Can You Find The Wiltshire Potholes From The Moon Craters?!
Now, at Devizine Towers we are far too mature and sensible to mock Wiltshire Council’s sterling efforts to repair our road defects by jumping on the bandwagons of chalking phallic symbolism around our county’s potholes, playing pitch and putt in them, or creating meme’s with a drowning Leonardo DiCaprio. But we thought a fun game for all the family might be some harmless entertainment; at least, far more harmless than driving on our roads….
Can you distinguish the pictures of potholes on Wiltshire’s roads between those pictures of moon craters?! It’s not as easy as it looks, kids! Would you know which of these images to report on the MyWilts app, or NASA?!
There’s ten pictures below, carefully cropped and in grayscale to avoid clues, like vaguely painted road markings, or little green aliens. If you do need a clue, I can tell you, there’s more Wiltshire pot holes than there are moon craters; we like to keep things real on Devizine!
See how many you can correctly guess in our pothole or moon crater challenge!
Find the answers below, if I can remember myself which ones are which!!
NO PEEKING!!
Question 1: Pothole or Moon Crater?
Question 2: Pothole or Moon Crater?
Question 3: Pothole or Moon Crater?
Question 4: Pothole or Moon Crater?
Question 5: Pothole or Moon Crater?
Question 6: Pothole or Moon Crater?
Question 7: Pothole or Moon Crater?
Question 8: Pothole or Moon Crater?
Question 9: Pothole or Moon Crater?
Question 10: Pothole or Moon Crater? Tricky one to finish on!
Answers: 1- pothole, 2- pothole, 3- moon crater, 4- pot hole, 5-pot hole, 6-moon crater, 7-tricky one this, but it is a moon crater we found on the Poulshot road, 8- pot hole, 9- moon crater, 10- unless Neil Armstrong took a traffic cone with him, we strongly suspect it’s a pot hole, but who can be sure? I reckon you’ve taken a traffic cone to the moon in the past after a few too many shandies, or maybe just to the end of your cul-de-sac.
Mark your own papers, I trust you, but deduct a point for every traffic cone you’ve woken up with, cuddling in your bed, you silly drunken sausages.
…..and other niggly countywide troubles doner meat and chips from Chick-o-Land will stop me ranting about…..
Speculation arises if the entire additional £3.6m awarded to Wiltshire Council from the Department for Transport’s Pothole Fund, has been used to fix just the one pothole on Gains Lane, Devizes, opposite Sainsburys, because there’s bugger all sign of it being used elsewhere….
Miraculously, the single pothole amidst a multitude of other serious road defects in the county with the fifth worst local authority for fixing potholes, has been filled in… over abundantly, leading residents pondering if the county council are trying to attract tourism by replicating Cape Town’s most renowned landmark,Table Mountain.
Spot the difference!
The road defect on Gains Lane, Devizes
Table Mountain, Cape Town
The hilarious irony is, Wiltshire Council are doing the precise opposite when it comes to tourism, and are hellbent on wiping our county off the tourist track all together, inadvertently risking the future of all leisure facilities too.
But, oopsy daisy, you weren’t supposed to know about the grave concerns expressed to town and parish councils by the Chief Executive of Visit Wiltshire on the Government’s new national structure for tourism, which will see the introduction of countywide accredited Local Visitor Economy Partnerships, and as result, Wiltshire Council announcing they will be withdrawing their funding from Visit Wiltshire from April 2024, because withdrawing funding leaves Wiltshire no longer able to meet eligibility criteria to have an accredited LVEP, and it will be effectively ripped off the tourism map of England. Ha, that barrel of laughs is for another place, another time, and I apologise to Wiltshire Council for any accidental leakage until such a time you can illegally trash Stonehenge’s world heritage status by tunnelling a road underneath it, my tongue just runs off with itself sometimes.
Don’t be outraged, there’s time yet to devise a plan as cunning as Baldrick’s to act as a smokescreen and make you believe it’s all for “the greater good.” Cue a certain local Facebook tintop dictator, my very own ineffective fact checker with a penchant for anything corrupt provided it’s suggested by a straight chap with a blue rosette; please try to recognise satire when it stares you in the face.
Not that I’d advise taking business advice from me, but if you own a small business in Wiltshire which relies on tourism, I would only buy stock to last until April if I were you, and consider a crash course in supermarket shelf-filing. Baby-face Danny K, get us a railway station six miles out of town, let’s escape together, we can exchange homophobic gags on the way, step on it!
Anyway, I digress, I shouldn’t worry my silly little head about the vanity of this ease of backhanding futile construction permits once we’re free of tourism, we were rapping about the tarmac on the singular entity on Gains Lane, Devizes, which is so vastly overpacked its convex is an equal malformation to the concave of the original pothole, which, face it, like many locally had the potential of a black hole to suck light, electromagnetic waves and randomly selected solar systems into it. The effect, rather than your wheel dropping into it and smashing suspension, coils, anti-roll bars, et al (which is, even funnier, impossible to prove over the “wear and tear” loophole) is now like navigating a tepuis, or table top mountain in a shopping trolley; hit it and you’re likely to bust open the headliner and bonnet of your vehicle, with your head.
If it happened to you, you may feel a tad dizzy, and confused enough to vote for these councillors again come council elections, which could well be the reasoning behind it. Perhaps it could lead to further famous table mountains being replicated in our county’s potholes, like Mount Roraima, the most famous tepui in Venezuela, or the Canyonlands of Utah; now, wouldn’t that be nice?
Of course, this is purely satirical speculation for amusement purposes only, and it is more conceivable that the council worker simply couldn’t be arsed to flatten it out, let alone use the surplus tarmac to fill the upteen other potholes nearby it, for that would be far too proactive and because it’s highly likely they’ve forgotten what a pay rise is.
Fact is, as Cabinet Member for Transport Caroline Thomas has, in the drone of a weatherman on dope, blamed the annual 400% increase in potholes on “a combination of a long dry summer followed by periods of very wet and then freezing conditions,” we should take her word for it, as it’s not like we’ve experienced seasonal weather changes since, I dunno, eternity, is it? And we should stop bothering them as there are far more pressing issues, such as forgetting to take one’s expenses form when frequenting that trendy wine bar.
The Cape Town Tourism website says Table Top Mountain has attracted 24 million visitors since it opened in 1929. Not that I’m the kinda guy wondering how you open a mountain, let alone with the restricted technology back in 1929, but perhaps it’s something worth considering before all tourists are left wondering whatever happened to that place between Berkshire and Somerset, and they could all nip into Chick-o-Land and pick me up some doner meat and chips; might shut me up for a bit.
You’ve got to award Gazette & Herald reporter Jason Hughes the journalism medal of bravery this week, for his dissemination on head of the Devizes Guardians, Jonathan Hunter’s mien concerning the tardiness of communication by Wiltshire Council over the current state of our roads!
The headline read “Devizes potholes cause misery for motorists, councillor claims.” Claims? Wha?! Does this guy get to go outside at playtime?! Has he seen the state of it out there? It’s like a lunar landscape after a flipping meteor shower! When Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Centre of the Earth, fittingly about volcanic tubes that reach the centre of the earth, he was inspired by Wiltshire’s roads; fact!
Honestly, honesty is a must here, let’s not get impassive on this breaking scoop; we all know the truth, we’ve known for some time, and hats off to town councillor Jonathan Hunter for digging the claws in.
“A road repairs promise was made two years ago,” he explained, “last week I wrote to Cllr Caroline Thomas on behalf of the residents of Devizes who face the reality of an appalling local road network. Cllr Thomas, has given a statement through the press but after a week I’m still waiting for a reply to my email, which apart from being unprofessional and rude, it signals that the cabinet members approach is not community first and shows a complete disregard for the residents of Devizes.”
I responded, “probably because she owns a Chelsea tractor,” with a little emoji of a tractor in hope to cheer him up! What can I say? I was under pressure and it was the best I could come up with at the time. But what can we do about it? Here’s Jonathan’s top four tips, which makes a terrible headline, because people love “top ten tips,” five, perhaps, Jonathan, but not four, no. Still, they’re good ones.
1. Continue to bombard WC using MyWilts the app, to report potholes. Whilst this system is very reactive it’s the best that they can offer.
2. Write to Cllr Thomas and share your concerns, I can’t guarantee that she will read or even reply but the more residents that express their concerns may make a difference. caroline.thomas@wiltshire.gov.uk
3. Please identify hazardous areas to your friends, neighbours or colleagues who are vulnerable. In particular, those with mobility difficulties.
4. At the 2025 Wiltshire Council unitary election remember the promises that were made in 2021 and the reality of how those promises have been implemented across your local road network.
“There are three areas of key concern in Devizes,” Jonathan told the Gazette, “London Road is the main road coming in and out and that isn’t great at all. Bath Road and also Windsor Drive, which is an interconnecting road, the surface degradation on those roads is really poor.” And continued to express his concern for damaged pavements reducing the accessibility and safety for vulnerable pedestrians.
After such, the article does give this press reply by Cllr Thomas, which goes thus: “The hot, dry summer of last year, and the very wet and very cold weather so far this winter has unfortunately created the perfect conditions for potholes to form across the 2,500-mile road network. We’re doing all we can to repair them, using all our skilled workforce and resources, with the priority being to make the road safe.”
Now, I did rant on this subject at the beginning of February, quoting Cabinet Member for Transport, Dr Mark McClelland’s axiomatic piffle direct from the council’s website, so let’s have a little game of spot the difference here: “The weather has provided the perfect conditions for potholes to form, and that’s why we’re seeing an increase in the number of road defects throughout the county.”
Uncanny, huh?! At least they’re singing off the same song sheet I suppose. Probably written on the wall at county hall, “just reword this weather-blaming twaddle if the press asks!”
Well, please accept my apologises, but I’m not the press, just the milky, the milky inspired by Stephen Mulhern of Catchphrase to “say what I see,” and with a tendency to do precisely that; it’s an abomination which so obviously could have been avoided with ongoing proactive maintenance, even Mr Chips can see it, and he’s a fictional yellow bollard with a clown’s nose, naked other than a cravat.
“The roads are very dangerous for all users,” Jonathan expressed his concern, “pothole repairs should just be an emergency fix to prevent a serious accident, they are not a permanent solution as the substance shrinks within the original road defect. Unfortunately, it would seem WC have adopted pothole repairs as their main strategy to improve crumbling roads with surface degradation. The lack of engagement is a poor show and speaks volumes.”
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As a younger chap, for it once was so, I’d procrastinate with the washing-up, putting it off until the point I’d run out of cutlery or crockery. By this time the daunting task of tackling the mountain was too much to bear. Not forgoing, I’d be suspicious organic matter in the sink could’ve evolved into a dispassionate and sadistic varmint which would, acting in defence of its dwelling, ambush my digits, and marigolds would make unless armour.
In maturity I’ve learned engaging proactive to chores will prevent such issues from building to an uncontrollable catastrophe, but remain convinced, by driving on any road in the county, Wiltshire Council hasn’t yet reached such maturity. Their dithering, wilful ignorance of Section 41 of the Highways Act 1980, has spawned an infestation of intractable and accrescent critters: potholes, and they breed like rabbits.
Agreed, like a birdwatcher finding a rare Capercaillie, I’ve seen council workers patching up the deadliest potholes of recent, here and there, but take The Kings Road, Easterton, for example, which for a while now I’ve renamed the Kamikazes Road, for my own personal white-knuckled amusement. Here, over the past week, they’ve shoved some hardcore in the odd pothole which has occupied the road for an insurmountable eon, ticked it off as a job well done, and returned to base for tea and custard creams. The equivalent of which in my washing-up metaphor would be to rinse a teaspoon I found rotting behind the fridge under the cold tap.
Of course, Cabinet Member for Transport, Dr Mark McClelland has waffled this axiomatic piffle on the council’s website, “The weather has provided the perfect conditions for potholes to form, and that’s why we’re seeing an increase in the number of road defects throughout the county.”
Akin to a football manger telling the presenter, “It’s a game of two halves,” tell us something we don’t know, like perhaps coupled with Dr McClelland’s valid point is also the unmentioned minor technicality they failed dismally to repair potholes for the last two previous years, minimum. Yeah, the increase of road defects is caused by bad weather, I’ll give him, but bad management too. Like my washing-up, if you don’t address the issue promptly, we see potholes on potholes on potholes, on, well, you get the picture; it’s of a lunar landscape, and you’re cycling one of those old Boneshaker bicycles over it.
Potholes are so rife in Wiltshire; people have started using them to give directions. “Oh-argh, go down road for six potholes, past the pensioners playing street golf, you’ll see a really massive pothole, not the one where Kate Winslet is grasping driftwood crying over drowning Leonardo DiCaprio, but a much deeper one, turn right there and it’s just past the third pothole on the left!”
Okay, you roll your thunder; cease the satirical ranting and tell us what we can do about it, I hear your cry. Here’s the longwinded Wiltshire Councillor Dr McBellend again, with the official advice: “Wiltshire Council has an online reporting system called MyWilts that people can use to report problems on the council’s roads and footways. This can be either accessed by computer or an app downloaded from the relevant app store. Reports received from MyWilts are processed accordingly and customers updated through the Council’s reporting and management systems.”
Like everything these days, from parking your car to ordering at Nandos, you must go to a website, download an app, create an account, and customise yourself to the inner-workings of the profiteering geek mate of the council who invented it.
According to the Wiltshire Highways Safety Inspection Manual, depending on priority and road size, it can take anything up to 60 days for them to address the issue, which, based on past experience, seems to be to send a team out to inspect, possibly spray paint a colourful circle around it, or in severe cases stick a traffic cone in it, return to base to file the report and grab some tea and custard creams. By which time umpteen drivers have lost a wheel in the pothole you’re attempting to inform them about.
Technophobes are shit out. I like to think I’m savvy, but it took me little under an hour to make head nor tail of the app, and report a SINGLE road defect, when the county is awash with them, on every single road, multitudes of them, potholes on potholes, remember? How much spare time do they think we have?
One has to wonder how Councillors get to county hall. Are they blindfolded? Are they teleported in like Captain Kirk? How come they cannot see what we see? Oh yeah, the gas-guzzling Chelsea tractor brigade, I forgot; why don’t we all just save up and buy ourselves a 4×4, goes the pig-ignorant Conservative thinktank. Because we’re scrapping the barrel to put food on the table due to their general incompetence of a thousand other issues I could rant a tangent on, that’s why, and we really don’t need the added expense of avoidable car repairs.
Oh, but, oh, what’s that you say? You can reclaim expenses from Wiltshire Council if your vehicle is damaged due to potholes? Yes, I hear that, and after months of paperwork there’s been some success stories; ninety days is the legal maximum allowed, they will take advantage of that while your kids go hungry.
Provided you take a multitude of photos and videos of the damage, the questionable pothole with a tape measure or sonic deep-sea echo sounder, and its surroundings, provide indisputable evidence it was said pothole, add some interesting history about any neighbouring landmarks, and possibly bribe them with proper posh Waitrose biscuits rather than working class custard creams, you can retrieve some but rarely all your costs, should you suffer an incident there and then. But what of the gradual wear and tear of our cars on our daily journeys across this scabrous terrain of endless bottomless chasms? These surely are both insurmountable and incalculable, and what’s more, impossible to prove. I quizzed a local mechanic.
Coils, springs and other such technical bits and bobs are forever being replaced at his garage, he informed me, and was undoubtedly convinced it was due to the constant driving through potholes. He extended it to suggest driving in France wouldn’t cause these problems; whoa, controversial!
Now, I’m sorry for my rude alteration of the councillor’s name, if you noted it, and if I could take it back I would, but I’ve said it now and it’s out there; just a typo really. I’m aware Tories can be touchy when pointing out their incompetence and hypocrisy, and often act like a told-off toddler, but name-calling is simply not cricket. I’m aware it’s a tricky issue and perpetual, but you did sign up for the job, so, no temper tantrums, let’s be logical here; the app is a get out clause for the council, if it’s not reported there it’s as mythical as unicorns.
For I made the gag out of frustration, not so much for the crumbs of pasty I lose while driving the milk float over these bumps, for I’m not so petty to calculate and invoice the council for a six pack of Ginsters, but for the pothole so deep it shattered my window, covering me in shards and leaving me in need of a change of underwear, for the repair of my car’s wheel balance, tyres, for the fact that although I drove over the window-shattering pothole carefully for the next month or so, and it was finally repaired, to note the other six or seven potholes surrounding that one wasn’t, and they’ve equalled it now in deepness. It’s a never-ending problem, I accept this, but for crying out loud, be the hero who finds a doable solution, and I can eat my words rather than have to mince them.
I’m aware we’ve bricked ourselves into this asylum the lunatics have taken over and that’s democracy, but if they’ve found a workable solution on the continent, are we too proud to pinch their strategies? Opps, grey area, fetch my blue pissport and I’ll shut the door behind me.
No good waffling figures to me about how much the council have spent on infrastructure, while I gaze at the new digital road sign in Worton, which flashes up the driver’s speed with a happy or sad face emoji, when one car I witnessed this week clocked 72mph and didn’t fuss to slow past the school gates through that 30mph zone. And, pray tell, how much did it cost to install it, compared to the revenue it’ll provide? It’s not how much you’ve got but what you do with it.
While it may well slow the considerate fella who’s accidentally slipped into 33mph, no emoji is going to cause these thoughtless potential murderers to take caution, but a copper with a speed camera offering a huge fine and lifetime driving ban might. That’d raise some pennies for tarmac, and reduce traffic as well as encouraging lorries to use the motorway and not shortcut through towns and villages; blimey I’m full of radical notions this morning; give the man a Twix.
But failing any of them, councillor, take a pay cut, live like the rest of us sufferers, avoid expensive luncheons, buy bargain custard creams for county hall’s biscuit barrel, or pick up a shovel, get your Fairy-Liquid-kind hands dirty for once in your sad little life and fill the potholes in yourself! Or do they keep potholes as it’s symbolic of where this country is heading?
Who can say for certain?
I can, “for certain,” there you go, job a good ‘un, shame the same can’t be said for Wiltshire Council’s road policy!
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It’s the satirist in me which smirks at the audacity of placing a right-sided “road narrows” roadwork sign on the last bend before Potterne, up Whistley Road. In all actual fact, the road widens at this point, rather it’s potholes the size of moon craters, on both sides of the road, which cause it to be an ineffectual passing place, unless you own one of those American monster trucks, and if you do, navigating the B-road in question wouldn’t be advisable.
In fairness, for your car’s protection, gradually sinking traffic cones have been strategically placed in the singularities (that’s what physicists call the centre of a black hole, by the way; a point where extremely large amounts of matter are crushed into an infinitely small amount of space, such as your alloys and bumper.)
Secondary fairness, the dilapidation of tarmac is as never-ending as washing dishes, and extreme weather conditions are like your kids, bringing dirty crockeries to the kitchen when you thought you’d just finished. Washing up is a perpetual task, but if you don’t persevere it accumulates, to the point you’re eating breakfast from the dog bowl; see where I’m going with this, Wiltshire Council?
The problem remains, Whistley Road is not the exception to the rule, rather the standard these days in our country lanes’ decrepitude; take a journey up The Kings Road in Easterton, hardly fit for a king at all, and a wonder why on earth it needs speed bumps when natural depressions in the road bigger than the actual village itself, you’d like to think, should prevent anyone in their right mind from speeding.
One would like to imagine accelerating over fifteen miles an hour might yet be a very real possibility once you’ve boarded our main roads, only to find their condition is hardly better. Yet, at Tuesday’s Devizes Town Council Meeting, Councillor Jonathan Hunter pointed to his understanding that for the financial year 2021-22 Wiltshire Council was awarded 22,924,000 smackers from the Government’s Highway Maintenance Fund to pay for a range of highway improvements, begging the question why our local roads still make the Giant’s Causeway look like an autobahn.
Brickley Lane
Johnathan, the kind of Conservative which makes you realise not all of them would piggyback their crippled grandmothers to reach a bottle of Bollinger from a top shelf, put forward a proposal to inquire how the money has been spent. Putting to DTC, “it would be helpful to understand how this funding has supported highways improvements in the county; if any substantive project in the last twelve months have been undertaken in Devizes, and if this government funding was used to deliver them.”
“Furthermore,” he added, because councillors tend to go on a bit, “Devizes Town Council seeks visibility regarding the plan for this year’s road improvement programme within the Devizes area, and what are the local priorities.” And it would seem the Council agreed.
Cromwell Road
“With the poor state of the local road network,” Jonathan told Devizine, excited by his proposal being met, “including many sections of surface degradation and dangerous potholes, it is encouraging that this proposal was fully agreed by Town Council members.”
“For reasons of road user safety, travel inconvenience and the cost of vehicle maintenance it is important that local road users and pedestrians should be able to receive a full progress update on the current roads programme and importantly receive clear visibility about tax payer funded plans for the local road network that serves Devizes.”
“Currently, to find out anything about road repair plans, you have to don some deep-sea-diving apparel and search in the very deep and murky waters of the online kingdom, even Jacques Cousteau would find that a challenge!”
Very well, Johnathan, well done, but we do the funny bits if you don’t mind! But it would be good to know, in this era whereby you can triple the value of your car simply by filling it up with petrol, that you’re not going to forsake your tyres on the next bend, unless you’re a Kwik-Fit manager.
We look forward to the possibility of seeing the plans by Wiltshire Council; roads don’t fix themselves and no one said it was going to be easy, but you choose the bloomin’ job! For everyone on Facebook, you can join in the fun at the Devizes Pot Hole Spotter’s Club, here!
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