The gestalt of the M6 (including the toll road and Gravelly Hill Interchange) is truly awesome (in the original sense of the word) when considered. Being an expat bummie the section through the second city is the part that I love most of the whole road, I still consider it my home turf. From the turnoff to the Aston Expressway at Spag. Junc. to the extended flyover that passes the once might Forty Dunlop, the views of the Villa and the rotunda and the dreaming towers of Birmingham. I always loved the feeling of sailing over the rail yards and factories, the rhythmic whump of the car going over the expansion joints... sigh. No service stations in the brum and the Black Country, there you fend for yourself, a single cell in the bloodstream of the country itself, an artery from the nation's beating heartland feeding the capillaries that in turn are feeding the myriad symbionts that makes us as a country what we are at any one, whole brief moment.

Suc a contrast to the motorway at it's far extremity in Cumbria and its route with the fells of the lakes and Yorkshire funnelling the road as it winds onward and where it feels like it's transporting you past a land still brooding over the brutal incursion of this industrial behemoth.

It passes close to where I live now and is still one of our main routes south or north, climbing as it does over the Mersey and the ship canal (another monument), although it's become so crowded and today's drivers so fuppin' insane that travelling along it can be a real nightmare.