M50 Ross Spur
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One of the oldest and best-preserved motorways runs from the M5 to Ross-on-Wye, at first sight ending at quite an arbitrary location but in reality forming a key part of the road connection between the Midlands and South Wales.
It remains a fascinating museum of very early motorway design - when all the details hadn't quite been sorted out and experiments were still being conducted. As a result, it's quite narrow, with less-than-full-width hard shoulders that vanish at every bridge. The Queensferry Bridge over the Severn carries only one full-width lane and one narrow lane in each direction.
There's a cut in the main video where the camera mysteriously stopped - in almost exactly the same place as the first time I tried to capture this road, more than a year earlier. It only misses a few hundred metres of road.
There's also a supplementary video entering the motorway from the notorious junction 3 - it really is as small and tight as it looks.
- Video captured
- April 25 2009
- Running times
- Eastbound: 3'43"
- Westbound entrance at junction 3: 0'41"
