Wilts County Council has its priorities back to front, of course. The greatest traffic congestion on the A350, in Wiltshire, is around the Yarnbrook and West Ashton area.

An eastern bypass would actually worsen it here and on the A361, for North Bradley, Southwick & Rode too.

Wiltshire County Council is also making itself so unpopular, by pushing its eastern Westbury bypass scheme above all else, that subsequent funding for a Yarnbrook and West Ashton bypass will not be forthcoming.

However, the alignment of the eastern Westbury bypass is such that it would not anyway actually work with the preferred northern Yarnbrook bypass.

The western Westbury bypass route would succeed here.

With an eastern Westbury bypass, the A350 traffic would still go through Yarnbrook.

Alternatively, on the eastern bypass alignment, a Yarnbrook bypass option was shown through Picket Wood, which is another Site of Special Scientific Interest.

I would at one time have thought that it is impractical to consider building a new road through an SSSI.

But, Wiltshire County Council is now in the mood to force nature to make way for development.

I think that WCC dropped any Yarnbrook and West Ashton bypass plans partially because of the anomalies of constructing such in conjunction with its eastern Westbury bypass.  The reality would have emerged.

I guess that an aim has been to first get a road that is on the same, eastern, side as the SSSIs into place.

Meantime, the Wiltshire A350 and A361 villages will have to endure HGV traffic for many years to come.

The A350 is hopeless as a main road from the M4 to the south coast.  As well as hold-ups about Yarnbrook, for many miles, from the Wiltshire side of Shaftesbury to Blandford, the A350 is consistently twisty, steep and narrow, because of the natural terrain in the area.  It can never be improved.  Dorset County Council has acknowledged that 'the foundations are not able to withstand the weight of traffic it carries today'.

Lovely Dorset villages on the route are suffering from the stupidity of HGVs being guided along the A350.

Traffic management and a western road to the future Westbury rail freight depot could turn this around.

A short direct western access road alongside the railway from the Westbury industrial estates to the A36 would also draw off most traffic from the unsuitable A3098 and B3099 which presently goes through Dilton.

An eastern Westbury bypass would give no relief to Dilton.  It would make life worse by drawing traffic on.

An eastern Westbury bypass would not even relieve traffic through Westbury from the B3098, the road from Bratton and places to the east, as this bypass is proposed to fly over the B3098 - without interconnecting, because to interconnect the roads would mean a roundabout and climbing loop within the conspicuous area in front of the White Horse.   An eastern bypass has little value, other than to develop the Wellhead Valley.