The A303: Highway to the Sun

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Nostalgia is a warm bath - pleasant enough but shortly it cools to tepid and you're forced to make the choice to get out, shivering, and towel off. However, the star of the show for me was the Morris traveller, because I had one just the same and this was the car we used on those journeys.

Trailed by a whimsical but rather lacklustre TV programme I only bought the book because it is my local highway.The flesh-and-blood example of progress v nature here resides in the case of the great bustard, the world's heaviest flying bird and so, therefore, one of the most impractical, whose attempts to re-establish itself on Salisbury Plain, courtesy of the admirably quixotic Great Bustard Group, would seem to be doomed.

His object is to reveal the special beauty of the landscape, particularly Salisbury Plain and Stonehenge (pictured). The A303 is one of the essential routes of English motoring, promising to whisk the traveller towards the green and honeyed lands of Somerset and the far west to a world of holidays and escape (although these journeys all too often grind to a standstill. The A20 became a trunk road (London-Folkestone-Dover) in 1936; the A2 didn't become one (London-Canterbury-Dover) until 1946.

I was pleasantly surprised with the program in question as it was a nice balance between the road itself and the surrounding history.