Stonehenge update for Rescue News 94 (October 2004)

English Heritage has submitted a planning application for a new Stonehenge visitor-centre just outside the World Heritage Site (WHS) at ‘Countess East’, about 3km east of the Stones and close to the A303/A345 roundabout junction. Salisbury District Council invites responses to the application by 28 October (for details see www.salisbury.gov.uk and follow the Stonehenge links).

The proposed visitor-centre building would be unobtrusively set into the hillside east of Countess Road. Parking would be closer to the A303 and the ecologically sensitive River Avon. New roads, landscaping and drainage treatment areas could threaten the integrity of rare early Anglo-Saxon settlement remains, including five ‘sunken featured buildings’.

Access from the visitor-centre to the WHS, for most visitors, would be by LPG-fuelled land trains. The rubber-tyred vehicles would run on a specially constructed ‘reversible’ 10m-wide bund supporting a double trackway, to main drop-off shelters on King Barrow Ridge and at Durrington Farm. From here, or from subsidiary halts nearer to Woodhenge and at the east end of the Cursus, visitors would make their way into the landscape and to Stonehenge on footpaths and byways, or over the grass. Byway 12 would be downgraded to exclude motorised traffic and partly resurfaced for wheelchairs. The A344 would also be downgraded, with access only for permitted vehicles. The present visitor-centre car park would be grassed over, leaving minimal underground facilities.

A number of important issues are being addressed but there do appear to be some serious problems. Not all of the land required for the visitor-transit system has been secured. The continuous earthwork needed to carry the land trains would impose an extensive new monument across the WHS, in some places very close to and affecting the setting of important scheduled monuments, such as the Cursus. Tree-planting and land-remodelling, to hide new structures, threaten archaeological remains. It would not, without a longish walk, be easy to visit some of the more interesting areas in the southern and western parts of the WHS, limiting choice for many. Problems of access in poor weather might make extension of the land train to the henge an inevitable demand in the future.

Ministers have not yet announced a decision on the A303 Inquiry but, owing to road access problems, a visitor-centre on the Countess East site would not be viable unless an A303 improvement goes ahead and indeed the planning application assumes that will happen.

One of the drawbacks of this timing is that we do not know whether opinions expressed in support of the A303 proposals, and repeated in the documentation for the visitor-centre, have been questioned by the A303 Inquiry Inspector. Objectors raised serious doubts concerning, for example, the methodology of assessment of the impacts of new development on the settings of archaeological sites, and the emphasis placed on rehabilitating the central area of the WHS, near the Stones, at the expense of the integrity of the WHS and its setting as a whole.

Furthermore, depending upon Ministers’ reaction to the National Trust’s objection to the A303 preferred route, and the outcome of any challenge that might be made following a road announcement, a decision on the A303 might be subject to some modification. A better road solution might yet be considered – perhaps one that might allow for much more sustainable proposals for visitor-access to the WHS landscape.

Kate Fielden

21.9.04