Occasionally we are treated to a news story that is guaranteed to inspire nothing but a raft of totally opposing and polarised views.
The potential upgrading of the A303 is one such tale that will have folk manning one of two barricades.
Either you agree it is high time the wretched road was converted to dual-carriageway throughout its infamous go-slow-zone in the Blackdown Hills, or you despair of the idea that such classic British countryside could be carved asunder forever.
There's no middle ground on which people can concur – unless, that is, Danny Alexander's planned feasibility study to look at improving the A303-A30-A358 corridor miraculously decides that the Treasury will pay for it to pass through a long and hugely expensive tunnel.
That is about as likely as the Government financing the reintroduction of Concorde. Which means every member of the travelling public in the Westcountry and beyond will have to ponder: Should they, or shouldn't they?
For many of us this particular issue isn't like other hot topics of the day, such as hunting, where people simply take a stand one way or the other.
Even the most diehard of country-lovers who has to occasionally travel within this region will know that the single carriageway sections of the A303 are a pain in the neck.
Goodness knows what the average long-distance holidaymaker travelling west with a car-load of irritable kids thinks as they begin to ascend the Blackdown Hills outside of Ilminster. There they are – wafting up over Longlie Common – and suddenly the place lives up to its name.
You're vehicle is going to lie there for a long time. By the time you get to Stopgate you are... well, stopped. At Yarcombe you are yawning – and by the time you pass Upottery you feel like smashing plates. Get all the way to Monkton and you'll be praying.
But you will be travelling very slowly through very beautiful countryside – the sort of exquisite rural homeland that poets like Edward Thomas wrote about fighting for in World War One.
The high escarpments and steep-sided vales with their impossibly perfect patchwork of hedge-lined fields could represent the nation in some far-flung poster campaign designed to lure Anglophile tourists.
Once famous for being the nation's premier dairy-lands – they put the clotted into Devonshire cream – now they're a big lump of symbolic butter waiting for a knife. Because dualling the A303 through the Blackdowns will be like a knife through butter. Easy to achieve, impossible to mend.
We must decide which barricade we'll be manning.