Last month we heard from Wiltshire Council, definitively they claim, that the A344 is still the A344 and a highway. As "A" roads have a legal definition in the UK and that involves joining population centres, carrying motorised traffic, etc, it is patently absurd to continue to list the A344 as an "A" road. Consequently, this is being taken up with the Secretary of State for resolution.
Meanwhile, on the A344, English Heritage continue to mess up. As a planning condition for the new visitor's centre, they were obliged to install Kent Carriage Gaps to allow all non-motorised traffic, not banned by the permanent Traffic Regulation Order, to use the A344, unhindered, 24/7. Like many of the planning conditions imposed on English heritage (around 23 of them) many were supposed to be put in place before the visitor's centre was opened to the public,; the management plan seems to suggest sometinme between October and December 2013. Yet again, this was a major fail by English Heritage. Wiltshire Council Planning Department seem to have done little to police these consents, which makes you wonder what they spend their time doing!
Now for those of you who don't know, a Kent Carriage Gap is one of the ways of enforcing a TRO of the sort imposed on the A344. This is how they should be designed:
Two sizes of post to allow carriages of different sizes to pass along the carriageway. The separation of the posts and their height is also defined.
The point of these gaps is to allow unhindered access
along the carriageway - the operative word here being along. This is how they should be constructed.
Have English Heritage achieved this? No, of course not. Almost 9 months late, this is all they have been able to manage.
Between the new roundabout at Airman's Cross and the entrance to the visitor's centre carpark you have this attempt, photographed by Wiltshire Councillor and Chairman of Winterbourne Stoke Parish Council Ian West and friends, it certainly doesn't seem fit for purpose, doesn't meet the design of Kent Carriage Gap for which planning consent was given, and wouldn't appear to be able to be used as intended by all the types of carriage it is meant to permit.
Further along, we come to an even more egregious mess which we photographed last week in the run-up to the presidential visit!
Well, on the plus side, EH have lowered the kerb. But that is the only positive thing that can be said about it. The Gap is again to one side of the A344, not across it and there is no clear exit from it back onto the A344. It's worse than that, bearing in mind that the path running from left to right comes down from the coach park and is the main access for visitors being brought in from that direction. Now, given these pedestrians are about to cross an open highway, the A344, in very large numbers, you'd think English Heritage would have had the common sense to do a number of things. First, leading pedestrians onto and across a highway, without warning them they are crossing one is a fairly stupid thing to do; particularly given that many of them are foreign visitors.
Second, not warning those using the highway that there may be pedestrians about is also pretty lame, so you'd think there might be proper signage on the path and the road, "Look both ways" signs on the footpath, etc, etc, but no such luck. All in all, when we have our first visitor mown down by a horse rider, horse and carriage or even a cyclist, the negligence on English Heritage's part will be clear.
In writing this, we realise we never actually measured the height and separation of the posts that are there, so we might have to pop up and measure them to be sure.
Ian West and friends also looked at the state of the permissive byway at the other end of the old A344, beyond Byway 12 and towards Stonehenge Bottom. English Heritage, keen to foster the World Heritage Site's policy of encouraging visits by cyclists have signposted the route:
You've got to admire the lengths they have gone to over the last 9 months to do this! Of course, if you take the trouble to go down that way, avoiding the inevitable traffic jam at byway 12...
...you can get a really good view of Stonehenge, without having to pay the extortionate entry charge. Follow this up with a visit to the museums in Amesbury, Salisbury or Devizes and you will see the best of Wiltshire's archaeology - you don't even need a local resident's pass.
All we can say is that it is a good job President Obama didn't arrive by bike and that Raffles family of Amesbury decided to walk up to Stonehenge from the east, rather than go by car, or else the six of them would never have met and English Heritage couldn't have benefited, however undeservedly, from the global human interest story that broke following the president's visit.
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