Stonehenge (22 page)

The first, perhaps the only, good news for Stonehenge in 2000 came with the summer solstice, for which English Heritage now felt obliged to provide ‘managed open access’. If it did so with lightly gritted teeth, the event was nevertheless a great success, going off without trouble, as it has done ever
since. It attracted a crowd of about six thousand that year, rising to about thirty thousand by 2007. Visitors for the rest of the year, however, still faced a disappointing experience. The average time spent at Stonehenge is now a mere twenty minutes and for most tour operators it is no more than a ‘toilet stop’ between London and Bath. Tourism received a further blow early in 2001, when Brian Edwards of the University of the West of England gave his view to the newspapers that the alterations to Stonehenge had been so extensive that it was now an entirely modern monument ‘created by the heritage industry’ and merely foisted on unsuspecting tourists as prehistoric. English Heritage promised a new guidebook, which duly appeared in 2005, and does make reference to the twentieth-century restorations.

All this time the much-criticised Stonehenge Plan was still in place. Its solution to the visitor centre problem was to situate it at Countess, just outside the eastern edge of the World Heritage Site. By July, however, it was apparent that the great hoped-for commercial opportunity to manage it as a complex of shops and restaurants had failed to materialise and so English Heritage took matters into its own hands and bought the land. The following April, 2001, brought the announcement that Denton Corker Marshall, a firm of Australian architects, had won the contract to design the new centre. Their proposal for a building in a nest of concentric curves, set into the landscape with only a series of slender white ribs visible through the covering turf, looked elegant and imaginative, but it could not by itself provide a solution. Well might ICOMOS – the International Council on Monuments and Sites, which advises UNESCO – appeal to the British government for ‘joined-up thinking’. It urged consideration to be given equally to the three possible solutions to the road problem available since the 1990s: the 2-kilometre cut and cover tunnel, a 2-kilometre bored tunnel and a 4-kilometre bored tunnel. The cut and cover option was the most damaging to the archaeology of the site and the 4-kilometre tunnel the most expensive. In December 2002 the Department of Transport announced plans for 2.1-kilometre bored tunnel. This was supported by English Heritage but questioned or opposed by many other groups and individuals.

33. The government announcement in December 2007 that it would not fund the latest proposals for a road tunnel under Stonehenge made the rest of the English Heritage management plan for a new visitor centre unworkable. This provoked various reactions. Louis Hellman’s Martians, who appeared in the
Architects’ Journal
, summed up one of the most common.

Prominent among them was the newly formed Stonehenge Alliance, chaired by Wayland Young (Lord Kennet), President of the Avebury Society. The Alliance argued that the necessary excavations would be the largest man-made interventions ever on Salisbury Plain. They would include permanently floodlit tunnel entrances too close to the stones and their effects would be irreversible. The National Trust, which had been acquiring more land around the central site from time to time since its initial purchase and now owned nearly 2,000 acres, began to voice reservations. The Council for British Archaeology went so far as to lodge a formal complaint. In February 2004 a public inquiry into the A303 proposals opened in Salisbury and in August English Heritage applied for planning permission for its visitor centre. The next summer the government announced the outcome of the public inquiry, which was that, despite evidence given by conservationists and others, the short bored tunnel was the best option. It added, however, that since costs had risen during the time the matter had been debated, there was to be a review of all the possible options to assess whether the tunnel represented value for money. That same month Salisbury District Council turned down English Heritage’s plans
for the visitor centre. Another of those expensive diminishing circles of argument that have characterised the modern mismanagement of Stonehenge was complete.

In January 2006 the Highways Agency announced a public consultation on five options. It was to be a process that demonstrated the truth of Winston Churchill’s remark that ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ Some consideration was given to all proposed solutions, beyond the five to be assessed in detail, whether they came from public bodies or private individuals, leaving, as the report’s authors put it with, perhaps, a wan attempt at humour, ‘no stone unturned’. Even the suggestion that a combined solution to the road versus heritage problem might be to turn Stonehenge itself into a giant traffic roundabout was put on the record. The opinions of local people, archaeologists, the army, the National Trust, the Society of Antiquaries and many others more or less expert were taken into account. In the century since Sir Edmund Antrobus put up the first fence, the number and nature of the interested parties had changed and multiplied beyond recognition. Not only was the archaeology of Stonehenge better understood, it was understood as part of a wider prehistoric landscape that should be preserved and reconnected. Meanwhile the ecological concerns that had been the province of specialists and hippies in the 1960s were now universally respected. All this was to the good, but it made decisions difficult. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Britain’s largest charity, mobilised its members in defence of the skylarks, corn buntings, lapwings and barn owls which would be disturbed by any diversion of the existing road to the north or the south. Beyond the
World Heritage Site itself there was now also, to the north, the Salisbury Plain Area of Conservation, the Special Protection Area and a Site of Special Scientific Interest, ‘the largest known expanse of unimproved chalk downland in Europe’, which was home to, among others, the rare Desmoulin whorl snail and many water voles. The report also included a section headed ‘Effects on Bats’. Pitted against this complex and delicate world of natural and archaeological rarities was the unquestioned need to improve the traffic flow on the A303.

Overall the consultation revealed a discrepancy between the views of local people, who were mostly concerned with relieving traffic congestion and faintly resentful of the interference of an ‘elite’ of outsiders, and the other respondents. Among the latter there were some surprising bedfellows, with the Royal Automobile Club and the Alliance of Pagan and Druid Communities finding themselves in close agreement. In the end there was a 58 per cent majority in favour of the existing scheme, the shorter 2.1-kilometre bored tunnel. Among the dissenters, however, who found the consultation process limited and flawed, were some formidable opponents. They included the National Trust, without whose agreement it was hard to see how any plan could proceed, for the Trust holds its land inalienably, the Royal Archaeological Institute, the Stonehenge Alliance, Friends of the Earth and ICOMOS. In June 2006, just in time for the solstice and shortly before the consultation findings were announced, the National Trust issued a press release that was also a rallying cry. It explained that it had for more than seventy years ‘been acquiring parts of the ancient ceremonial landscape integral to Stonehenge for the specific purpose of reuniting the Stones with this landscape’. ‘None of the options under the
Minister’s consideration’, it went on, ‘is worthy of this site, and thus the threat to Stonehenge is now urgent, serious and imminent.’ ICOMOS and the Council for British Archaeology issued a joint statement of support.

The next month an increasingly beleaguered English Heritage, caught between the conservation interests it was supposed to serve and the government that funded it, applied again to Salisbury District Council for planning permission for Denton Corker Marshall’s visitor centre. The council made permission conditional on government approval for the road scheme, without which, it was felt, the centre could not be expected to function. At this point the Secretary of State called the application in and a second Stonehenge public inquiry opened on 5 December 2006. A year and a day later the government announced that the tunnel proposal was too expensive and the entire scheme, tunnels, visitor centre and all, was dropped. English Heritage pronounced itself ‘very disappointed’. The Stonehenge Alliance, the National Trust, Friends of the Earth and many others were relieved. To date, the MP for Salisbury Robert Key estimates, twenty-five million pounds have been spent on proposals, consultations and inquiries. In 2008 the prospect of the 2012 London Olympics is concentrating official minds on the need to get something at least respectable in place for the anticipated influx of tourists and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and the Department of Transport have set up a steering group. There are no plans for rerouting the roads or building a new visitor centre at this stage, but the Management Plan is being revised with a view to finding a location for a temporary visitor centre at one of more than twenty possible sites under consideration. Meanwhile among the opponents
of the last scheme there has emerged a degree of consensus for a gradualist approach, for small measures, beginning with the grassing over of the A344, which might improve matters without the need for intervention on any great or irreversible scale and without prejudicing later decisions. Since such measures also have the advantage of being cheap, there is a possibility that some of them may be implemented in the not too distant future. There are those who believe and hope that the next orthodoxy to be challenged at Stonehenge will be the need always and everywhere to improve traffic flow and that the stones may prove mightier than the motor car.

In the twentieth century Stonehenge was chiefly, for good and ill, in the hands of archaeologists. In the twenty-first it has been at the mercy of administration and management. But the archaeologists have not been idle. The last seven and a half years, while they have seen almost no excavations at the site itself, have brought a number of important discoveries. Until 2002 the Stonehenge Archer was the only shadowy human figure in the prehistoric landscape. In May of that year he gained a companion of a sort when a team from Wessex Archaeology, who were digging at Amesbury, on the other side of the River Avon from Stonehenge, uncovered another, more or less contemporary grave. This, however, was a very different burial. The Amesbury Archer, as he has come to be known, was a man aged between thirty-five and forty-five, who was buried not only with arrows but with a rich array of grave goods, including five Beaker pots and two hair ornaments which are the earliest gold objects ever found in Britain. There were copper knives from France and Spain and an object that may have been an anvil, suggesting that the ‘Archer’ was perhaps a master craftsman, a smith from
the earliest age of metal-smithing. He was also, as analysis of his teeth demonstrated, a native of the Alps, almost certainly Swiss.

He was not, as the press hoped, the king of Stonehenge. He lived too late for that and his burial across the water may suggest that those who buried him, while they treated him with great respect, saw him as a stranger to the culture of the monument. Nevertheless his grave and its contents have added a great treasure to the Salisbury Museum and another plank to the argument of those who believe in a more sophisticated and cosmopolitan prehistoric world than the archaeologists of the last century were inclined to allow. A year later the horizon became positively crowded with the arrival of the seven ‘Boscombe Bowmen’, whose shared grave was found at Boscombe about four miles from Stonehenge. The Bowmen were the contemporaries of the two archers and their grave included eight Beaker pots, the largest number ever found in a single grave. They were in fact three men, a teenage boy and three children, one of whom had been cremated. The skeletons of the teenager and two of the men had apparently been buried elsewhere before and brought, in part at least, for reburial at Boscombe. None of the men was native to the Stonehenge area. They may have been Welsh, which might be taken to reinforce the links between Salisbury Plain and the Preseli Hills. But they might also have come from Brittany, which may have been, Aubrey Burl has suggested, an important influence on Stonehenge, or from Portugal.

Wherever they came from, Stonehenge in its completed or at least its final form would have been a century old when they saw it. Such, at least, is the finding of the most recent research into the monument itself, which has, yet again,
pushed the date back in time and compressed the period over which the several stone phases must have occurred. The work is part of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, launched in 2003 and led by Professor Mike Parker Pearson of Sheffield University, at the head of ‘probably the strongest archaeological team ever assembled’, along with anthropologists and the astro-archaeologist Clive Ruggles. Their work is ‘focused not just on the monument, but on its landscape, its hinterland and the monuments within it’ and the findings to date have been remarkable. At Stonehenge work has consisted largely of a reassessment of the conflicting evidence of the twentieth-century digs in an attempt to find a more secure date for the sarsens. Yet again William Gowland’s records have proved valuable, while Richard Atkinson’s were found wanting. Comparison of their notes with photographs of the excavations have enabled Parker Pearson and his colleagues to resolve apparent contradictions which seemed at one point to suggest that the outer ring was raised before the Great Trilithon, something which logic would suggest was unlikely. In fact what Atkinson took to be the erection ramp for stone 56 and on which his dating was based appears to be a later, unrelated feature. Dismissing the evidence derived from it leaves just two reliable dates for the sarsen circle and these result in a date range of 2580–2470
BC
. This not only makes the sarsen stage of Stonehenge older than previously thought, it has implications for its relationship to other monuments.