The Stonehenge Master Plan

Maev Kennedy pens the final chapter of the Stonehenge story, maybe... From National Trust magazine, Summer 1999.

Turner painted Stonehenge in 1811 as an island in a wild empty landscape, lit by blazing skies of dawn and dusk. The human intrusions, the hunched shepherds, the farm wagons trundling along narrow muddy tracks, are pitifully insignificant, miserable little ants creeping under the huge sky. The stones themselves, painted in thin watercolour, are half dissolved into the light, enormous but subservient to their setting. To anyone who knows the site today, Turner's image is as fantastic as the folk tale that Merlin flew the stone circle to Wiltshire from Ireland. Yet within the next decade, after years of bitter controversy, that landscape will be restored.

It was the dawn of a winter solstice when I first saw Stonehenge. I was brought up in Ireland, a country littered with evidence of ancient days. My father could find ring forts and burial mounds by following his nose into the most unpromising patches of brambles and nettles. There were two ruined Norman castles, and an iron age dolmen, in suburban housing estates near our house. On excursions further afield we climbed crumbling round towers, searched in vain for a door into a Norman motte -- "a fairy mound" in Ireland -- and best of all, went with guttering candles into the great burial mounds of the Boyne Valley. Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange, we were told with pride, were "older than Stonehenge", but we had seen pictures of Stonehenge and knew the painful truth that we had nothing to compare -- blame Merlin -- with its sheer glamour and drama.

When I first came to England I wanted to see Stonehenge more than Bibas, which is saying simply.

On that first shattering cold morning there were precious few visitors, a Druid who put his robes on over a sheepskin jacket, a few hippies -- it was the 1970s, New Age Travellers hadn't been invented -- a solitary tour bus from Salisbury.

The bus driver grumbled and cursed, but followed his tattered passengers into the circle. He sneered until the magical moment when the blood red sun rose between two Sarsen stones, and then even he shut up for a minute. A scatter of early snow and a hard frost camouflaged the 20th century, dulling the noise from the roads, turning the farm fences into sparkling lines of light. The illusion of Turner held.

By the time we left, the 20th century had Stonehenge by the throat again. The barriers around the Stonehenge stones were up, the relentless dull background roar of traffic -- unimaginably worse 25 years later -- had resumed, the car-park was filling up, and the patient foot-stamping queue had formed at the tea kiosk. Stonehenge was again as horrible as the Parliamentary Select Committee found it, when it called the whole sad mess "a national disgrace".

English Heritage, which manages the monument itself, has borne the brunt of blame, for the hideous car-park, ticket huts, cattle-crush turnstiles, dismal cramped shop, and the vile foot tunnel under the A344, through which all visitors must pass like sewer rats.

But in truth the worst damage, to understand Stonehenge, is not these atrocious visitor facilities, but the fact that the henge is completely isolated from the 607ha (1500 acres) of surrounding National Trust land. The landscape and the hundreds of monuments within it made Stonehenge, giving it is setting in time and place. The people who built Stonehenge didn't live inside the circle, but out there beyond the barbed-wire fences.

By standing on the car-park ditch, you can see the avenue. You may read an information board about the faint green bumps tour in the Fields, but you cannot walk to the stones along the avenue and experience the truth that this was the great ceremonial approach to the monument. You can hunker down by the barrier rope and peer out across the fields and see that some of the stones are aligned on much older monuments in the landscapes -- it's much easier from inside the circle, but of course the ordinary visitor is not allowed in -- but you cannot walk to them across the fields. You might as well visit the National Collection of Roses at Mottisfont Abbey to see a single rose bush, barred from walking along the garden paths to look at anything else.

And now, after innumerable consultants' reports, position papers, proposals, public meetings and private slanging matches, there is at last a timetable for change. I have a piece of paper which says in black and white that the new visitors' centre and the park-and-ride scheme to allow people to walk to the stones, will open in March 2003, as the A344, the local road which should never have been built, which actually clips the heel stone of the circle, is finally closed. The whole scheme, with the traffic in a tunnel and the stones back in a landscape of unfenced sheep pasture, should be complete by the end of the first decade of the new Millenium.

A recent pioneering study for English Heritage, the first attempt to put money value on an untradeable commodity such as heritage importance, showed that many people interviewed at the site were serial Stonehengers like me. They valued it above opera or theatre or New British Neuroticism or anything else on the cultural horizon. But it also revealed a surprising percentage of the general population, which had never visited, but still thought it was worth paying a great deal of money to improve Stonehenge, for the sake of the possible visits of their children and grandchildren.

The arguing is not entirely over. A small minority are concerned about the tunnel construction method, cut and cover rather than a far more expensive bored tunnel. The Master Plan says flatly that it's the �125 million cut and cover or nothing, that the �300 million bored tunnel is out of the question. And the Trust supports this view.

Their current setting shrivels the stones. Except by certain occasional miracles of light, they are trapped and penned in. There is much devilment left in the details, but it is now clear that something will be done to liberate them. When my car plunges into the new A303 road tunnel I shall miss my accustomed view of the stones. But it is a truly startling thought that in ten years, Samuel, a visitors' tunnel veteran -- he cried when he was two because he thought there might be dragons down there -- may be able to run straight to the stones across springy turf, encountering nothing more alarming than a flock of sheep and a herd of tourists.

The National Trust's position

• The Trust's vision for Stonehenge is: to unite and protect Stonehenge and its setting in a pastoral landscape where people can roam freely and without charge.
• The Trust owns and manages 586 ha (1,448 acres) of land encircling Stonehenge.
• The Trust's purpose is permanent preservation for the benefit of all.
• The Trust is an equal partner with English Heritage in making the Master Plan happen.