The main road between our two nearest towns ran through this village once.  It’s wide for a village road and you can still see, just, white lines on the tarmac. Thirty years ago the bypass was built, through open countryside. On a still day you can hear the drone of traffic in the middle distance.

Old abandoned modes of transport – canals, railway lines – mark the landscape. Each required some private space. An owner had to be paid. A tenant removed. In the great novel Middlemarch prospectors for a railway company are “seen off” by farm workers in smocks.

Sometimes owners are pleased to sell. Sometimes they fight bitterly against this intrusion. And not just owners. The most bitter opposition comes from those living near a major project where homes will be blighted with no compensation.

Now there is a government plan to widen the bypass and turn it into an “expressway”. An expressway has a dual carriageway. Access to it requires on-and-off ramps as opposed to T-junctions.  Lanes that once crossed the road will need bridges or underpasses.

When the bypass was built over thirty years ago, it bisected farms and estates and made some public footpaths unusable. The highways agency, to keep its costs down, wants to provide as few crossings and junctions as possible. 

Melvin is the contractor who owns the huge butterfly mowers and harvesters and tedders that rumble through the village.

“My people will have to drive three or four miles to reach a meadow a hundred yards away as the crow flies…,” said Melvin, who is with me in a function room in a Holiday Inn at a junction on the motorway.

“But you too have an interest in mobility,” said the man sitting opposite us. “I’m sure you hate nose-to-tail traffic when you are trying to get somewhere….’

We have met him before. In an earlier stage of the project, he was more flexible, more accommodating. Now it is time to close the discussion.

“Your interest is only one of thousands. Millions rather. The family that wastes most of a day in traffic jams on the way to a holiday home will be pleased. Run-down country towns with no local industries will get a chance to recover when they’re connected to the national grid. Every single interest has to be considered. You may be inconvenienced but the bus company at the end of your village will be able to run more and quicker routes…”

I think the most we will get are junctions east and west of the village within a five mile reach and one crossing somewhere in between. 

The crossing the farmers prefer is the lane that goes right past our house.