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Spirits of Lyneham Banks
20 Wiltshire Scenes (8)
The "spirits" of Lyneham Banks have probably borne witness to more changes in transportation methods during the 20th century than anywhere else in Wiltshire. The route from Swindon to Chippenham has descended the hillside the steep way between the hamlets of Bradenstoke-cum-Clack and Dauntsey Lock, traversed it with a snaking trunk road and then skirted it in 1970s with the extension of the M4 motorway westward to South Wales via the Severn Bridge.
But it was the building of the Wiltshire and Berkshire Canal under an Act of 1795 that placed Swindon firmly on the map. This narrow man-made waterway, used mainly for the haulage of coal, joined the Kennet and Avon canal at Semington to the River Thames at Abingdon... and hugging the foot of the Banks at one point required seven locks to progress further.
In 1833 Isambard Kingdom Brunel was appointed to engineer the Bristol & London Railroad - the company name was changed that same year to the Great Western Railway - and a route to the north of the Marlborough Downs with almost level track except for two notable inclines and with minimum curvature was adopted. By 1841 his infamous "broad gauge" line was completed with Swindon as one of the stations.
But that was not the only change. During the Second World War an aerodrome was built on the top of the Banks, between the villages of Lyneham and Bradenstoke, which has hosted an R.A.F. fleet of over fifty C-130 Hercules cargo planes used to carry troops, equipment and relief supplies dropped-off to countries thousands of miles away.
Despite the intermittent drone from tyre, train and turboprop, Lyneham Banks is a place for peaceful outdoor pleasures. The view across the north Wiltshire dairy land towards Gloucestershire is a patchwork of fields - most still reasonably small in this age of modern farming although the hedgerows are now devoid of the English Elm that was once common here. On other days Mother Nature quietens everything under a blanket of fog and stillness prevails... except perhaps for the munching of a horse enjoying a fresh, dewy breakfast.
My initial thoughts for an illustration ranged from a High-Speed 125 train, motorway holiday traffic jam, pretty thatched cottage with vegetable garden, C-130 cargo plane swooping low over the road on its landing approach... all of which I had in stock. But the image which made that early morning visit most memorable was the black mare.
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