The Magic Roundabout

Have you ever been on vacation, driving merrily along minding your own business, when whoopsie, you have to hit the brakes as you’ve unknowingly entered a gateway to the Nightmare dimension?
The Magic Roundabout, a godforsaken collection of mini-​roundabouts (or minibouts) that connect 4 main artery routes and a relatively minor road (sorry Shrivenham Rd.), was physically built in 1972, but conceived far earlier way back in 1937 by H.P. Lovecraft while languishing on his deathbed, emotionally distraught by the realisation that Cthulhu wasn’t the ultimate evil after all and he simply had to jot down his maniacal design on paper.
The fact that the layout of the minibouts of the Magic Roundabout form the basic outline of an upside down pentagram is as blatant a calling card of evil as you could ever expect to see
The MR is apparently a ‘landmark that Swindon is famous for’, which should tell you everything you need to know about Swindon in 6-​words and exactly why you should consider investing an additional 10-​hours to driving around it instead of through it.
Throw in the fact that I traversed this mess with a stunned, wide-​eyed American in the car, unused to both roundabouts (they’re quite the tourist attraction in the USA and all seem to require a mandatory 3-​miles of warning signs to mentally prepare a driver to tackle one) and driving on the left side of the road, which only added to the overall sense of panic and impending doom.
We survived the Magic Roundabout, which is more than some can say. Legend has it that Dave Bailey from Oxford failed to sacrifice a chicken or say the appropriate prayers before entering the roundabout back in 1983 and remains there to this day, his white van driving in endless futile circles, doomed for eternity to try and find the exit for the M4.

The magic roundabout is pure evil, ok so you would think its fairly simple everyone knows the basics of roundabout knowledge so surely it could take some common sense yet so many people have no idea what to do or where to go which is why it makes driving it so intimidating.
Its very confusing, but arrows clearly indicate which way and where you should be going its when buses are coming straight for you that it begins to get scary.
My other half will not even drive it, will avoid it at all costs even if it adds 10 minutes to the journey.

I don’t drive. I usual encounter this when in the car with my Mum, who can be a little worried. Invariably as we approach she starts telling me to keep quiet until we are past, at length, until I’m really wishing she’d stop talking and drive, but my mouth is, of course, tight shut.
Actually I think she’s probably a lot better at it than she thinks. And Marg2k8’s explanation makes some sort of sense! It still remains a little scary, with traffic coming at you from what seems like all directions!
If you’d like a look before tackling it, then on the map top right go to ‘explore this area’, then switch to satellite, and zoom in. It’s sort of two rings, one going clockwise, one anti, with four islands and four smaller roundabouts in between.
I can’t help wondering if they’ve ever built one of these elsewhere since?

The Magic Roundabout is one of the things that Swindon is famous for. It is not just one roundabout, but a whole series of roundabouts at one junction of several roads, near the County Ground (Home of Swindon Town Football Club). For anyone that has not driven across it before, it must be quite daunting, because you can literally drive right across the middle, you don’t have to travel around it as you would with a normal roundabout. Basically, if you know where you want to go, you just head straight for it and each time you come to a give way line, you have to give way to traffic coming from your right. It certainly speeds up the flow of traffic.