weymouth

You could see it like a gash on the horizon, beginnings of embankments marked in white from all the Dorset chalk. It was only too familiar but far too sad to see by any measure; now it seems another road by yet another backward looking council is advancing at full tilt and all the trials of those who’ve tried to stop it have come to nothing. Like England is scarred now not by almighty programmes from on high, but piecemeal, prosaically, facilitated by a trough of ill advise or apathy.

Dorset County Council – the ones who’ve pushed this road from the beginning – state on their own website that Dorset’s coast and countryside is amongst the most varied and beautiful in England and is believed by many to be the County’s most important asset. Thanks to Thomas Hardy, its hinterland is of international renown and it is where that hinterland meets the coast, where the ridge that makes it way down from the heartland plateau of Salisbury Plain, that the full damage of the road becomes quite clear.

As I write the scar grows ever wider and a line of hills that stretches up past Wiltshire to Ivinghoe Beacon on the Chilterns, a line that forms the backbone of the country, has now been desecrated for the sake of a highly dubious expediency. The road had been proposed for nearly twenty years with high levels of local support, given that they were told that it would solve the town’s congestion even though, as Natural England stated in their objection at the road’s public enquiry; “[the scheme’s] advantages are limited and likely to be achievable in large measure by other means.”

The very need for the scheme was questioned by both The Council for the Protection of Rural England and the Woodland Trust but this was brushed aside by both the Council and the Inspector as if the presence of undoubtable congestion justified tackling this through increasing road space; a mock solution that had been discredited more than a decade ago and the adoption of which today points to either absolute absence of vision, endemic crookedness, sheer stupidity or perhaps simply the inability to convince a population that another road will not change anything, other than lock us in further to a pattern of destruction.

There were other casualties besides the ridge. Two Mile Coppice - a patch of woodland and part of a SSSI - has now been carved up, effectively depriving the town of a much loved walking spot. It was the only remaining piece of ancient woodland within the Borough of Weymouth and Portland and, like all ancient woodland, had taken centuries to evolve. Compare this with the ‘mitigation’ package that somehow justifies the tearing in two of a nature reserve; the offer of the use of a piece of secondary woodland half a mile away, cut of from the town now by the road and containing only a fraction of the richness of the habitat, offered to console or otherwise entice the owners of Two Mile Coppice - The Woodland Trust - whose many objections at the enquiry were rebuffed with breathtaking simplicity by Dorset County Council by their stating that the benefits outweigh the harm and that the other woodland could be an equal or greater resource, like pieces of land are theirs to carve up, like doling out one plot can justify the annihilation of the other.

And this, in echoes of other SSSI’s destroyed or damaged right across the country, has taken place despite national, regional and local legislation, including the Natural Environmental and Rural Communities Act and the UK Biodiversity Action Plan. English Heritage at any rate did not object, were happy with a payout for a survey of the barrows on the portion of ridge that soon would no longer exist.

There was also the dissecting of a local housing estate which, among the predictable disadvantages of forced relocation, division of community, noise and air pollution, meant that many well used cycle routes away from the main roads are now impossible to use. Other land destroyed, damaged or rendered semi-sterile by the noise and toxicity of passing cars includes Dorset Wildlife Trust’s Lorton Meadows Nature Reserve and an and area designated of Local Landscape Interest. Bincombe Valley and its peace has now been lost. Add to this the marring of enjoyment of well known and well used long distance footpaths; Wey Valley Walks, the Dorset Jubilee Trail, the South West Coast Path itself and it’s clear the building of this road is a full blown tragedy.

Why was it built? Who funded it? How did it come to pass that it was allowed to go ahead? As I’ve already mentioned, there was strong local support for the scheme among much, but clearly not all, of the Weymouth population. And as also mentioned earlier, it reflects too the growing gap between local and national governmental thinking. This is partly a reflection of the engineering background of many County Council planning men, which fundamentally skews their entire mentality. It also tells of the kind of money that is still available for big schemes like roads and bridges, even trams on better years. Small scale and smart schemes - workplace and school travel plans, more cycle paths, car clubs – these things do not possess the same appeal for many councillors as large and slick construction contracts, are perhaps harder to sell as ‘doing something’, do not appear to carry the flame of ‘legacy.’ The big irony, considering the much promulgated Green Team Great Britain is that this road was partly funded, and largely justified by the 2012 Olympics, Weymouth hosting the yatching events for the occasion.

The coming disaster was acknowledged by the turn out of those already mentioned who objected to the scheme at the enquiry. But, in a saddening echo of the eighties and nineties, it was by then a largely foregone conclusion. There were others who stepped in, a man called Noddy who set up camp in an oak in Two Mile Coppice in the freezing cold of mid December, who was joined by others but by far too few. And yet they held the promise of what’s needed, of what in other times and places has come to pass and could still do so again. The flame at Two Mile Coppice was shortlived, but the ember of dissent the symbol of that protest holds could still be carried for what lies ahead.

How many more new roads will we permit to pass? It is tragic that at such a time, with the carbon impact of road transport only all too clear that a strong resurgent movement casts off as unfashionable or strategically second place the fight against the forces of road building. What makes Weymouth no less tragic, and which should make it stand as a bitter but vital reminder, is that we know we can fight – and win – against road building and on a national level, which should make taking on local councils relatively easy.

Thomas Hardy made the landscape of West Dorset famous in his time, a fame that lives today around the world. And it was a love for landscape that moved me and many more to join the protests against roads when we did. Global warming almost seemed abstract then against the all too real and visible butchery of hills that was taking place around us. For me the feeling still holds; not one issue over another because, in many ways, they are inseparable. The feeling holds not just through the corresponding tally of road transport to emissions, or the pathological degree of insulation from our natural surroundings when travelling in a car. The state of today’s and tomorrow’s climate is a reflection of how we treat our landscapes and our hills. The scientific consensus we now have over emissions is of course of massive value. But we should no be too quick to dismiss finer sentiments, feelings of belonging and connection and responsibility.

As the saying goes, what we do to the land we do to ourselves. This is in no small part reflected in the writings of Hardy who was in his way somehow married to the land. His work speaks of lovers looking out for one another as one rounded a track on the side of a hill, reddle men making their way over down and heath for days like they were almost aboriginal in their intimacy with the ground below and all around them. Figures on the skyline fading with the light, stood on barrows that were in themselves like tiny, smaller hills upon the back of larger ones when you saw them from afar. He describes an intenseness of connection where a place is more than just a person. It is a world, a force, a character that, Godlike, encompasses the other lesser figures so that their passions reflect the feeling of the place that they inhabit, seem almost trivial by comparison or somehow lifted up and made a part of the wider scene. At his best, he evokes some sense of common blood, of common destiny running through both place and the people in it so that the stories of love and betrayal, of tragedy and whatever scraps of redemption can be found in hearts of sadness seem somehow of a greater order, a pattern that cannot be totally defined but somehow sits there with us.

Hardy’s greatest poem, or at least the one that has stayed with me above the rest, was ‘The Darkling Thrush’ in which he describes listening to the bird, in the twilight on a December’s evening at the beginning of the twentieth century. It ends;

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, where of he knew

And I was unaware.

Today, with the world Hardy knew and sought to preserve in collective memory seemingly vanished it is our charge to somehow constitute a move back towards something that resembles it. There may still be hope for this, for the kind of world we still will have some say in, but not if more roads like Weymouth’s are officially approved and widely ignored. We must keep hold of our hills, cherish them in the full knowledge that life depends upon their preservation. They hold more than our past and sense of place; they keep our very future and hold the power to awake, even when, horrifically but nonetheless especially when they have been taken from us. Weymouth reminds us all of what there is to fight for. We should do so quickly, while there's time.

Copyright all Text and Images J.A. Hindle 2008