Heritage and the Highways Agency colluded in their
decision to close A344 junction with A303 by Stonehenge this summer, on the grounds
of restoring the “historic landscape” and also because of the dangerous nature
of the junction – in the last 5 years a single accident resulting in serious
injury and one resulting in a slight injury. Is that a reasonable reaction, or were both agencies indulging in
egregious hyperbole?
Worse still, by a considerable margin, was the collusion of
Wiltshire Council, who you might have expected to be a voice of reason and to
stand up for the interests of the people on whose behalf they are
employed. Not a bit of it. They went back on their word, of over
20 years standing, to NOT consider closing the A344 until the A303 was turned
into a dual carriageway.
As you sit in your traffic jam as it crawls through our
village, glaring angrily at villagers who have the temerity to try and cross the
A303 at the one, pedestrian-controlled crossing on the entire length of the A303, you might be forgiven for thinking that it would be hard to get involved in a
high-speed, fatal car crash in Winterbourne Stoke. How wrong you would be! If the road isn’t at a stand still, it sees traffic travelling at well
above the 40mph speed limit and we have carnage on the roads.
Let me put this into context. If all those killed and injured on the stretch of the A303 immediately
either side of Winterbourne Stoke had come from the village, then over ONLY the
last 5 years:
1 in 10 households would have had a family member killed
1 in 4 households would have had a family member maimed
Every household would have had someone injured seriously
enough to become a police statistic.
Things are even worse if you just consider this same 5 year
period and the 1mile stretch of the A303 through the village:
2 dead, 3 seriously injured and 6 injured seriously enough
to become police statistics.
Based on the English Heritage/Highways Agency/Wiltshire
Council logic, then the A303 should have been closed to through traffic years
ago to protect the Neolithic landscape in and around Winterbourne Stoke and to prevent
the carnage on the A303. Tearing
up the road surface and restoring it as an ancient sheep drove to Honiton seems
a sensible, inexpensive and achievable option.
And it has advantages for you my dear beleaguered, yet sadly
static, travellers. You’d have to
find an alternative route to or from the West Country and wouldn’t get stuck
here or risk life and limb when the road is open. We could apply the same approach to the roads around
Shrewton and the A36 around Stapleford, so you couldn’t get stuck there either.
