It must be quite a few years since I went to Stonehenge. It looked then virtually as it does now and my memories of it were fairly negative. This time I could see all the usual problems but felt a bit more positive. That's not to say that it needs the road moving, the entrance shifting and making much better with a proper visitor centre and so on. I do like the fact that people are kept off the stones. Having visitors clamber round and over them would destroy them visually and also physically. The chain link fence doesn't do anything for the place except make it look like a defence establishment.
Very noticeable by one part of the car park is the grey-bearded figure calling himself King Arthur Pendragon. He operates outside the car park by standing in an adjacent field but has banners are posters fixed to the wooden fence. ‘King Arthur’ chats to anyone with an inclination to talk to him. I can’t say I had much interest myself as I tend to avoid anyone seriously presenting themselves as characters from history: re-enactment societies are a very different kind of thing. This gent’s message – his campaigning point – was that artefacts had been removed from Stonehenge for research or show elsewhere and they should be returned as they were sacred to the people who used them around the monument.
A landmark site like Stonehenge gets claimed as being ‘sacred’ in one sense or another to all kinds of people – druids, pagans, history geeks, environmentalists, astrologers and several shades of politicians with axes to grind or flint arrowheads to chip. Most of them are numbingly didactic about their beliefs and impose them on the rest of us whenever they can. It does not respect a site like Stonehenge to treat it in this way, nor help to unlock what are still the great secrets of this prehistoric landscape.
