In anticipation of a trip to Cornwall in October half-term, I bought The A303: Highway to the Sun by Tom Fort. It is a delightfully quirky book about a road that says holiday and demands leaving at ungodly hours of the morning to avoid the Stonehenge traffic jam. There is much on Stonehenge in the book and this photo was taken from the car whilst crawling past on the 303 on my way to Cornwall at Easter.

Quite rightly, the book follows the A303 from east to west and I very much enjoyed the early section detailing the history of Harewood Forest, where I walked as a child from the village of Wherwell where I lived until the age of six. Wherwell priory also gets a mention and I remember the days of my Mum having to cross the A303 in the late 1970s to take me to and from nursery.

The Kula Shaker song that I always insist on listening to also makes an appearance – ‘You can find your way home on the 303’ the lyrics blast out of the stereo and the book perfectly describes that feeling of the road ‘taking the adventurer from commuter belt Hampshire to the threshold of another land entirely, one of wooded dales enclosing tumbling streams, steep hillsides and old stone farmhouses, purple treeless moors, eventually rocky headlands and Sandy beaches and the surging sea’. I agree that it is indeed a road of magical properties.