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’.
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