Setting the Scene

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.