A436

If you leave Gloucester on the A417, you find yourself climbing a very steep hill. At the top you find yourself at a roundabout near the Air Balloon Public House where, to stay on the A417, you need to turn sharp right (a worthwhile detour as it takes you towards a great view point where you can see the scale of the hill you've just climbed. But, returning to the point, this roundabout marks the beginning of the A436.

Route

Air Balloon - Chastleton

The start of the A436 spur at Kilkenny

The road begins at the Air Balloon on the A417, from which a very short section of dual-carriageway leads onto a curvy and undulating S2 which carves a hilly course through woods and farmland to the south of Cheltenham. After a few miles, the A436 arrives a staggered double roundabout with the A435 at Seven Springs.

This essentially comprises two separate roundabouts with a very short D2 section and a Pegasus Crossing between them. For many years, this was a staggered crossroads, where the more important green-signed A436 gave way through the stagger to the much quieter white-signed A435, rendering it a very odd and rather busy junction.

From Severn Springs, we continue on to Kilkenny where the road forks and until recently (shown on the 2018 AA Road Atlas for example) the primary A436 continued ahead whereas the non-primary A436 takes the left hand fork. The reason for this apparently strange case of road numbering is that this first section of the A436 forms a southern bypass to Cheltenham and the signed route from the A40 to Gloucester (itself on the A40) is via the A436 rather than through Cheltenham itself. Therefore, the right-hand fork is effectively a spur, giving a short cut to and from the eastbound A40, whereas the left-hand fork formed the mainline of the A436, which itself reaches the A40 after a mile at the village of Andoversford. Recent OS maps (and smaller scale maps) no longer show the route through Andoversford as being classified.

Here, it is the A40 that runs north-south, so we take a brief left and right across the A40 to resume our eastward course through the Cotswolds. The course can be described as gently undulating, but relatively straight - there is a sense of old Roman alignments here, particularly at the junction with the B4068 which continues in a straight line from the approaching course of the A436. We continue on until we meet the A429 at Bourton on the Water - definitely a Roman Road, being the Fosse Way. I would say we weave our way between Bourton on-the-Water and Lower Slaughter, but you can't really describe a dead-straight road as weaving. It just manages to miss the two settlements.

The Landranger map shows that we are running parallel to The Gloucestershire Way, Monarch's Way, Macmillan Way and the Heart of England Way. Now that's a multiplex of foot paths to put most road multiplexes to shame.

A mile south of the impressive Cotswold town of Stow-on-the-Wold we meet the A424. At the crossroads in the middle of Stow we turn right, back on the A436 in its own right. As we leave the town, the B4450 forks off to the right, whilst we head north east, again through a mix of farm land and wood lined road, climbing from Adlestrop alongside Chastleton Barrow Fort to a T-junction with the A44, which marks the end of the A436.

Original Author(s): Simon Davies

History

The original route of the A436 into Stow

The A436 is described in the1922 Road Lists as Andoversford - Stow-on-the-Wold - Chipping Norton (Cross Hands Inn); the eastern end was in the same place as now. However, as shown in the map on the left, the original routing was via the current B4068 rather than the current multiplex with the A429.

The section between the Air Balloon and Andoversford was unclassified in 1922 but soon became the B4023. It became part of the A436 in 1935.

The current route of the A436 east of Andoversford was unclassified in 1922 but became the B4068 in 1935. The two numbers were swapped over in the 1980s, although the A436 does not serve Bourton as the B4068 did.