How does a railway enthusiast evince a dedicated fascination with a railway station long-vanished from the face of the earth? How does the lure of a denuded wasteland exert such a strong pull over someone who was not even alive during a former railway station’s busiest days? It is an obsession that makes you want to be at said hallowed location every so often, even for just a short time, and imagine how it was a hundred years earlier and wish someone would finally crack the fourth dimension with a time machine to carry you back to when the trains called and filled the site with steamy busy activity, to when it was a place of employment, to a platform where you could start an exciting journey to another station stop now lost in antiquity. Recognise the condition? The chances are that you do if you are reading this publication. Well, that’s how I feel about Dauntsey in Wiltshire, a wayside station on the Great Western Railway with a lifespan of 1868-1965, and this is its story and an explanation as to how this fascination came about.
The first time I heard the name of Dauntsey uttered was around 1974, nearly two decades after the station had closed, and the speaker was my father-in-law, Douglas Lockstone, in Malmesbury. I was in the early throes of investigating the history of the GWR branch to that town, a quest that was to consume me for a lifetime and produce two hardback tomes, one for Wild Swan, one for Lightmoor Press (actually three, but for years I’ve disowned a first little paperback of 1977 as the efforts of a floundering novice). So I mentioned my interest in the little branch that ran 3½ miles from Malmesbury up to the main line at Little Somerford – the Lockstones had been Master Grocers in the town and in Douglas’s youth there had been a lot of contact with the railway with incoming merchandise coming from Bristol and London – and it was then that he corrected me… “Well, actually, it used to run out to Dauntsey.” How so? All will be revealed.
I was schoolteaching in those days – Swindon, Slough, Southampton, Ashford, a Medway Valley headship – and I remain grateful to my wife’s family who put me up on endless occasions while my research took a hold and I made many visits to the Malmesbury area on fieldwork and interviews, and of course it made it possible for my in-laws to see their grandchildren regularly. But Dauntsey remained a mystery for some time – it was a long time before I even saw a photograph of it. And it was not even an obvious appellation for the station, Dauntsey being a scattered habitation of cottages, farms and fields north of the GWR’s first main line, the station being between Wootton Bassett Junction and Chippenham. Its more precise location was at Dauntsey Lock, close to the old Wilts & Berks Canal, where the land started to rise up a steep bank to the village of Bradenstoke, home of many railwaymen in days gone by. I used to think that a more appropriate GWR naming would have been ‘Bradenstoke & Dauntsey’, or ‘Bradenstoke Road’, to use typical GWR naming style in use elsewhere.
My early searches took me to Devizes Museum and it was in its archives that I saw my first photographs of Dauntsey, although why I went there in the first place escapes me now. One of the photographs was a dark view of a branch train for Malmesbury in the bay platform, the other a staff group with branch engine on what purported to be the last train to Malmesbury to run on what was Dauntsey’s last day as a junction station. However, the staff group picture
