Dramatic sky....

If you leave Manchester journeying south by car to, say, Birmingham or London, the chances are you will take the M56 and M6 route past the airport. You can stick to the motorway system and get mixed up in all the traffic that snares up the Thelwall Viaduct area near Warrington, or you can try the A56 route that leaves the M56 south of Altrincham and rejoins the M6 near Knutsford. On a good day that is an option but with so many people using it now it doesn't have many of those and can be as congested as the main motorway. And it's particularly bad at Mere Corner much to the chagrin of the people living in those huge houses with eye watering price tags that back onto the lake on Mere Golf Course.

To sort this out they are building another road, parallel to the A56, as a motorway link between the M56 and M6 which they hope will relieve the congestion. I suspect that it will just get you to the congestion on the M6 between Knutsford and Middlewich a couple of minutes earlier.

I drove down the A50, which the new road will cross near High Legh, and the devastation of this part of the Cheshire countryside is appalling. Vast amounts of grade A farmland will be concreted over and it's ploughed through some beautiful woodland just south of the A50 here. On both sides of the new road, huge areas of former farmland have been given over to the construction. I can only hope that it is restored to what it was formally once the road is finished.

And I have it at the back if my mind that this part of Cheshire will have to be churned up again when the HS2 rail route is built up to Manchester. It must be here as I can't imagine it being built on the other side of the A56 as that would take it through Tatton Park.

Picture of the devastation/construction and a very dramatic sky that didn't turn into a storm.