Stonehenge Alliance: press statement 23 January 2006

Last updated: 23 January 2006

Interim Position Statement by

The announcement of options for the A303 Improvement at Stonehenge is disappointing. The reviewers have come up with five options, four of which take us back more than a decade and indicate that the Government?s priority at Stonehenge continues to be a road improvement that would leave the archaeological landscape of the World Heritage Site severely damaged for ever.

These four options are similar to proposals thrown out following wide consultation in the early 1990s because of the damaging impact they would have on the Stonehenge landscape. The Stonehenge Alliance rejects all four of them.

The fifth option, termed a "partial solution", is also unacceptable to us, since the scheme of which it is a part is not set out in full. As it stands, the partial solution would confine options for improving the setting of the WHS to an on-line solution for the A303 and we have already opposed the Published Scheme with a 2.1km bored tunnel at Public Inquiry. We would like to know what the long-term intention is for dealing with the A303 on-line.

As a signatory of the World Heritage Convention, the UK Government undertook to protect and preserve the whole of the World Heritage Site, not just the central area close to the Stones. A sustainable solution is needed for the roads at Stonehenge that would prioritise the heritage landscape, rather than the problems of traffic congestion.

Should that prove to be too expensive at the present time, an interim road solution should be found that would allow some improvement to the setting of Stonehenge and the World Heritage Site, without compromising investigation of various options to reach a satisfactory solution in the longer term.

The Alliance considers that it would be better to do nothing for the time being than to implement the wrong road scheme at Stonehenge. But we hope that the Government will be persuaded to come clean on its partial solution and to examine other, more appropriate, alternatives than those put forward in the present options review.

The Stonehenge Alliance is a group of archaeological and environmental organisations formed to press for protection of the entire Stonehenge WHS from damaging transport proposals. We jointly opposed the A303 Stonehenge Improvement scheme, including a 2.1km bored tunnel, at the Public Inquiry in 2004.

THE STONEHENGE ALLIANCE IS SUPPORTED BY:
Ancient Sacred Landscape Network; CPRE, Friends of the Earth, RESCUE: The British Archaeological Trust, The Pagan Federation, and Transport 2000