Monumental folly

The astonishing has happened at Stonehenge. Some prehistoric force has driven ministers to make a decision. It is to spend half a billion pounds burying the adjacent A303 in a tunnel, to bring ‘tranquillity’ to the ancient place. The result has been a predictable outcry from protestors. The television historian Dan Snow has compared the Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, with Isis in Palmyra: ‘vandals and zealots who destroy ancient artefacts’. Stonehenge drives men mad.

The stones have for a quarter of a century been as impregnable to change as they have always been to interpretation. Whitehall has been unable to decide what to do with a single-carriageway road which runs 200 metres from the stones and causes hour-long traffic jams in summer. The two-mile tunnel is supposedly a compromise, between local activists who want a five-kilometre tunnel and those who just want improvements to the existing road.

In her recent history of Stonehenge, Rosemary Hill makes the point that ‘each century rebuilds the stones in its own image, by turns romantic, scientific, counter-cultural’. Such ancestral relics rightly enjoy peculiar protection. But the idea of Stonehenge as tranquil is novel. Tranquillity would never have been its essence. The stones have fallen, risen, been ignored, propped up with cement and hijacked by every loony in the land.

Their present image owes much to the cults for which they have become a magnet, the druids, wicker men, warlocks, ley lines, UFO-watchers and hippies who periodically, often entertainingly, incorporate them into their fantasies. The druid ‘King Arthur’ Pendragon is currently demanding free parking for his motorbike, citing some prehistoric European convention on human rights against having to ‘pay to pray’.

With 1.3 million visitors a year, the stones have become English Heritage’s most successful and lucrative attraction.