When will Stonehenge’s lockdown end?

Another year, another row about Stonehenge. A rather sad piece on the BBC News website describes how its lacklustre custodians, English Heritage, had to cancel a live feed of the sunrise on the day of the solstice due to unspecified ‘safety concerns’ when a few people were seen climbing over a low fence to access the stones. More than 200,000 people around the world had tuned in to the live stream ‘but ended up watching pre-recorded footage of the stones until the feed returned at around 5am, showing largely cloudy skies’.

Oh dear. But then disappointment has been hanging over our most famous prehistoric monument like a cloud for over a century. Since a generous landowner gifted it to the nation in 1918, successive governments – and more recently English Heritage – have done a remarkably bad job of looking after it.

For most of the 20th century, archaeological digs were given scant resources and no single museum established, at the site or elsewhere, to display and interpret any findings. Roads thundered by to either side of it. But at least you could walk around the stones themselves.

The nadir came in the 1970s. A decision to fence them off was made in 1978, in response to the ‘Free Stonehenge’ festivals and regular invasions of the site. It came at a low point of the century for much of Britain, with its strife and coming winter of discontent

In retrospect, one can understand the political symbolism. The Labour government of the day was unable to control the unions, but could at least stop ‘long-haired hippies’ trespassing on a national monument; never mind that said monument had been open to all for the previous 4,000 years. Like so many restrictive and short-term rules, it has proved harder to remove than enforce.

So decades after what appeared to be a temporary, emergency measure, the site remains fenced off. You cannot enter or get near the circle without a special ticket (and whacking great fee), to be granted access outside of normal opening hours. Instead, regular visitors paying their £23 have to view the stones from afar, patrolling around them along a ‘designated walkway’ while they listen to an audio phone telling them what it would be like if they were actually allowed inside the circle. 

It's hardly an immersive experience, so no wonder many find it a disappointing one, particularly for foreigners arriving in the not unnatural expectation that they might get inside the site they have travelled to see. If visitors can approach to within inches of a Vermeer at the National Gallery, surely they can do the same to far less vulnerable massive stone trilithons that have stood there for millennia?

So why are the stones still fenced off when the threat of pitch side invasion has long receded? The answer appears to be administrative convenience. While English Heritage could perfectly well provide a safe route through the site, with security to supervise visitors – as at most ancient sites, and with modern techniques to prevent erosion – they choose not to do so or the spurious grounds that the site ‘needs protecting’. ‘Managed open access’ is the chilling euphemism for ‘closed to almost everybody’.

Over a million visitors fork out each year for their disappointing experience. Twenty million pounds or so could pay for an awful lot of security guards to stand around the stones and make sure that little Harry doesn’t attempt to carve his name on a sarsen. As it is, there are plenty of officious men in yellow safety jackets patrolling the designated tarmac track that circles the stones at a considerable distance.

One strange by-product of English Heritage’s intransigence is that, in normal years, tens of thousands of frustrated visitors descend on Stonehenge for the summer solstice, at a rare time they can get inside. It doesn’t take a degree in archaeological conservation to see that it is far worse for the stones to be flooded for a single day than to have a constant stream of much smaller ticketed traffic monitored throughout the year.

In a sanctimonious and complacent statement on its website, English Heritage claim they are ‘committed to the responsibility of keeping the Stonehenge World Heritage Site preserved’ – by keeping it off limits to most visitors. Using the same argument, the art museums of Britain could, of course, preserve their paintings better by locking them away; but then, as with Stonehenge, no one would ever see them properly.

There are glimmers of hope on the horizon. In Mike Parker Pearson, we now have a committed archaeologist who has shown great determination and imagination in interpreting both the sacred landscape around Stonehenge and some of its origins in Wales. One road has been removed and some form of tunnel proposed for the other, though that remains controversial because, of course, it could damage any buried artefacts.

But arguments about tunnels and access to the stones on solstice days are a distraction from the real issue at the heart of the Stonehenge problem. English Heritage and its CEO, Kate Mavor, need to acknowledge that it is completely unacceptable to continue to keep the stones sealed off from the people who own it – us.

It seems emblematic of a digitally disengaged Britain that we have to accept the poor substitute of a purely virtual engagement with the monument of our ancestors, via audio phone and streaming, rather that experience the real thing.

We need a pincer movement from a public #freethestones campaign and a libertarian Conservative government prepared to challenge a lockdown at Stonehenge that has now lasted over 40 years. Only then might English Heritage commission a feasibility study to grant proper, year-round access to the stones themselves. But don’t hold your breath.