Quick thoughts on A303 written representations

Well, the Stonehenge A303 proposed works examination representations are now in and available online. Many of the 264 documents (perhaps most) are from Highways England. But there are many more, including from Historic England (579 pages), National Trust (286), Stonehenge Alliance (218), Blick Mead (149, an odd submission, consisting mostly of copies of other people’s …

Stonehenge deserves better than this

You may have noticed that Blick Mead was in the press today. I’m writing a feature rounding up all the recent excavations in and around the world heritage site for a future British Archaeology (you will be astonished at how much there is!), so I thought I’d have a look at the story. Excavation at …

A guide to siting new roads around Stonehenge

Historic England has published a new edition of its online research magazine. It‘s devoted to new research around Stonehenge. You can read it here – excavations (covered in news reports in British Archaeology), surveys, artwork and finds. I’m just going to pick up on one thing… Martyn Barber and Fiona Small write about mapping the …

What would Trump do with Stonehenge?

This is not a polemic, but a long reflection on Stonehenge, archaeology, conservation and the modern world. So as not to interrupt the read, I have put no links in the text. There are some at the end. In 2014 the president of the United States visited Britain’s most famous ancient monument. Barack Obama was …

What did the world heritage site mean to people who built Stonehenge? Nothing

Yesterday I walked in the landscape around Stonehenge. In a recent short video headed The Stonehenge Tunnel Begins, Tom Holland stands on Bush Barrow, near Stonehenge and one of the country’s iconic prehistoric monuments, and addresses the camera. He describes “vans and lorries employed by the Highways Agency who are testing out the ground for …

The strange case of the dog in the Stonehenge tunnel

It had been pretty quiet in Stonehenge media land. We had an excavation at Durrington Walls in August that got a bit of attention. This was thin stuff compared to the coverage given last year to the geophysics sensation that the dig overturned, though what we now have is far more significant (and so features …

Tunnel Truths 2

The Western Daily Press picked up on my previous blog yesterday (a complete surprise to me). You can read Tristan Cork's piece here. It includes comments from the Stonehenge Alliance, who seek a longer tunnel (at even more boggling expense). They got to meet "the Unesco mission". "We pointed out", said an Alliance spokesman, "that the A303 through the World Heritage …

Tunnel truths

ICOMOS and UNESCO are visiting Stonehenge this week, to ponder the current set of road tunnel proposals. A lot has changed since we were last thinking about such a tunnel. Despite stories in the press, these changes add up to a much better proposition than the one that had, in principle, been accepted a decade …

Digging up the A344

Yesterday evening I went down to Stonehenge to look at the roads. Not something everyone does, but this is a turning point in a century of argument and striving for change: on Monday part of the A344 was closed. Already the tarmac is being broken up, and soon it will be dug out and the …