The old road from Ross to Monmouth, the A40, uh, was a road just two lorry loads wide in most places.

It had steep hills, very nasty bends. If you got behind a lorry going up the hills, you couldn't overtake, so you'd be grinding up there till the lorry got on the top and then you could manage to overtake. The M50 was built and it literally didn't go anywhere.

It went from Ross to the outskirts of Tewkesbury because there was nowhere joining up. So they, when they built it, people used to say, well, why have they built it? But then of course in the long term it was to link up with the M5. Regarding work on the M50 when it came into being, it um, Enabled Ross to become a sort of a centre to a network of roads. The men there mostly taken on for labouring jobs. They used to work very, very long hours, say 7 o'clock in the morning till dusk at night, and that was 6 days a week. It enabled um Ross andy to be opened up to Wales and Bristol. And Birmingham, we used to go up to the services on the M50 at the end.

Mainly used to just go for a ride because it was a dual carriageway, not much vehicles on it. I always wore a helmet, even though it wasn't compulsory. In the beginning, I had a cheap little dome thing and then I went and spent a nice one that I think came around your face like that cap and a peak, a white one and as I said, it main thing was to keep my head warm. There was no speed limit on it, so you weren't worried about getting done for going over 70 miles an hour.

So I used to go out there and roll up the motorbike as fast as we could. We'd raced each other. Why not? I went down the bypass from the roundabout at the labels down to Wilton and I can remember going down there and I lay down on the bike as fast as I could and I think I just poked my head up once to see the speedo and she was doing about 98 miles an hour, which for a 350 twin in those days was pretty good, silly really because I had no protective clothing on apart from a helmet, so. You wouldn't want to think about it, but you do it like stupid boys.

There was no Sunday drinking in Wales, so you saw the coach loads used to come to Ross and Wye and local areas on a Sunday, and so that was a great income support.

for the landlords, but it also used to um cause frictions between young men, the Welsh and the English. It used to set off, you know, quite some sort of alternations at times. It brought people in from all over different countries there there were Irish navvies working here.

There were people from up north working here, so it had a great camaraderie within those working groups and of course it changed the ethnicity of Ross because some of those people. Um, had relationships with Ross with the local girls and they never ever went back, brought about different cultures, different religions. With hindsight, it improved the ethnicity in Ross.