A £10,000 county council attempt to improve the controversial Whitchurch Road 'rural gateway has been branded a failure — just a week after it was re-opened.

The scheme, designed to reduce traffic speed and persuade trucks and 'rat-runners' to use the main A386 between Tavistock and Plymouth instead, has been ridiculed since it was first installed.

Within hours of it being built, the grassy chicanes were in ruins — deeply rutted with tyre tracks.

Over the next few months dozens of complaints about accidents and near-misses were made as residents claimed the scheme had not only failed to achieve what it set out to, but had made things very much worse.

A 'safety audit' was held and scheme designer Mike Parnell, Devon County Council's local services officer and members of the West Devon Partnership Committee — a group comprising councillors from various local authorities — fought off a barrage of criticism from local councillors.

Mr Parnell and the committee said the success or otherwise of the scheme could not b judged until it was properly finished. They agreed to spend a further £10,000 on it and to monitor it over the next 12 months.

But local resident Ian Kilpatrick said: 'One week after the so-called enhancement, at a cost of many thousands of pounds, the whole thing is in tatters.'

He blamed the lack of any designated right of way in the long stretch of single-track road for forcing drivers onto the banks.

'What a fantastic waste of money,' he said. 'When will the officers of the various council departments actually listen to the inhabitants they are supposed to look after? It would seem they have to save face and hide behind a worthless safety audit.'

Tom Quartley who commutes daily between his home in Grenofen and his business in Tavistock, was lost for words.

'Words fail me. Why they didn't put two sleeping policemen to slow the traffic down, I don't know,' he said. 'I think it's a complete failure. There's so much wrong with it I could go on for ever — it has spoilt that back road, which was perfectly all right before.

'The lorries are going in there and knocking it about. The passing bays are in the wrong places and are not big enough and there are no "right of way" signs.

'They have narrowed it so much that lorries can't get through now, but they still try. It just makes me laugh. They put kerbstones in, but they've put them in vertically, like they pinched them from Avebury.'

Tavistock mayor Judith Williams was concerned the scheme had made a bottleneck of the only alternative route to the A386.

'On Goose Fair day when everybody was routed round that way people got completely stuck. I was stuck twice myself,' she said.

'That's what we said as a council: when there's an accident and the A386 is blocked that's the only alternative.'

The other problem on Goose Fair day was the heavy rain. Mrs Williams said there was no drainage and the banks turned the road into a lake.

'It was like going through a muddy swimming pool. It was absolutely appalling.

'It's an absolute disgrace spending all that money on the gateway — it's like driving through a railway siding. I really do think I speak for the majority of people on this — an awful lot of money has been wasted on the project.'

The heavy rain made the scheme even more dangerous, according to Whitchurch resident Ian Mackenzie, who said he'd never previously had any problems on the road in 35 years of daily commuting.

'It was the time of that lashing rain, you couldn't see a thing, but people kept coming, they wouldn't pull in — I had to or I'd have been in the bank.

'Nobody really knows what they are supposed to be doing — it's very dangerous,' he said. 'The most sensible thing they could do is to return it to how it was.'

There was nobody available from DevonCounty Council to comment on the situation as the Times went to press.