Stonehenge

Every year on the summer solstice, an assortment of druids, pilgrims, pagans and other expectant travellers flock to Stonehenge in the hope of witnessing what is rumoured to be mystical sight. If the morning is clear, they will hope to see the midsummer sun rise between two of the great sarsen uprights, in line with the monolith of the heel stone at the far side of the circle. At this moment there will be much singing and rejoicing amongst the visitors, much wringing of hands amongst the custodians that all this frivolity doesn't damage their World Heritage Site, and much shuffling of feet by photographers as they try to make it appear that this alignment does actually ...

***Introduction*** It was whilst trying to come up with something constructive to do during the school holidays that the thought of visiting Stonehenge suddenly popped into my head. I vaguely remember being a visitor for the first time way back when whilst I was still at school (that may well have been during the Stone Age). My hazy recollection of the ancient monument featured a graffiti-laden collection of stones and a shop full of school kids on the rob in nearby Avebury (not guilty, m’lud). Still, the rest of the family had never been so we decided to risk it even if most reviews I’d read hadn’t exactly been that complimentary and I still remembered being ...

Hopefully this will be one of my more topical reviews, as you may have seen back in the summer on the TV news, or read in the press, that the long discussed and very expensively planned road tunnel under the famous monument has now been scrapped. Why? On the grounds of cost, pure and simple. And there ends the latest in a very long line of debateable issues surrounding this, the world famous ancient monument of Stonehenge. Issues that have been discussed and argued over for probably the 5000 years since the original builders arrived on site. Having visited Stonehenge as recently as July (2005), I decided that now was the ideal time to ...