I WAS glad to hear that visitor numbers at our local tourist attractions aren’t being overly knackered by the foul weather.

The latest figures suggest the likes of the Outlet Centre and our museums are still doing very nicely.

That’s the good thing about having lots of excellent attractions with roofs, of course, but we should also beef up our roster of outdoor magnets for visitors’ cash.

By the law of averages next summer will be lovely, so now is the time to make sure we’re ready for the influx.

We don’t even need to spend much money, as there are plenty of existing things we could pass off as local wonders if we play our cards right.

Take potholes, for example. They’re developing all over town and sooner or later one of those dips in the road will turn into a full-on bottomless pit. My money’s on the one half way down Groundwell Road.

Anyway, wherever it turns out to be we shouldn’t fill it in. Come to think of it, we probably won’t be able to afford to fill it in. Instead we should put railings around it and signs identifying it as The Legendary Chasm of Swindon. To add to the effect we could search local amateur dramatics groups for an oldish bloke who can do a sinister West Country accent – and who preferably has eyes which simultaneously gaze in separate directions.

It would be this man’s job to stand by the pit looking sinister and a bit deranged, and enthral visitors with tales of the chasm’s history, which includes Bronze Age sacrifices, strange glows in the dead of night and the ghost of a highwayman and his horse, who tumbled in one coal-black stormy night in 1716.

Perhaps a device playing a recording of an unhappy animal could be surreptitiously lowered into the pit to enhance the atmosphere.

Other attractions along the same lines might include The Shattered Road Surface of Doom, whose suspension-killing defects are said to be the ghostly work of a lost Roman legion. The soldiers, tourists will be told, took a wrong turning at Chippenham while in search of a shop selling dormouse flavour crisps.

The only problem with establishing The Shattered Road Surface of Doom will be deciding which of the many potentially ideal locations to use.

The same sort of difficulty will arise when the time comes to establish The Dark and Derelict Old Building. It will need to be a structure of historic significance with impressive yet decaying architecture, but that doesn’t narrow things down much in this next of the woods.

We should probably choose the one least likely to collapse while people are inside it, as killing visitors is a bit of a no-no in the tourism game – especially if they haven’t had time to visit the gift shop.

The tour guide – perhaps the same guy we use for The Legendary Chasm of Swindon – will tell visitors that the building is said to be cursed, and that it has been allowed to decay because every time somebody in a position of power looks at it they’re immediately unable to do anything useful. Now I reflect on it, that won’t be too far from the truth.

If we want to be truly on the cutting edge of tourist attraction provision, we might want to recruit some of our living, breathing local resources.

That’s where The Ancient Guardian Priests of Swindon will come in. They’ll be introduced as a sacred group whose origins are lost in the mists of time, but whose appointed role is to appease the gods by standing at every entrance to the town centre, babbling in a mysterious forgotten tongue and accepting offerings from visitors in exchange for blessings.

Obviously, they’ll still be known to locals as the drunks whose ASBOs mean they’re not allowed in the town centre anymore, but our guests need never find out.