Stonehenge (20 page)

If only a few were prepared to go so far, there were many who found Michell’s resistance to academic overspecialisation, the dividing of knowledge into ‘ever more isolated categories’, attractive. His underlying thesis is that civilisation moves in what he characterises as Platonic cycles rather than Hobbesian straight lines, and thus beliefs may pass with time from lunacy to heresy to orthodoxy. It has been proved in part by his own work. The sombre note on which he ended
The View over Atlantis
may have been hippie nonsense in 1969, but it seems prophetic now:

the earth is slowly dying of poison, a process whose continuation is inevitably associated with many of the fundamental assumptions of the modern technological civilization. The radical alterations to the social structure necessary to avert the approaching crisis may lie beyond reach of achievement.

In 1977 Michell published
Secrets of the Stones: The Story of Astro-Archaeology
, in which he surveyed the intellectual battle for Stonehenge and other megalithic sites. By then astro-archaeology, a word probably first used in print in 1971, was well advanced on the journey from heresy to orthodoxy. Indeed at this point there was a lively traffic in both directions, for academic archaeology was somewhat in disarray. Improved methods of carbon-dating, developed in the late 1960s, had pushed the chronology of Stonehenge back in time, making Atkinson’s Mycenaean theory untenable. This left what another distinguished archaeologist, Colin Renfrew, described as ‘a void in European prehistoric studies’. If knowledge had not been diffused from the Mediterranean to the primitive people of Wessex, how had Stonehenge happened?
Euan MacKie, head of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Hunterian Museum, caused panic in some quarters by suggesting that maybe the builders had indeed been native astronomer priests and therefore the Iron Age Druids really were their descendants after all. Richard Atkinson, having excavated Silbury Hill and failed to find his sleeping king, underwent a Damascene conversion to Thom’s theory of the megalithic yard, helped him to carry out a survey of Stonehenge and made a public retraction of his earlier views in the
Journal of Astronomy
.

But if archaeology was at something of a crossroads at Stonehenge, it was not at a standstill. In 1978 Atkinson and J. G. Evans reopened a trench of 1954 and found a skeleton buried some time between 2400 and 2140
BC
. It was the young man killed by arrows now known as the Stonehenge Archer. The following year saw another of those coincidences of insight and idiocy that characterised the century. An official of the General Post Office drew a line on a map for a new telephone cable which happened to run across Stonehenge. Not until the GPO’s bright yellow digger was within yards of the Heel Stone, and then entirely by chance, was it spotted and stopped. Mike Pitts, an archaeologist from the Avebury Museum, mounted a ‘rescue dig’ on the site and found evidence that there had once been a pair to the Heel Stone. This was a substantial discovery. It removed one of the principal objections to the idea of the solstice orientation, the fact that the sun does not rise directly over the Heel Stone. This, it now seemed, might be deliberate. The sun was meant to be seen rising between a pair of stones. If indeed, a later archaeological report conceded, the purpose of Stonehenge had been to celebrate the midsummer sunrise, then ‘the positioning of
the two stones here would have achieved that aim’. It was a substantial point to astro-archaeology.

In 1974 the countercultural appeal of the solstice crystallised into the first Stonehenge Free Festival. An outdoor music event based a few hundred yards to the west of the stones, it was soon a major fixture in the alternative summer season. It was relatively small and good-humoured. In the sweltering summer of 1976 the fire brigade played water on the crowd as they danced and the police used their headlights to illuminate the stage. Over the next decade the event got bigger, benefiting from the nearby Glastonbury Festival, which had been held at the solstice since 1971. Some of the stars came over to play to the free festival crowd and Stonehenge underwent another of its periodic transformations, becoming now an icon of rock culture. Black Sabbath’s 1983 album
Born Again
included a track called ‘Stonehenge’ and when they took the album on tour they decided to base their set on the stones. The tour turned out to be memorable, but not in the way the band had hoped. According to the singer Ian Gillan, it was the bassist, Geezer Butler – who had presumably never been to Stonehenge – who told the designers he wanted it ‘life size’. Butler blamed an error in the conversion to metric. Whoever’s fault it was, the band ended up on the road with a set that filled three containers and was too big for any stage. They used as much of it as they could, edging awkwardly between megaliths as they performed. But the group who welded Stonehenge forever to the heavy metal scene was Spinal Tap, stars of Rob Reiner’s eponymous film of 1984 about ‘one of England’s loudest bands’, a mock documentary that became a classic and eerily prefigured the Sabbath’s experience. In a sequence first shot before the
Born Again
tour, Spinal Tap find that owing to
a mix-up between feet and inches the Great Trilithon, which descends on to the stage at the climax of their act, is only 18 inches high. Attempts to contextualise it with a leprechaun dance make matters worse but perhaps the real genius of the scene is the Stonehenge lyric – a masterpiece of haute rock bathos:

Stonehenge, where the demons dwell

Where the banshees live and they do live well

Stonehenge

Where a man is a man and the children dance to the pipes of Pan … etc.

Not everyone saw the funny side. On 1 April 1984 management of the Stonehenge site passed into the hands of a new quango, English Heritage. By now the national mood had darkened. The first half of the 1980s saw inner city riots in London and Liverpool. At Greenham Common in Berkshire, where US cruise missiles were based, a long residential protest began in 1981, organised by women who linked hands to ‘embrace the base’. There were violent conflicts involving the miners at Orgreave in 1984 and the print workers at Wapping in 1986. Laws against squatting were tightened and numbers of young people took to the road in travellers’ convoys. The 1984 Stonehenge Festival was the biggest ever, with as many as a hundred thousand people coming and going. It was peaceful and the sun shone. But it was to be the last time the public were allowed access to the stones for the solstice until the next millennium. By 1985 the travellers’ convoys were attracting a great deal of opposition. Moving round the country through the summer from festival to festival, they were accused of
creating noise and mess, intimidating local people, sponging off social security, damaging land and generally being a nuisance. The chairman of English Heritage, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, came under pressure from local Wiltshire landowners to suppress the festival and he agreed. Injunctions were taken out against eighty-three named individuals. Police in full riot gear with helicopter support set out to stop the festival-goers’ convoy as it headed for Stonehenge. They met it at Cholderton on the Wiltshire border and, after a prolonged stand-off, fighting broke out. The Battle of the Beanfield, as it became known, was little reported. The police had warned journalists to stay away for their own safety. There were four hundred and twenty arrests on charges of obstruction and unlawful assembly. Glyn Daniel noted with satisfaction in
Antiquity
that the Wiltshire police had ‘dealt firmly with the invaders’. However, when those charged appeared in the local magistrates’ court the Earl of Cardigan, secretary of the Marlborough Conservative Association, who had witnessed the events, took a different view. He thought the police had been brutal and the whole scene ‘grotesque’. His fellow landowners were furious, but the Earl made it known that ‘If I see a policeman truncheoning a woman I feel I’m entitled to say it is not a good thing.’ Charges were dropped. Some of the convoy limped off to Lord Cardigan’s land, where he refused the police access to evict them.

If 1985 was, as John Michell wrote, ‘the saddest year in the history of the monument’ to date, those that followed were worse. In 1986 the Public Order Act was passed, its provisions intended, among other things, to give the authorities more control over events like the solstice. Stonehenge ‘freedom marches’ set off from all over the country. The act was controversial in many ways but one of its most peculiar unintended consequences was a Druid revival arguably bigger than anything since Iolo Morganwg’s day. Throughout the century the new Druid orders had moved ever further from the Victorian model of friendly societies with an essentially Christian culture towards a broader spirituality and interest in the occult. The rituals of Robert Reid’s Universal Bond dwelt less on God and increasingly on the elements, human potential and ‘generalised cosmic forces’. Its influences included the ritual magician Aleister Crowley and among its supporters was Gerald Gardner, promulgator of Wicca, or modern witchcraft, the only religion ever to be founded in England.

31. The violent confrontation of June 1985 between police and travellers attempting to get to Stonehenge was little reported. Tim Malyon, who took this picture, was one of the few photographers present. He later agreed with Lord Cardigan that at the Battle of the Beanfield, as it became known, the police had used undue force.

Paganism and earth mysteries infused the new Druidry, but without making it more harmonious than the old. Robert Reid had not been on speaking terms with his father, George, and in 1964 Robert’s own death occasioned another schism when the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids split from the Universal Bond and went off to hold their solstice celebrations at Glastonbury. In 1988 Philip Carr-Gomm refounded the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, which had lapsed in 1975, and it rapidly became the largest of the Druid orders devoted to spiritual matters, while in the mid-1990s women members left to found the Cotswold Order of Druids and the British Druid Order. These were all in the broadest sense counter cultural, opposing or at least offering a critique of the prevailing social order. But after 1986 three new orders were formed that concerned themselves particularly with reclaiming the right to use Stonehenge as a national temple: GOD (the Glastonbury Order of Druids), SOD (the Secular Order of Druids) and LAW (the Loyal Arthurian Warband). ‘Stonehenge … belongs to the world,’ wrote Tim Sebastian, founder of SOD,
‘we who live in this sacred Isle are its custodians and we should be its users, not for trivia, not for political ideology, and not for profit, but for the encouragement of the youth of the world …
STONEHENGE BELONGS TO THE FUTURE.
’

For several years after the Beanfield there was an uneasy and intermittent peace at the solstice, with more trouble breaking out in 1988. English Heritage offered a limited number of tickets, which were accepted by local people, archaeologists and some Druids, while others stuck to the principle of open access. Attempts to control the event became increasingly heavy-handed. By 1988 Amesbury residents were complaining that they had to carry identity cards and that there were roadblocks round the town. Then in 1989 English Heritage clamped down, introducing an annual four-mile exclusion zone secured by razor wire, patrolled by helicopters and enforced with multiple arrests. When authority becomes such a cumbersome Goliath it is easily thrown off balance and it encountered its David in John Rothwell, former soldier, biker and founder of LAW, a revival of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthurian vision of Stonehenge. Rothwell changed his name legally to Arthur Pendragon and acquired the sword from John Boorman’s film
Excalibur
. Dressed in flowing robes and living for months at the site, surviving on handouts, King Arthur’s message to visitors was ‘Don’t pay, walk away.’ Each year he and the Warband attempted to breach the exclusion zone and were regularly arrested under the Public Order Act, which states that any group of more than two people moving in the same direction may be counted as a procession and arrested as a threat to public order. One year King Arthur said it was a picnic, not a procession, and so was arrested for possession of an offensive weapon (Excalibur) instead. In
1995 he performed a citizen’s arrest on the policeman who was trying to arrest him, under ‘Articles 9, 10, 11 and 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights’. It was a campaign of peaceful – and witty – civil resistance that owed as much to Gandhi as to Camelot and it made the authorities look increasingly ridiculous.

As another decade turned, things seemed grim on many fronts, but not all. Archaeology and archaeologists were changing. There had never been total support for Daniel’s dogmatic line. The ageing and increasingly mellow Richard Atkinson had always rather liked the idea of the festival, while the rising generation were more sympathetic to their contemporaries. A young archaeologist, Michael Heaton, wrote to the
Guardian
in 1985 that ‘The damage, if any, done to Stonehenge [by the festival] is piffling in comparison to the damage done by the Ministry of Defence, but because it is done by “hippies” … it is singled out for … hysteria.’ In 1990 Christopher Chip-pindale edited
Who Owns Stonehenge?
, a collection of essays that brought archaeologists, Druids and others together on paper at least. Two years after that a minibus full of young archaeologists entered into the Arthurian spirit by turning up at the exclusion-zone perimeter and announcing their intention of going in singly at fifty-yard intervals (thereby not constituting a procession). They were told they would be arrested anyway. More generally among those who had grown up in the age of ley lines and sacred geometry, even if they did not believe in them, there was a willingness to see Stonehenge – and all ancient monuments – in a broader context as part of a connected landscape that had been resonant to its creators with metaphysical meaning. Another of those cycles of intellectual fashion that interest John Michell was turning,
bringing archaeology back to Stukeley’s point of view, only now it was called phenomenology.