Stonehenge

by Adam Nicolson

Originally printed in The Telegraph, June 2006, and reprinted here by kind permission of the author.

Picture by Ian Britton from FreeFoto.com

It won't be long now before the summer solstice, like its own maniacal birthday party, strikes Stonehenge. Thousands of archaeo-druids, neo-hippies and all the others who think of the Stones as theirs will congregate for the mass-communing with the climax of the year. I wouldn't dream of being there myself. But you don't have to be. Choose almost any other early summer morning and you will find that you have the most potent landscape in England entirely to yourself.

At first light, the larks are already up and singing for every minute of their lives. Their song is the only life there is. Shadows still hang in the woods and in this half-light, the slight hills and slight valleys around Stonehenge look as unworldly as anywhere in England. It is wide, long-limbed country, not constrained or delicate, but drawn with a long steady pencil. It is a place of slightness and subtlety, full, as Edward Thomas once described them, of those 'long straight lines in which a curve is always latent...'

In a summer dawn, it is a place of deep stillness. The A303 will in the course of the long day carry 32,000 vehicles straight past the stones. But now, before that day begins, if you find yourself a mile or so upwind of the road, what trucks there are float past like boats, noiseless mobile boxes from another world. Hardy's most wonderful sentence from Tess of the d'Urbervilles can still be felt to be true. As the murderer Tess and her lover Angel Clare run from the police across the empty chalk landscape, they find themselves at Stonehenge in the very last moments of the night, when, as Hardy said, 'The whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation which is usual just before day.' The deep grandeur of this place which Hardy's words summon is still there in this landscape, at least before the traffic gets going. It broods and waits. You might almost think that the grandeur itself is simply waiting, in its reserved and taciturn way, for the traffic to leave so that it can resume its rightful place around the stones.

A sense of length in the country—slow changes, a feeling of distance and of presence—is at the heart of the Stonehenge landscape. It is not a plain, because everywhere the ground surface shifts and modulates but it is nowhere sharp. Its essential geometry embodies continuity and connectedness, what the archaeologists call 'intervisibility', a visual net thrown across it, from ridge to ridge, and into the shallow bowls between those ridges. It is a place that invites you in, makes you want to walk across it, to know it through the soles of your feet, not as a form of conquest, but as a way of gaining knowledge and intimacy.

All around Stonehenge, on the slow lifting ridges which ring the horizon from the stones, Bronze Age round barrows are arranged on the skylines. They have a clear and deliberate relationship with the great central monument, connected by sightlines to the stones and each other, but in a subsidiary relationship to the stone circle. They are the rim and the stones the hub. The whole landscape is shaped by a feeling for the beauty and purity of that circularity. The space of the intervening ground is an essential part of the meaning here, a kind of connected distance, like the gravitational space between a star and its orbiting planets.

That space is not busy. It is in fact virtually clear of structures, but once this arrangement is grasped—the central navel of the stones surrounded by the ring of Bronze Age dead—nothing becomes more charged. It is like the central emptiness in a cathedral nave, and like a cathedral its meaning unfolds as you walk through its enormous, silent, scarcely articulate but subtly organised geometries. You understand its connections. The distant ring of Stonehenge itself changes as you move, in the way that the cooling towers of a power station revolve around each other as you pass them. As the light and clouds fall on the stones, they suddenly glow or nearly disappear, seem buried in the landscape or become strangely dominant despite their distance. This place of the dead is animated by your own living presence within it.

But this landscape is not merely aesthetic, designed to look beautiful or charming. This is a giant theatre of the connections between your own body, your physical presence in the world, the fact of death and the structure of the universe, the movements of sun and moon, the way in which things revolve. These great funerary monuments are placed with precision and grace, on the very lines where earth and universe, at the rising and setting of sun and moon, are seen to connect.

More than anywhere else I know, the Stonehenge landscape addresses that connection with a beauty and directness which make our own efforts at landscape art or memorials seem clumsy and scarcely articulate. If you walk over to one of those groups of barrows, the connection seems immediate. On the barrows themselves,

the ground has not been ploughed for the last 4,000 years and the cows are not admitted to graze there. As a result, a shaggy turf grows on the mounds and in the ditches and banks that surround them. There you will find the plants that have been ploughed and improved away from the rest of the landscape: the vetches, the knapweed, the tall spires of Jacob's Ladder and the cowslips, now going to seed. In the grassland beside them, much of which the National Trust is now restoring after years under arable, I did find a rare and wonderful clump of Meadow Saxifrage, whose white wide-petaled flowers look like something that belongs more in an Alpine meadow than in the lowlands of England. But that is simply a measure of how much of this downland turf has been lost. Only 4% remains, most of it in the possession of the army on Salisbury Plain to the north of here. It will certainly take many decades for anything resembling the springy, matted carpet of the downland turf, which used to respond to your step like a sprung dance floor, to come back. The rock-rose, the harebells, the cranesbills and the wonderful deep purple milkwort—all the downland flowers described here up until the deep ploughing of the 40s and 50s—will only slowly return from the sanctuaries into which they have been driven.

Like the fact of sheep-nibbled turf, which requires generations of sheep to make and keep it what it is, this place is not about wildness but the presence of human culture for thousands of years, a place both figuratively and literally drenched in buried meanings. Nowhere in the world is there a greater density of ancient monuments. In the 52 square miles of the World Heritage Site surrounding Stonehenge there are at least a thousand ancient structures. Almost incredibly, not all of it has been fieldwalked by archaeologists, but from those parts which have been examined, 102,000 pieces of worked flint have been recovered from the surface. Hundreds of the Bronze Age round barrows have yet to be looked into. Those which have been dug have yielded layer on layer of suggestive mystery: battle axes made of quartz dolerite from the Whin Sill over which Hadrian's Wall runs in Northumberland; others from hard Cornish stones; jewellery made from Irish gold; a decorated sceptre; a whistle made from the leg bone of a swan; a bronze standard; vases from Brittany; glass beads that may or may not have come from Egypt; bodies within the barrows laid on a bed of moss and yew. There is nothing parochial here. It is a landscape of deliberately organised global and cosmic meanings. It is one of the heartlands of the world, and one which remains stiff with an almost unapproachable strangeness.

In one barrow, three men said to be of fine physique, are laid out with their heads towards the centre of the barrow, their bodies doubled up and their six fore-arms missing. Over the top of them were laid the bodies of seven children. In another, a man buried about 4,500 years ago had 3 copper knives with him, the chemical signature of the copper revealing that it was mined in Spain. The trace elements in the enamel of the man's teeth show that he lived a good part of his life in the Alps. The same technique has revealed another family of 3 men and three children who spent their lives in south-west Wales, precisely the part of the world from which the famous Blue stones of the Stonehenge circle originally came.

Nor is the strangeness the preserve off the very distant past. Down in the reedy margins of the Avon, there is the grave of a woman buried there in about AD 600, face-down in the bog mud, her left hand on her stomach, her right hand stretched out above her and her body covered with 18 oak planks. At about the same time, a man was decapitated and buried at the stones themselves, struck with a sword or an axe from behind and to the right. The footings for a gallows were found nearby. For the Saxons, this was a site of execution and the name Stonehenge, which they gave us for this monument, may reflect that: the Stone Hanging Place, the Stone Gallows.

These are the central points about the Stonehenge landscape: it is thick with more meanings than we have any idea of; the stones themselves are nearly meaningless without the land and hundreds of structures around them; connectedness is of its essence; our understanding what it all means has scarcely begun; nowhere in the world is more precious as a reservoir of buried meaning.

That is the background against which to understand a decision that will probably be taken within the next few weeks. Everyone knows that the 1967 car park, pedestrian tunnel, fences and general mess next to Stonehenge itself is a national disgrace. Everyone who has ever been there also knows how invasive and destructive of atmosphere the booming A303 and the nearer but slightly less busy A344 both are. The really shocking aspect of the Stonehenge landscape as it stands is the gaping difference between Neolithic and Bronze Age understanding of the meanings a place which can embody, its power and delicacy, and our own cramped, bodged, ugly and hostile additions to it.

On that, the world is agreed. What is not agreed is what to do about it. The ideal solution is obvious enough: remove the roads, remove the fences, withdraw the visitor centre paraphernalia and car parks to a point at which they don't impinge on the landscape itself. That is the only task—to restore the grandeur which is implicit in this place by doing something here which is concordant with its greatness.

That is the prize, but what is the solution? The front-runner, which is backed by the Highways Agency and English Heritage, will be as great and shameful a disaster as anything that now exists. Their proposal is to put the A303 in a tunnel 1.3 miles long for the short stretch it is visible from Stonehenge itself. For the rest of its passage through the Stonehenge Landscape World Heritage Site, the road will be turned into one and a half miles of fast, wide, modern dual carriageway in deep cuttings, with large-scale multi-level roundabouts at each end. The portals to the tunnel at both ends will be bang next two of the most important sets of ancient skyline long barrows and round barrows. The cuttings will sever the connections in the landscape on which the meaning of Stonehenge depends. In addition, a new road will be built through the northern part of the World Heritage Site to carry a 'land-train' in which visitors to Stonehenge will be ferried to and from the now-distant car park and visitor centre.

Others are advocating a slightly longer tunnel 1.8 miles long but are apparently prepared to see as much as a mile of deep dual carriageway cutting through the World Heritage Site. It is of course a question of money. English Heritage's short tunnel will cost £510 million and this longer tunnel £697 million. But for anyone who knows anything about Stonehenge and its landscape, neither is good enough. The only solution that anyone will be proud of in the future, which won't look like a cheapskate, destructive and weak-minded compromise, is to drive a 2.8 mile long tunnel under the whole site, from one side to another. There are some technical problems to do with ventilation and soggy chalk but they are not insuperable. The cost of that longer tunnel is £1,070 million, about the price the Dome. The difference between a good scheme and a bad is about £500 million, what the government spends on an average weekday morning before 11 o'clock.

One of the problems is that the decision about the road is in the hands of the Ministry of Transport, which makes decisions according to transport criteria. But this is far too important to be left in the hands of the road-makers. It looks as if we are sleepwalking towards a decision which will make Twyford Down look like someone putting up a bit of decking in their front garden.

So this is the choice: cheaper half-measure and the permanent degradation of the most important landscape we have; or spend the money and create something that doesn't rupture our relationship with the past but enhances it and in some ways restores it. If this country can't afford to do right by Stonehenge, what on earth can it do?