The Road that Seems to be Everywhere!

Most English people, I should think, could hazard a reasonable guess at the general plan behind our road numbering system.  While they might not get all the destinations right, they probably know that from London the A1 goes to Scotland (Edinburgh), the A2 to Kent (Dover), the A3 to the south coast (Portsmouth), the A4 to the west (Bristol), the A5 towards Ireland (stopped by the sea at Holyhead) and the A6 to Scotland again (Carlisle).

If I'm honest, when I began trekking around this beautiful country of ours for a living, almost ten years ago, my awareness of road numbers went little beyond this general outline.  I knew that the higher numbers fitted between these six primaries, in the spaces to their right, but not much more.

Fairly swiftly, I paid a great deal more attention, as I realised that (in those pre-SatNav days) this knowledge might be of considerable use in navigating my way around the land.  I'm not sure of the basis upon which, in the early 1920's, a general survey of the country was made that resulted in the road numbers that we have today, but I found it fascinating to follow individual numbers across the map from start to finish.

I was amazed at some of the tiny places that had been chosen as the terminus of particular roads.  One that I use quite regularly, for example, is the A507.  This begins in Hertfordshire, where it leaves the A10 at Buntingford, and used to stretch almost to Aylesbury, morphing into the A418 at an otherwise insignificant roundabout near the historic village of Wing.  It now disappears at the re-designed junction 13 of the M1.

The more I travelled across the midlands and south of England, the more I seemed to trip over (so to speak) one particular road, the A361. Whether I was going cross-country to Cheltenham (where I went yesterday, in advance of the Gold Cup meeting) and Tewkesbury, up to Daventry, Rugby and the car factories at Gaydon, or down to Swindon and west country destinations like Chippenham or Shepton Mallet, somewhere or other I'd find a road called A361.  It seemed to be everywhere, and its ubiquity attracted my interest and demanded deeper research.  I discovered that this is, in fact, the longest three-digit A-road in the country, at 195 miles, and wriggles its way from Ilfracombe on the north Devon coast to a tiny village called Kilsby on the A5 in Northamptonshire.  It's even got its own website!  What other road can lay claim to such fame?

As a single road, its course is somewhat bizarre.  While the northern section seems a reasonable route from the east midlands to the M4 corridor, and at the other end it provides a useful link for places in north Devon to the M5, it is inconceivable that anyone would use this route - even in the days before motorways - to travel from one end of it to the other!  It's almost, as one writer has suggested, like a string of local roads, where the scenery changes at every corner.  For my part, all I can say is that, wherever I meet it it's usually direct for the bit I'm on; there's quite often little traffic to hold me up, and its surroundings are picturesque and have character ... which is one of the reasons I've been at this game for ten years!