Leighton Bromswold

Off the road to Leighton Bromswold the footpath to Old Weston

From Sheep Street looking to St Mary's church Leighton Bromswold

From Staunch Hill the road down to the A14 at the footpath to Saltwells

From Leighton Bromswold the road joining the A14 dual carriageway

A remote place surrounded by miles of unpopulated farmland. The building on the left is shown on the OS map as a public house but seems now to be closed.

Looking south-east towards the church along The Avenue.

St Mary’s church, Leighton Bromswold, is on the horizon just right of centre.

The sign in the distance indicates the junction for Leighton Bromswold.

A simple junction on the flat, made safer by a wide central reservation for turning traffic.

Between the A605 and A1 junctions, several laybys are provided on the A14 solely for emergencies. Note the double yellow lines within the layby. A typically muddled, penny-pinching British approach to road building: not enough investment to make what is a hugely important transport artery a proper free-flow highway with appropriate safety features.

The A14 is a major road which runs for 129 miles from the Port of Felixstowe to the Catthorpe Interchange, the junction of the M1 and M6 motorways near Rugby. The route linking Rugby (and therefore the West Midlands and the north of England via the motorway network) to East Anglia and the ports of Felixstowe and Harwich is incredibly important and incredibly busy (Felixstowe is the UK's principal container port and the A14 is the road between Felixstowe and everywhere else) but it didn't exist in any coherent form until about 1992. Prior to the current A14 the main route from Birmingham to the Haven ports followed the old A45 road via Coventry, Rugby, Northampton, St Neots, Cambridge and then through all the towns on the A14, from there to Ipswich where it ended on the A12 – not the fast route required for transporting goods across the country with the sudden rise in container shipping during the latter part of the twentieth century. Most of the current A14 route is a collection of bits of dual carriageway acquired from other roads (most notably the A45) with occasional stretches of new road to bolt it all together. Because of its importance to the country’s economy, there are plans to upgrade it further. Prior to its use for the current route the A14 designation had been used for a section of road between the A10 at Royston and the A1 at Alconbury following part of the route of the Roman road, Ermine Street, which is now mostly designated as the A1198. The only bit of the current A14 that follows that number's original route is the spur linking junction 23 to the A1. Link Chris's British Road Directory Link Wikipedia