Hindhead Common Bicycle "bypass"

Below is a photograph I took this weekend of the beginning – or, depending which direction you’re heading, the end – of about 5 miles of mainly off-road cycle track around Hindhead, Surrey.  The pictures which follow show points on the route, starting from the south west and working north-east. (All pictures below their captions).
 

The route starts with a section of newly-constructed kerb separated, shared cycle/footpath, alongside what remains of the old A3 before the new Hindhead Tunnel and its approaches were opened in August 2011.  It is largely continuous although interrupted by a couple of junctions to the left.  You can see some of the A3 signage to the right and centre of frame.

Where the exit slip from the new dual carriageway meets the old road to take traffic into HIndhead Village, there is this cycle bypass of the roundabout – still shared with pedestrians – leading to the next section of the route, alongside the A333, again part of the old A3.  There used to be forests of "Cyclists Dismount" blue signs around here, but it looks like the protests of the Waverley Cycle Forum to have them removed have been successful.

The next section of the route is nothing more than the old footway alongside the road.  It has not been widened, modified or resurfaced since its previous existence as footway only.  Here you can see it is interrupted by entrance and exit to a petrol station – this photo took a little waiting, to get a window without cars blocking the path waiting to exit on to the road. (You can also see how impossible it would have been to construct a separate cycle track alongside this 30mph, local-access-only road - nowhere near wide enough).
 

 

We have now crossed the old Hindhead Crossroads into the village proper.  I didn't snap the scene near the old crossroads, now a curious double-mini-roundabout, because it is not a partiuclarly nice place to hang around.  On the other hand, with the A3 traffic diverted through the tunnel the volume and speed of traffic here is no fairly light most of the time. 

The double mini-roundabout attracted a fair bit of ire from local petrolheads - aparently it is a little confusing to negotiate.  I can't honestly see why, but it does at least make drivers approach the system fairly cautiously - otherwise the temptation for anyone crossing north-south along the Haslemere-Farnham road, the A287, would be to barrel through at speed in the expectation that there would be nothing coming from right or left along the old A3 axis, which is now purely local traffic.  Perhaps that is what those motorists are whining about, but tough - they are now driving through what local planners are determined to convert into a proper village centre.

Here below you can see where the old A3’s roadbed abruptly ends.  The entire road was dug out and replaced with soil at the insistence of the National Trust, as part of the deal for them to provide access land for the tunnel.  (Only two years ago this was a fume-filled hell, of nose-to-tail motor vehicles.  Crossing the road here was nigh on impossible, especially for horse riders.  One can question the wisdom of the tunnel, and it is already evident that it has just moved the congestion further along to the next bottleneck, but the re-unification of the two halves of the common and the removal of the traffic have been hugely beneficial.)  To the right of frame you can see the entrance to a Byway Open to All Traffic (BOAT) which runs on down around the side of the Devil’s Punchbowl.

“BOAT 500”, as it is designated, is a narrow, tarmac lane running through the trees.  It is a “Quiet Lane” which merely means a BOAT which the local highways authority has assumed responsibility for maintaining.  Here you can see that the Quiet Lane ends, with the remainder of the BOAT being a rough unsurfaced track leading down the hill.  This is fortunate, because it renders the route unsuitable for motor vehicles apart from 4x4s and trail bikes, and so discourages ordinary motorists from using it.

Here you can see, a few yards further on, where the road forks.  The BOAT to the right, and to the left a new, tarmac path for pedestrians/cyclists only.  I don’t know whether the sections of felled tree trunk are just coincidence, or were placed there deliberately to prevent 4x4s gaining access.  From what I have seen of the surrounding BOATs and bridle paths, some such measures are probably necessary to prevent illegal incursion.

Looking back over my shoulder, the white van is one of the very few motor vehicles you actually see on the BOAT, notwithstanding that it is technically open to motors.  In fact the volume of pedestrian, equestrian and cycle traffic here, especially at a weekend, would likely reduce any motorist to a walking pace.  The van belongs to a group of downhill MTB enthusiasts.  This is a paradise for fans of downhill cycling, and you will see them puffing and sweating as they push their sophisticated full-sus MTBs back up the steep slope afterwards!

This view, looking out over the Sailor’s Stone towards the Punchbowl, shows how the old A3 road has been entirely obliterated.  The strip of what looks like garden weed-suppressing matting is more or less that, on an industrial scale. It is there to permit thousands of young heather plants to take hold to re-seed the hillside.  The old road bed was broken up so that it didn’t prevent drainage, and then the pieces were left in place and buried under, in places, more than 10 metres of soil.  Much of the soil removed to dig the tunnel was saved for this purpose, just so that the road could be buried.  Again, this was done at the insistence of the National Trust.

The Sailor’s Stone is a monument to an uknown sailor who was set upon by thieves and killed near this spot as he walked up the Old Portsmouth Road in the late 18^th century.  The thieves were discovered drinking their spoils in a local pub, and were hauled off to gaol, tried and summarily executed on gibbets erected on the hill above, hence its name of Gibbet Hill.  The sailor’s grave is in the cemetery at the parish Church of Thursley, down the hill.

Below the end of the bollarded foot/cycle path pictured above, the old A3 road was not buried, but a narrow strip was left behind to form “Punchbowl Lane”, a statutory bridle path leading down towards Thursley.  This picture looks at the other, north-eastern, end of the lane, looking south west.   While the lane is a bridle path and so not open to motor vehicles, an exception is made for access to a couple of houses and the Youth Hostel which nestle deep in the Punchbowl and have no other access.  There is a standard farm gate at either end.  These were installed as a precaution against stroppy motorists who might be tempted to use the BOAT 500 Quiet Lane and Punchbowl Lane as a rat-run to avoid the appalling prospect of having to drive a half-mile in the opposite direction to get to the slip-road for the tunnel and the new A3.  The idea is that if this occurs, the gates will be locked and the residents will just have to get out and open them each time they want to pass through.  There is enough room at the side for walkers/cyclists/horse riders to pass, but not cars.

The next pic looks down the next section of the route.  We are now back on public highway – a lane which continues under the A3 and meanders around to the village of Brook, 5 or so miles away. (This photo is looking in the other direction, north east towards Thursley) It does get some, purely local traffic, but it is single track and in very poor shape in places on the other side of the A3.  This section is fine because it is new, having been built as a works access road for the tunnel construction. Here you can see, in this rather shaky shot, two roadies puffing up the modest incline.  This route has become popular with road cyclists as its surface, although a bit grubby in places, is firm smooth tarmac.

Finally, this is where the route comes back to the normal road system, on the exit slip road from the A3 to the village of Thursley.

On the OS 50,000 scale the old road is still shown but the tatest 25,000 scale has been updated and shows the old road as a thin dotted line.

The route, or at any rate the larger half of it to the north-east of Hindhead village centre.  Has become popular with cyclists, especially roadies, for whom it represents a largely traffic-free route on well-maintained tarmac surfaces – admittedly it gets coated in mud but the mud is only millimetres deep on top of the tarmac.

It should have been entirely traffic free all the way around the punchbowl, as the original intention of the NT was that BOAT 500 would be redesignated as bridleway, as can be seen in the Highways Agency glossy produced prior to the public enquiry into the project.  In practice the BOAT hasn’t seen a huge amount of traffic and if that were to change, an assembly of local ramblers’ associations and cycling clubs are poised to lobby the county council to “down”grade it.

In a more general sense though this project has been a wasted opportunity.  The route starts in the middle of nowhere, near a handful of houses close to the A3 at Bramshott Chase to the south west of Hindhead.  It finishes quite close to the middle of nowhere – a half-mile from the village of Thursley.  It does at least provide a rideable link on a road or utility bike to the village of Hindhead – if there was much there other than the National Trust Cafe and the Devil’s Punchbowl Hotel.  I have seen a map which depicts what are laughably described as “links to the wider cycle network [sic]".  A “network” of rough, muddy bridleways, many of them permissive rather than statutory, or deeply uninviting narrow but fast country roads.

During the Planning Enquiry on the tunnel project, numerous ramblers’, cyclists’ and equestrians’ interest groups gave evidence and requested various amendments to the scheme.  The most significant of these was that of CTC and Sustrans, among others, not to bury the old road entirely but to leave a narrow strip of it in place as a traffic-free cycle path.  The reason for this was that the old road followed the line of the original Punchbowl road, cut into the hillside in the early 19^th century to aid horse-drawn carriages to make the climb up to what had become a popular tourism destination.  As such it had a rather shallower gradient than the older route, following the BOAT, which runs quite level for some distance and then plunges down a rather steeper incline which would be manageable only on MTBs or road bikes with a considerable gear range.  I normally ride this area on a hard-tail MTB but I have tried the eventual cycle path on an urban bike fitted with a Shimano Nexus 7 and I can attest to the challenge that presents, so a 3 speed Sturmey would really struggle!

Anyway, like every single other request of the cycling groups, and almost every single request of the rambler and equestrian groups, this was rejected.*  I am more sympathetic really to the decision, as the NT was aiming to restore the landscape to its pre 19th century form and that could only be done by burying the old road.  In fact, the NT enjoys an extraordinary status only shared with a handful of other landowners: the statutory inalienability of its property, ie it cannot be compulsorily purchased without, I believe, a specific Act of Parliament, which no government, however large its majority, would lightly risk.  Therefore, when the NT exercised its privileges to demand “exchange land” as part of the deal to agree to supply land needed to access the planned tunnel mouths, it stipulated that the road must be obliterated.

That particular decision was met with howls of outrage, filling the letters pages, and quite often the front pages of the local rag until the caravan moved on to equally foaming outrage about parking restrictions in Haslemere, via ditto about that double mini-roundabout.  Demands were made to keep the old road open as an emergency diversion route when the tunnel was closed, and to permit Hindhead and Grayshott residents to travel towards Guildford/London without having to go backwards a half-mile to the junction for the A3 on the other side of the tunnel.  All sorts of dire predictions were made about what would happen if there was an accident in the tunnel – and there have been accidents, but the blockages have been short, and the planned diversion schemes, including contraflowing one tunnel while the other is cleaned up, have worked OK so far.  I can imagine the NT were egging on the contractors to keep digging, just to make sure there was no road left to use.

Back to the wasted opportunity.  If they were going to so much trouble, why could they not have linked it up with nearby towns and villages so that we would have had a usable utility cycle network, instead of merely a fabulous network of paths and tracks which are only usable on a fat tyred, suspension-forked mountain bike?  For example, why could they not have continued the cycle route further along the A3 north of the tunnel to connect Hindhead and Thursley with the town and railway station at Godalming?  If you are going to spend £381m on a road tunnel, surely a bar or two to upgrade 3km of footpath alongside the A3 to a usable shared-used cycle path would not have been beyond the realms of possibility?** 

Evidently not.  The route was laid for one reason, and one reason only:  as a public highway, the A3 is, was, open to use by all comers including pedestrians, cyclists, horseriders and carriage drivers.  The tunnel prohibits all of these, plus riders of <50cc mopeds (whose status is left in limbo, as they can’t use bridleways).  The statutory rights of these users had to be provided for.  The fact that only a complete lunatic would contemplate cycling the A3, and I certainly have never, in many years of driving that route, seen anyone cycling it, is irrelevant.

*  Just about the only request the Inspector did accede to was from 4x4 owners, to retain the BOAT rather than regrading it to bridleway

**It is something I am pursuing with other members of Waverley Cycle Forum but I don't hold out much hope.  I think I'll write a post on it some other time.