Stonehenge Stone Circle News and Information

Calls for “Free Stonehenge” are legion, usually citing that the donor, Sir Cecil Chubb, stipulated that “the public shall have free access to the premises”. It’s a bit academic as his covenants are no longer enforceable but let’s pretend they are and consider if the campaigners have a moral case at least. Their wish for “free access” can mean one or both of the following:

1. Access for free
In other words, free of charge. But look what the Deed actually says: “the public shall have free access to the premises on the payment of such reasonable sum per head not exceeding one shilling for each visit.” So it wasn’t access for free, it was access for payment, up to a maximum of 1 shilling – at a time when the average weekly wage was 30 shillings. Nowadays, a thirtieth of average weekly earnings is about £16. People can…

All over the place really. On my first summer solstice visit in 1971 it was little more than a gaggle of people sleeping in the ditch around the stones. These two photos from Julian Richards’ excellent collection published by English Heritage show where it went from there: first immediately outside the earthwork to the south-west, so that it faced the rising sun on June 21; then across the road into what we call the Cursus field, National Trust land between Byway 12 and the Fargo Plantation. At its greatest extent it did run onto the Cursus itself (thanks for the comment, Francis Stoner), and spread eastwards into the Avenue field. Damage was reported at the time to the woodland at Fargo and to some of the barrows.

It’s high time a proper academic study was done of this story. There must be a great deal of information out there…

If you visit Stonehenge now – as huge numbers did in August – you’ll really see signs that things are changing. Work continues in the car park to prepare a turning circle at the end of what will be the stub of the old A344. The road itself as it once continued eastwards to Stonehenge Bottom has now all but gone, exposing the chalk below. Wessex Archaeology has been monitoring it, and has excavated parts of the two parallel Avenue ditches, and a small part of what looks like the lip of the Heelstone ditch, as Ollie Good kindly showed me.

My interest in this was naturally strengthened by my excavations immediately beside the road there in 1979 and 1980. We had several advantages over the modern archaeologists.

The team were almost all volunteers, archaeology students and staff from Southampton University, so brought considerable skill, but at no cost to…

An interesting e-petition has just appeared on the Government website: Open Access to Stonehenge – Annual Midsummer Day Picnic.

Some bits of it are problematic from our viewpoint. For instance, what it says by way of justification is unlikely to be accepted nor is the principle of extending the access time ever going to find favour – see here. This bit is also a problem: “we now ask that there be a freely accessible, without charge, Annual Midsummer Day Picnic between the hours of Dawn to Dusk”. That implies people arriving in the dark so all the same cost, safety and conservation difficulties would remain and no way are the authorities going to agree to carrying on paying £200,000 a year to make it happen and  forego another £50,000 in lost visitor income and let the people who want them to do all that come in for…