Stonehenge Stone Circle News and Information

Just before Summer Solstice 2024, two protesters from the Just Stop Oil campaign group jumped the rope barrier between the paying public and Stonehenge itself to douse three stones in orange-coloured cornstarch using a pair of fire extinguishers.

In this particular instance, there was limited damage to the monument (the orange powder was removed with a leaf blower) but far, far more to the cause of JSO. It was almost universally condemned by anyone who was asked to comment – aside from those who felt the ends justified the means.

This isn’t the first time that this icon of British prehistory has been the target of stunts like this, and it probably won’t be the last.

Back in the late 1950s the monument was daubed overnight with white paint depicting what was supposed to be the Peace symbol in protest at nuclear proliferation. Whoever did it wasn’t as effective as they’d hoped because what they actually drew was the Mercedes Benz logo.

To be fair, the icon had only been invented a year or so beforehand and in a pre-Internet age such memes were slower to propagate. By the early 21^st century CND used a 3D version of the symbol against a backdrop of Stonehenge to get their point across.

2007 saw the campaign group Fathers For Justice storm the monument dressed as the Flintstones and equipped with ladders to make their case. Baffled Police could do nothing except wait for them to get down of their own accord.

More recently, the ongoing saga of the imprisonment of Julian Assange has been highlighted at most solstices by campaigners armed with no more than a cardboard cutout. Simple, effective, and no threat to anyone – unlike Julian, apparently.

The eternal quest to drive from London to the southwest of England 8 minutes quicker, necessitating the building of a £2.5Bn four lane expressway across the World Heritage Site with some of it in a tunnel but a lot of it at ground level, has birthed a world-wide campaign against the plan – headed up by the Stonehenge Alliance.

Their tactics involve more conventional means like leafleting, Judicial Reviews, petitions and banners and obviously use Stonehenge as the backdrop since it is at the centre of the controversy.

At the time of writing (June 24th 2024) UNESCO has just said it is recommending putting Stonehenge on the list of World Heritate Sites “At Risk” at its 46^th Session in New Delhi in July as a consequence of the tunnel project “despite repeated warnings from the World Heritage Committee since 2017”.

There is, though, one protester who has been front and centre for decades – King Arthur Uther Pendragon, Leader of the Loyal Arthurian Warband. An eco-warrior Druid veteran of anti-road schemes and tireless campaigner for the rights of all people to celebrate freely at Stonehenge.

After the appalling scenes of the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985 – when a large mob of largely anonymous Police and drafted in military personnel ambushed, attacked and violently beat up a convoy of peaceful folk attempting to make their way to Stonehenge for the free music festival that had been ongoing for 11 years and had just been banned by the authorities – a 4 mile exclusion zone was created around the site in summer to prevent further festival attempts in subsequent years.

In the 1990s, Arthur set up a (mostly) one-person protest camp by the Heelstone and camped on a nearby byway so he could draw attention to the exclusion issue as well as that of charging for access to Stonehenge. He was arrested every year as he tried to make his way to the monument for Solstice across the exclusion zone and became a royal pain in the arse to the authorities.

When jailed he refused to wear prison uniform and insisted on being allowed his Druid robes. When this was denied, he refused to wear clothes at all.

The media didn’t know what to make of it – on the one hand he was a troublemaker with a weird name and a stranger appearance who kept banging on about an odd cause, and on the other he was a charismatic underdog with a weird name and a stranger appearance who kept banging on about an odd cause!

In the end, in 1999, the UK Law Lords ruled that people had a right to free assembly on the public highway provided it was peaceful and unobstructive. The exclusion zone became unenforceable and everything changed.

The following year the first Managed Open Access to Stonehenge for the Summer Solstice took place, and any who wanted to attend to celebrate were freely allowed to do so for the first time in 15 years.

Stonehenge, of course, cares nothing for all of this. In 5000 years it has seen it all.

At least two murders – one in the Bronze Age, by arrowshot (“The Stonehenge Archer”) buried with care in the encircling ditch, and another in Saxon times by being (partially) beheaded then crammed into a crude grave just outside the sarsen circle, hammering by “picnickers” to extract souvenirs or engrave their initials on the stones reported through the 1700s and 1800s, clashes between early 20^th century Druids and the lone Policeman charged with guarding the monument against the deposition of cremation ashes, painted graffiti perpetrated by everyone from drunk Army officers in 1938 to Radio Caroline fans in the 1960s – the list of slights to Stonehenge is almost endless.

If we are outraged by protesters using it to garner headlines, perhaps we should instead ask ourselves why we are apparently incapable as a society of engaging in meaningful civilised debate on vital topics in the first place.

POST BY GUEST BLOGGER AND LOCAL STONEHENGE EXPERT – SIMON BANTON

RELEVANT LINKS:
Two arrested after Stonehenge vandalised by Just Stop Oil – SALISBURY JOURNAL
Just Stop Oil spray Stonehenge with orange paint as heroic passer-by steps in to try to drag them away
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