FOUR decades ago this week, a young Swindon man was planning a sponsored motorcycle ride from Land’s End to John O’Groats.

Such a trip wasn’t all that unusual in itself, even in 1977, but few bikers would try it aboard a 50cc moped.

Stephen Fretwell, an 18-year-old Dorcan School student who lived in Covingham, evidently relished a challenge, because he planned to cover each of the 1,000 miles or so from one end of the nation to the other on just such a machine.

We said: “It will be a tough haul but Stephen says he can do it.

“He sets out from the northern tip of the British Isles on Monday, and he hopes to reach Land’s End about four days later.

“He will be following an RAC route which avoids all motorways, and will take him through Bristol as the nearest point to Swindon.

“Stephen will be camping on his trek, and his journey will be precisely timed and logged by Artdeans of Swindon, who are supplying the moped.”

The intrepid young rider, who aimed to raise £200 for Cancer Research, went on to complete his quest in a total riding time of just 35 hours.

Another unusual story that week was about a large hole in the ground.

This was no ordinary hole in the ground, however, as it was positive proof of human settlement in Swindon long before the Domesday Book famously told of a hill were pigs were kept.

We said: “A second century Roman well has been discovered in Swindon by archaeologists.

“The well – 3.7 metres deep – was discovered two months ago on waste land near High Street, adjoining The Lawns.

“It has been excavated to its full extent – and is now being filled in.”

Strictly speaking the hole, to the rear of Lloyds Bank, wasn’t so much a well as an attempt at one.

Excavation organiser Bernard Phillips said of the Roman diggers: “They obviously tried to dig a well but eventually hit solid rock. Then it was used as a rubbish dump.”

It was thanks to the relics thrown in, which included animal bones and fragments of more than 100 pottery vessels, that the site could be dated so accurately.

News of a happy event reached us from the Brewer’s Arms in Wanborough, where landlord Gerald Sadler kept a small menagerie of creatures including macaws, a budgerigar, a mynah bird and three monkeys - Pigtail Macaques, to be exact.

Until the previous October, there had only been two, Sonny and his partner, Ada, but then Ada had given birth to young Henry, believed to be the first of his kind not born either in the wild or at a zoo.

Now it seemed Ada was expecting once more. We pictured sonny celebrating in the traditional way – by having a pint of beer, which was served by the landlord’s daughter, Jenny Tunley.

Gerald said: “I got in touch with Bristol Zoo when Henry was born and they said I must have been feeding them properly, otherwise they wouldn’t have bred.”

A rather more conventionally cheery story involved two Swindon sisters returning to their home town for the first time since marrying American servicemen in the 1940s.

Moni Cottrell lived in Denver, Colorado, and Margaret Littlefield in San Francisco, but they were reunited with brother Doug Preece and sister Rene Withers at Rene’s home in Copse Avenue.

The four were the children of a railwayman originally from the Rhondda Valley, and had lived in East Street as children.

The latest production at the Wyvern Theatre starred two people still best known for TV shows which are still mentioned by cultural historians – albeit for different reasons.

Katy Manning had played Jo Grant, a Doctor Who companion from 1971 until 1973, when the Time Lord was played by Jon Pertwee. Her credits included appearances in The Daemons, the Doctor Who story filmed in Avebury.

Jack Smethhurst was best known for having starred alongside Nina Baden Semper and future EastEnders Rudolph Walker and Kate Williams in Love Thy Neighbour, a sitcom about a black couple and a white couple who lived next door to each other.

Intended to highlight the foolishness and pointlessness of racism, the show was so clumsy that it’s mostly remembered these days for adding a slew of new insults to the vocabularies of racists in every workplace and school playground in the land.

Manning and Smethhurst were about to appear in a play called Natural Gas, about an unhappy middle-aged man who is persuaded by a friend that infidelity and divorce will pave the way for an exciting future.

Our theatre critic wrote: “The close of the play has several surprises in store for this fanciful hero, but whether or not it is the beginning of a new golden future is a different matter.”