Driving over Fontmell Down, it’s difficult to see the road ahead, let alone the stupendous views that are shrouded in something more demanding than a seasonal mist. The fog is all encompassing; it positively drowns my little car. You have to guess when it’s time to shift down a gear in preparation for the descent into Melbury Abbas. Melbury Abbas. Who lives in a place like this? On the best of days it’s a black hole with a twenty miles per hour speed limit that is redundant in the face of Wiltshire County Council’s diktat to heavy goods vehicles: do NOT use the lower Shaftesbury Road! Push your lorry up a 300 feet incline at top speed. Do NOT alert yourself to oncoming traffic! If you get stuck (which is inevitable), add a number to those on the blackboard in the garden of the damaged house on the bend.

I’m sick of this bloody weather. Fed up with sitting indoors looking out at grey skies and pouring rain. Which is why, last evening, I hatched a plan to take myself off to Wiltshire for the day. Somehow, it doesn’t seem to matter as much if it’s raining there. My destination leads me through Westbury, an old stamping ground of my long-passed youth. Haven’t been here for eons. A friend remarked that it’s now commuter ground. Where are they commuting to, I ask? ‘Doesn’t matter. Anywhere that isn’t Westbury. They have a good railway station’. As I cross the town’s boundary, Dylan is booming out of the radio: Positively Fourth Street. I think it was playing last time I was here in 1964. Funny thing – the place is a dump but still I dream incessantly about the road from Westbury to Edington where I used to live and in these dreams, although I can see the road, I’m always stuck in town.

So I travel that much worn road, anticipating every bend that I’m still familiar with, all the time with the chalky white horse overlooking my journey, and onwards to my destination. I’m off to the Wiltshire Museum at Devizes. Allegedly, they possess a larger quantity of bronze-aged gold than the British Museum and I have a free entry ticket. It’s a soulless journey but, of course, one always arrives. And look, I’ve parked at exactly the same time that Wadworth’s delivery dray passes. This is not some random exhibition – they still deliver the beer in this way. Hartley said, ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’. He hadn’t been to Wiltshire. It’s always the same.

The museum is a joy although, I must report, not much gold in evidence. No matter. I pass a good two hours inside and the ever-joyous Phil Harding presents many informative video clips along the way. I’m a big fan of Phil – he of the sweaty hat bands and dirty fingernails. Apparently, he receives regular suggestive fan mail from women who’d like to run their fingers through his feather.

I must admit that my most favourite thing in the museum isn’t archaeological. It’s the John Piper stained glass window depicting Wiltshire in the vibrant round. Here you have it all: a white horse, Silbury Hill, the processional route to Avebury, Beaker-ware which is plentiful and so on. I love it.

Culture done and dusted with, I take a two hour trot down the Kennet and Avon Canal to the foothills of the magnificent Caen Locks. It’s a couple of years since I did my canal walks from Bath to Hungerford and whilst this stretch isn’t the most picturesque, the twenty nine locks, rising to an incredible feat of engineering of 272 feet in two miles, remains admirable.

Along the way, I pass the nests of two swans, seemingly unperturbed by innumerable, muddy passers-by. And after this I go to Trowbridge for a cup of tea with my long-time friends. Do you have peppermint I ask? Of course they don’t. As I say, the past is not a foreign place in these parts.