Stonehenge (21 page)

Then, in 1992, a new chief executive officer of English Heritage was appointed, Jocelyn Stevens. Stevens decided to tackle Stonehenge. Physically the site was still a mess. The orange gravel had been taken up in 1978 and turf relaid, but at the same time a permanent fence was erected to prevent the public from going in among the stones. Meanwhile the roads were ever more intrusive, the visitor centre was run down and the solstice an annual embarrassment. Intellectually things were not much better. Not everybody had been as scrupulous as Gowland about keeping notes. Atkinson and Piggott had not collated their findings with the earlier work and Atkinson’s long-promised publication had yet to appear. The archaeological records were scattered and no attempt had been made to coordinate the findings made since the site became public property. Stevens initiated the assembly of a full archive and of the collaborative project that became
Stonehenge in Its Landscape: Twentieth-century Excavations
, by Rosamund Cleal and others. Its appearance in 1995 was another great advance in the understanding of Stonehenge and it incorporated all that was known to date, but it was more than a synthesis of past research. It included the latest attempt to establish an exact chronology. This was done using carbon-dating techniques and probability theory combined in OxCal, a software program developed at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. The results were dramatic. They set Stonehenge back in time another thousand years. The implications were as if, Mike Pitts wrote, ‘we picked up Europe’s most daring Gothic cathedral and dropped it into the Dark Ages’. The other great discovery that Cleal and her co-authors
made was as startling in its way, if dismaying. Richard Atkinson, who had never made any of his research material available to the project, died just as the book was being completed. When his executors handed over his papers, it was found that although they included notebooks containing ‘hundreds of measurements’, it was also the case that, as
Stonehenge in Its Landscape
records with chilling understatement, ‘as far as could be ascertained there are no details of what they are, or from where or how they had been calculated’. In other words, the information for which archaeology had waited for nearly half a century was, when it came, useless.
Stonehenge in Its Landscape
, however, was a triumph of scholarship and gave fresh impetus to Stonehenge studies. No more digging was done, but archaeology had been learning throughout the century to make increasing use of less invasive methods, such as photography, field walking, geophysical surveying and caesium gradiometers. There were also ‘finds’ to be made far from Salisbury Plain. One of the skeletons Hawley had sent to the Royal College of Surgeons, which was thought to have been destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, turned up unscathed in the Natural History Museum, where it was rediscovered by Mike Pitts and given a radiocarbon date of about
AD
150.

But as more questions were being answered about its past, the future of Stonehenge continued unresolved. Jocelyn Stevens found that the physical state of the monument was much more difficult to improve. In 1984 the Stonehenge Study Group had been set up to consider possible options and in 1986 Stonehenge became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. By 1991 it was attracting 615,000 visitors a year, but still they could do no more than park in the ugly car park, look
at the stones across the fence and tramp round the dreary visitor centre. The problem was the roads. The A344 runs just yards from the stones down to a dangerous junction with the A303, the main route to the south-west of England, which is always busy and in summer often jammed. It was generally agreed that for the sake of Stonehenge the roads needed to be moved, closed or buried in tunnels to minimise their impact. For the sake of local people and the national transport system, the A303 needed to be doubled in size, while for everyone’s sake the visitor centre ought to be improved.

Throughout the 1990s proposals were put forward for a new centre at various places to the north and the east. The site moved so often that Lord St John of Fawsley, who had been Minister for the Arts, suggested to the House of Lords that the best design would be a wigwam. There were proposals for the diversion of the A303 or its burial in a tunnel. Conferences were held, surveys commissioned and many petitions were signed. But the interests of archaeology, tourism, local residents and the Department of Transport proved impossible to reconcile. In 1997, with the election of a Labour government, the House of Lords took the opportunity to go over the whole question and appeal to the new administration to resolve the situation. Wayland Kennet, chairman of the Avebury Society, spoke in favour of a long, bored tunnel for the A303 and a visitor centre at Countess to the east. Others felt that the tunnel, however long, with its necessary ventilation shafts and large entrance ways, would be intrusive, while for many the cost was prohibitive. In April 1999 the government rose to the Lords’ challenge and the Stonehenge Master Plan was launched by English Heritage as ‘a means of rescuing the stones and the 451 scheduled monuments that surround them’.

An attempt to involve all the interested parties, including the National Trust, the local council, the Highways Agency and others, it was born of an age when attitudes to the public sector were changing again, with increasing emphasis on public–private partnerships and business models for management. Accordingly, the first proposal of the Master Plan was to design a logo – to be registered as a trademark. The next stage was to be ‘an international marketing campaign to find a commercial operator to design, develop and run a new visitor centre’. In the event no such operator emerged. UNESCO was critical but powerless and, as the century neared its end, confusion and acrimony reigned. At last, in December 1999, a final draft of the Stonehenge Plan was presented to Chris Smith, then Secretary of State at the Department of the Environment. It recognised that the World Heritage Site had to be treated as a whole, rather than merely focusing on the monument itself, and as such it received a wide welcome. Less welcome, in many quarters, was the proposal to solve the A303 problem by doubling the size of the road and burying it in twin ‘cut and cover’ tunnels past the monument.

On the question of the solstice, the last decade of the century also saw progress, eventually. The campaign for free access had been unremitting and the annual protests had become associated with other campaigns, notably those against road building, which saw young – and some not so young – protesters willing to live in trees or holes in the ground to try and prevent, physically, the building of the Newbury Bypass in Berkshire and the M3 at Twyford Down in Hampshire, where the new motorway was set to destroy part of a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest. King Arthur and LAW were active at Newbury, getting themselves
arrested as often as possible in order to overload the justice system. By now Stonehenge had become an internationally recognised symbol of protest inspiring the artist and antinuclear campaigner Adam Horowitz to start work on his
Stonefridge
in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A circle of old refrigerators, surrounding an inner group of refrigerator trilithons, it is aligned on the Los Alamos National Laboratories. Back in Britain in 1994, in another attempt to deal with mass protests, the Criminal Justice Act was passed, creating an offence of ‘trespassory assembly’, which allowed the police to arrest groups of twenty or more if ‘serious disruption to the life of the community’ was likely to ensue.

On the tenth anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, 1 June 1995, there was a Free Stonehenge demonstration at the monument. The police cautioned the crowd, most of whom dispersed, except for two, Margaret Jones and Richard Lloyd, who decided to ‘put their rights to the test’ and were duly arrested. Arthur and his Warband promptly went to London and chained up the front door of English Heritage’s headquarters. Then, while the machinery of the law ground on, there was a gradual easing in relations. Arthur proposed a meeting – at a round table, naturally – to bring English Heritage, the National Trust, police, local people, councillors and assorted Druids together. Those who made the first tentative overtures from both sides felt obliged to be secretive. The English Heritage archaeologists feared for their jobs and the various protest groups for their credibility. Finally an official meeting was held in 1996, with ‘numerous heated exchanges, plus the occasional walk-out for dramatic effect’, but two years later things had improved sufficiently for the authorities to allow some access on the same ticket basis as before. This
caused more rifts among the Druids, some of whom felt that limited access was better than none, while others stuck to the principle of free entry for all.

Finally, in 1999, the case of the Stonehenge Two reached the House of Lords. The Lords overturned the conviction, upheld the protesters’ right to demonstrate and criticised the Criminal Justice Act, pointing out that it would in theory mean that ‘two friends who meet in the street and stop to talk are committing a trespass … and so too a group of members of the Salvation Army singing hymns’. As the Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine, put it in his verdict, this was ‘an issue of fundamental constitutional importance … the public highway is a public place which the public may enjoy for any reasonable purpose’. That year the perimeter fence was broken again but it was the last violent solstice. From 2000 onwards, English Heritage would be obliged to arrange open access. That public, for whose ownership of Stonehenge the early twentieth century had campaigned, would finally regain the right of free entry to the stones themselves for one day a year.

Elsewhere the wheels of intellectual orthodoxy kept on turning, until the astronomical heresy arrived inside the gates of the establishment. A consensus was gradually emerging among archaeologists that even if not all the precise alignments insisted on by Hoyle and Hawkins could be justified, there was more than a merely general or accidental coincidence between megalithic monuments and astronomical positions. In particular Thom’s theory that foresights, markers some distance from individual monuments, were used to establish alignments was widely accepted. In 1990 the Royal Mail issued a set of stamps to celebrate the history of astronomy which featured Stonehenge on the 37p design
under the phases of the moon and in 1999 Clive Ruggles of Leicester University was appointed the world’s first professor of astro-archaeology. The transformation of Edwardian lunacy into twenty-first-century science was complete, if not universally popular. ‘Stonehenge,’ Ruggles noted, ‘continues to be the very icon of archaeo-astronomy … while astronomy continues to be the very bane of many archaeologists’ existence.’ It was, however, amid relative peace and harmony that preparations got under way for the new century and to mark it a Welsh group, Menter Preseli, successfully applied for a £100,000 Lottery Millennium Festival grant to take a blue-stone from the Preseli Hills to Salisbury Plain, ‘using only information available at the time Stonehenge was built’.

31. The astronomical interpretation became ever more widely accepted and in 1990 Stonehenge was included in a set of Royal Mail stamps celebrating astronomy.

‘An embarrassing, abominable, inexcusable mess…’

Mike Pitts, Editor,
British Archaeology

This chapter might begin exactly the same as the last, for as another new century dawned it was once again evident that something, or rather something else, had to be done about Stonehenge. Public ownership, if it had not failed, had not succeeded as its supporters had hoped, and if the Druids and the solstice-goers had been placated for the moment, nobody else had. In January 2000 a letter to
The Times
from the British Archaeological Trust, the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England, Friends of the Earth, Save Our Sacred Sites and others appealed to UNESCO to put Stonehenge on its list of ‘monuments at risk’. They argued that not only was the present situation untenable, but the proposed construction of shallow cut and cover tunnels across the World Heritage Site, and the scarring, noise, light and other pollution that would result from them, would cause irreparable damage. English Heritage replied a few days later that a longer tunnel, bored at a deeper level, was too expensive and would create problems of its own. An element of compromise, they felt, was essential but there was no meeting of minds, only an increasingly ill-tempered stalemate.

Meanwhile the Menter Preseli group were working on their millennium project to transport a stone from Wales to Wiltshire by Stone Age means. This turned out to be more difficult than expected. Even after Health and Safety inspectors had banned authentic Neolithic costumes and insisted on gloves, the volunteers found the eight-foot megalith almost impossible to move and the press coverage went from enthusiastic to satirical. ‘Rock won’t roll’,
The Times
chortled. By June the team had got as far as the sea, but having managed to get the stone going the next problem, inevitably, was stopping it. As it was being floated across the Bristol Channel on a raft between two ‘Stone Age’ boats, it slipped and sank to the bottom. A muffled titter went round the country. Undaunted, the team recovered their megalith and the project struggled on into the summer, by which time the use of divers, cranes, tug boats and nylon netting had thoroughly undermined any claim to authenticity. Eventually it was the insurers who called a halt. Two things, however, had been proved, one obvious and one less so. The first was that people in the Stone Age were much more adept at moving stones than they were over four thousand years later, and the second was that the idea of operating ‘using only information available at the time Stonehenge was built’ was intellectually as well as practically flawed. It is impossible to know with certainty what was known in the past, only that certain things were not known.