Lancashire Highways, Giant Potholes & Victorian Cobbles

Like a great many Lancastrian road surfaces, the one outside my house is strewn with potholes. The feckless County Highways Department, which perpetuates the difficult parking by Martin Top Chapel by refusing permission for our carpark, has neglected our roads for so long that it now appears to be overwhelmed. A combination of poor funding and departmental incompetence have combined to create an entire county’s worth of ill-maintained road network.

Although hardly justifying the poor service we taxpayers of Lancashire receive, some of the gigantic potholes which widen and deepen each passing week reveal the Victorian cobbles beneath. The ones above were laid in 1890; the covering road surface is twenty-first century. I note that, while offering a somewhat bumpier experience, tcobbles last longer than tarmacadam and would seldom have required repair and replacement. They would also have prevented the need for that most obnoxious of road features, the speed bump; one naturally drives more carefully atop a cobbled surface. Had local councils left residential streets cobbled, it would have been better all round, and the current mess would be smaller.

Decaying, damaged and worn tarmac seems like an apt picture of modern thinking, modern philosophy and modern theology. It promises greater comfort and a smoother experience, but it cannot survive the elements, eventually decreasing the surface quality rather than improving it.  Similarly, new theologies and ‘fresh expressions’ of God which come from the latest human thinking rather than God’s word prove just as useless and discomforting. They all wear out and fade away, leaving uncomfortable holes and gaps, but dig deep enough, and one finds something rather more solid and dependable.