– wrote Wordsworth in The Prelude:
... few sights there are
That please me more. ...the lonely roads
Were schools to me in which I daily read
With most delight the passions of mankind,
There saw into the depth of human souls.
For him the road was the essence of sociability, a place to meet people and listen to their stories. How the world has changed! Yesterday I walked in the rain south from Quarry Moor Nature Reserve on the edge of Ripon, towards Markenfield Hall on the A61. Sociable? You are more likely to meet a unicorn on a main road in the countryside than a fellow pedestrian. The roadside has become the most a-social and least hospitable place in the world; dangerous, noisy, smelly, polluted and wet.
Wet in particular, because there is no pavement so you have to walk in the long grass on the verge, and spray is thrown continuously at your legs.
The bus can rescue us – time and again if necessary – from the purgatory of the roadside. Not just because it is nearly always there, passing every 20 minutes in either direction, but because (despite limited stops in town) it stops at all sorts of interesting country places: Dunkeswick Lane, Nidd Bridge, Markington Crossroads; places you could never stop in a private vehicle.
So although the bus is a creature of the road, it reclaims the road from the tyranny of the car.
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