AGB        Eureka!  A long-wondered mystery solved    10 Nov 2006

This lunch time I drove through the underpass that is below the Crown Island roundabout.  For the umpteenth time I wondered what the two-foot square and twelve inches high pieces of concrete were for.  These obelisks have a pointed top a bit like a diamond cutter.  One of the pieces of masonry, in a part of the path that can be shaded from the sun by the overhead bridge, is painted white.  Over recent months I have asked various people who were passing along the path at the same time as myself, if they knew the purpose of the lumps of concrete.  Nobody knew, although one or two possibilities were mooted.  Today's suggestion was that it stopped people from driving on to the grass verge.  But with a moment's thought, that idea can be ruled out as motor vehicles cannot gain access to the path, and there is plenty of room to drive a car by the side of the lump of concrete.

In The Crown pub there are, generally, a group of local chaps of not-so-tender years.  I posed the question to the group.  AND I GOT AN ANSWER.  It seems that Nutty Nottingham Council had demonstrated another of their weird decisions. The story as told to me was:

A number of years ago it was decided to put a barrier between the pedestrian part of the path, and the cyclists part of the path.  The obelisks were the beginning of the base-part of a handrail to separate cyclists from pedestrians.  But for some unknown reason the work stopped and was never re-commenced.  The possible answer was that insufficient funds were allocated for the job, and the money simply ran out.  This myopic approach to public works is not an unknown phenomenon.  A more spectacular example was evidenced in Cape Town when I had a cruise that terminated in that city.

In the Cape Town case, as we were being driven through the city en route to a park, it was pointed out that we should look up out of the window over our heads as we went round a large roundabout.  A significant  elevated highway started to cross the roundabout at about thirty feet above the ground.  But at roughly half-way across the traffic circle, the elevated roadway just ceased.  Whether there was any sort of barrier at the point where a vehicle would have simply dropped off the end, we couldn't see from the coach.  The tour guide explained that it was at that point in the construction of the elevated roadway that the money run out.  We weren't told if Nelson Mandela had instituted a Peace and Reconciliation Committee to adjudicate between the Council and the Contractor.  We were just left wondering about the fiasco that we had witnessed.  Quite a tourist sight, though!