hey good morning so i've been meaning to tell you a story for quite some time but
just haven't really had the opportunity we've been traveling around doing our usual bits and pieces
but because we're now back in lockdown we're concerned a couple of local ones
and today's story is a little bit local to us
so before we get there before we talk about this story we're trying to find our friend david um
david also acts as a bit of a local historian so we'll um try and find him very shortly
trying to find david hopefully around this corner all being well
no in that case fell up this hill feel like i've been walking up a hill for about half an hour
i've already introduced it david i've done all the introductions
oh god dave is wearing a puppy i am badly not wearing a poppy
so this is david you may remember david from previous outputs um all of a sudden you've been
at least one how many days at least one at least one so the question we're gonna pose you today is
how far does a railway station need to be to serve a town because we always see when rebecca and i
are out we all see stations that were built and they were maybe like one or two miles from the
local village because of the way the railroad had to carve its way through the landscape and
of course they just prompt the station as close as they could i could give you countless examples
um where yeah they're at least up to four miles away from its station to its town or a village
today we're doing a little bit more than that and i'd say probably more than double
four miles um and we're currently walking along the south side
of a town called andover um along what was the ladies walk which is a very old trackways alright
david's part of the mark way part of the mark way one of the many ancient trackways of wessex yep
so the railway we're talking about in particular was built by a london and
southampton railway company so i can probably give you an idea roughly where that line went
so between 1839 and 1840 they eventually connected um winchester to uh basinstoke
and they finally made the connection to london southampton um now in between winchester and basis
they had one intermittent station and that station served what presumably on the face of it would
be mitchell over town commissioner oh mitchell village which was two miles away but they didn't
call it mitchell ever they called it andover road now andover as a crow flies is probably around
about eight miles and if you're getting a car today and take that journey from Micheldever to
andover it'd probably take you about 20 minutes that's in a car so we assume the people around
andover david we assume they all petitioned and said we want some of this railway action
they do so this was the this was the closest railway but being some seven eight miles away from
Andover actually in wintertime is a hell of a slog so it took them 15 years to get their own station
the town's recommended 15 years so for 15 years if they wanted to get on one of these newfangled
railways um they've really revolutionized things back in that year here before the railways came
you had to remove all your livestock by foot along the old drover's route yes probably well
the canal wasn't suitable for hauling lots of sheep to market the train yes perfect
now that brings us on nicely to where we're about to arrive soon probably about 200 yards
ahead of us is um an old iron bridge and we'll come to that in a short while when we get there
so david i've just seen down there some very old raw iron fencing like this this was taskers
task local task for local company and we're presuming they built this beautiful piece of um
yes this is the second second iron bridge they built in andover so the road below us now is
Micheldever road now this road again tells a story this is the route to the railway this is the route
to the railway so this is the final turnpike in andover created through an active parliament
you look at the cutting here through the through the chalk there's a hell of a cutting through a
big hillside but yeah heading out to Micheldever so presumably again the the road was built then to
to reach a railway the road was built to reach a railway this is the built in 1839. right so they
knew that it was act of parliament 1840 1840 the road opened which obviously ties in perfectly with
the railway , warren farm had compulsory purchased the farm, Warren Farm becomes Andover road station
presuming that this would be the steepness that they would have to use this road
uh pre the big cutting so this was the gradient they had to come up in their horse and cart
and you said about the royal mail the royal mail or mail
sub post office at under road station right so they would have to get get back and forth daily
we presume and there's the male male term from london right and hence why they said okay well
in 1840 they leveled the road out they leveled it out they just looked because it dug to yeah
every little step of today's journey dave was pointing something out so there's a
big estate there called sheep fare and i've never even thought about all my life that i've lived in
this area and i've never even thought about sheep fare despite cycling for it as a kid
every day on my way to school and david just pointed out that
it was the year of the sheep fair annual fair held in andover on the common
so much of the road is now it's still a road but you won't see many cars like it just goes into
a dead end so i think it's probably um a very very little use there might be some house down
here maybe probably come out dog walking or the nefarious activities yeah that's what i was going
to say i didn't know how to put that politely david um yeah exactly but what i was gonna say
let's just walk to the end of this road now and the truest sense of this word is a vlog um i want
to go and find a geocache because at the bottom of this road there's a really ingenious geocache
we're just discussing that i love i never really thought about doing the concept like so here is
the old bush i'd ever road that we're walking on from the iron bridge that way and this is
an abandoned road i don't do abandoned roads i should do it but we should do a abandoned roads
you know this has gone full circle from probably not a lot in 1800
230 220 years later it's kind of going faster nature is reclaiming it slowly yeah
fascinating right 100 yards we've got across a busy road but literally the
other side of the busy road we're going to cross and hopefully not kill ourselves is a very funky
little hidden treasury type geocache so the geocache was a complete letdown it's moved i
just opened the geocache snap used to be hanging from a tree and you used to have to undo this
bolt and you have to wind it down fascinating but it's gone so i don't know why it's gone we're now
in the middle of the a303 junction and we're just trying to work out we're on the old mixture we're
on the opposite end of the road somewhere aren't we probably we're on the old Micheldever rd of the
road it's in london it then meets what's now the modern a303 yeah going towards london so probably
if we dug down about six feet or maybe a bit more than six feet was that it roadway oh that's it so
this was about as far east as we were going to go on today's journey towards mitcheldever
and of course all that was only around about two miles out of the original 10 miles at least it
gave us an idea of the route that you'd have had to take if you lived in andover and you wanted
to catch a train between 1840 and 1854 there was just one last question to ask but everything else
is a good success it's a lovely day for us it's been a good little walk going to explore on what
was what we believed to be one of the probably one of the uk's furthest stations at the time
from its town it was set to serve so see if you can beat i'm going to say 10 miles so mitcheldeevr
10 miles that way as the crow flies more maybe like seven or eight but if you get a car now
20 minute journey can you beat that do you know of another station which was built to serve the town
so you can't cheat you can't use bristol parkway or southampton parkway because they're there to
serve the car park but can you beat 10 miles from andover road station in mitcheldever
to serve andover for distance i sound a bit worn out that's a good challenge there's a challenge
right we'll see you next week when we're probably back to another vlog with um me and rebecca sorry
if you've missed rebecca you'll have to go to the glamorous david instead today see you next time
you