by Tom Fort
After Joseph Browne, Stonehenge entered the photographic age. Visitors would have their picture taken in front of or on the stone of their choice by William Judd, the ‘attending illustrator’, whose photographic van was pulled up to the monument each day by a white horse. By then, under first one Sir Edmund Antrobus and then the next, the character of the estate had greatly changed. Much of the old sheep-grazed downland was ploughed up and turned to arable. Although the railway did not reach Amesbury until the early twentieth century, access to Stonehenge by wagonette from Salisbury was regular and easy and it became a favourite destination for trippers. Parties picnicked, clambered over the stones, inscribed names and messages, chipped off pieces for souvenirs, and scattered bottles, chicken bones and wrappings on the ground. Some even complained when they found that hammers and chisels were not provided.
All approaches to the Antrobuses from archaeologists reputable and disreputable to be allowed to dig at Stonehenge were abruptly rebuffed. But without putting fortifications around it, they could do little to prevent the progressive trashing of the site by an ever-increasing stream of visitors. The situation worsened after the Army began moving in strength onto Salisbury Plain from the 1890s onwards. Soldiers proved to be even more brazen than civilians in treating the monument as a recreation facility and helping themselves to bits and pieces that took their fancy.
The Royal Artillery took up residence at Larkhill, and in 1910 the War Office decided that an airfield should be constructed there for the use of the new Royal Flying Corps. In the course of the 1914–18 war, hangars sprouted around the northern and western side of Stonehenge. The Larkhill camp spread down to the edge of the Cursus, the great embanked earthwork to the north of the monument. A light railway reached across the downs to Winterbourne Stoke. All day heavy military traffic ground along the roads, and the stones trembled with the bursts of artillery fire and the detonations of mines. The end of the war left a vast area disfigured by redundant installations. For a time parts of the aerodrome reverted to being a pig farm. The monument itself came into the care of the Office of Works, which authorised the building of a café just across the Shrewton road and even considered allowing a modest development of bungalows.
March past Stonehenge, 1915
In 1928 Clough Williams-Ellis, the architect of Portmeirion and crusader against the forces of philistinism, raged against the treatment of Stonehenge. ‘Never were venerable remains less venerated,’ he wrote. ‘Stonehenge is intolerable . . . Hemmed in by iron railings, guarded by a turnstile and a post-card kiosk, glowered at by the derelict aerodrome and smirked at by café and bungalow, this sacred place is indeed painful beyond bearing. . . Stonehenge is a mockery and a wounding of the spirit.’
A303 turn left
Periodically the philosophical/cultural debate about who owns Stonehenge splutters back into life, usually after Wiltshire Police have been summoned to defend it against a peaceful invasion by sun and moon worshippers, pagans, Wiccans, Druids and solstice enthusiasts. Who Owns Stonehenge? was the title of a book edited by Christopher Chippindale (author of the indispensable and richly entertaining Stonehenge Complete) which attempted to reconcile the differing perspectives of archaeology, astronomy, Druidism and so forth.
Had the question been asked of any of the Sir Edmund Antrobuses of Amesbury Abbey, the answer would have been simple: ‘I do.’ In 1883 General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, Britain’s most eminent field archaeologist and the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments, wrote to the third Sir Edmund offering to assume responsibility for Stonehenge. Sir Edmund declined the offer. Ten years later the General tried again, arguing that the leaning and unstable stones must be raised and fixed in concrete and that a permanent custodian needed to be appointed. He was told to mind his own business.
Five years later the third Sir Edmund died and was succeeded by his nephew, the fourth Sir Edmund. He offered to sell Stonehenge and 1300 acres of downland to the nation for £125,000. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, decided the nation could not afford it. Sir Edmund responded by putting a fence around it, blocking the several tracks with tree trunks, and charging a shilling for entrance. The ensuing rumpus eventually reached the High Court, where Mr Justice Farwell ruled decisively in favour of the rights of the landowner and admonished the fledgling National Trust for daring to bring an action in the first place.
A shilling to get in
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, later archaeologists agree that the intransigence of successive Antrobuses did Stonehenge a priceless favour by defending it from the Victorian enthusiasm for ham-fisted excavations and restorations. Major work was limited to raising stone 56 upright, and fixing it in concrete. It was supervised by Professor William Gowland of the School of Mines, who also carried out a limited and careful excavation of other stones which showed how they had been trimmed and shaped and put in place.
Within six weeks of the outbreak of war in 1914, Sir Edmund Antrobus’s son and heir – who would have been the fifth Sir Edmund – was killed in Belgium. A few months later his father died, and the Amesbury estate was put on the market. Lot 15 – ‘Stonehenge, with about 30 acres, 2 rods, 37 perches of surrounding downland’ – was knocked down for £6600 to Cecil Chubb, the made-good son of a Shrewton saddler.8 The purchase was a spur-of-the-moment decision; apparently Chubb was worried that the monument might fall into the grasp of an American showman with ambitions to turn it into a vulgar tourist attraction. In 1918 he handed it over to the Ministry of Works, acting on behalf of the nation, with the proviso that there should be free admission for the people of Shrewton, Netheravon (where his father was born), Durrington (his mother’s birthplace), and Amesbury.
Since then Stonehenge has been, in the sonorous but woolly phrase, ‘held in trust for the nation’. Thus we all own it, and have some kind of ill-defined right to make a claim on it. Throughout Stonehenge’s ‘modern’ history – dating, for the sake of convenience, from 1620, when James I sent Inigo Jones to survey it and report back on its likely provenance – claims of ownership have been lodged. A multitude of antiquaries, historians, archaeologists, visionaries, prophets and crackpots have studied it, speculated on its origins, and promoted their accounts of its meaning and purpose. Inigo Jones identified it as a Roman temple, and Henry Browne attributed it to Adam himself. But the most persistent claimants to Stonehenge and its truths have been the Druids. It was Dr Stukeley who first argued the Druid case. His Druids were a gentle lot, proto-Christians really. The Romantics who came afterwards preferred theirs more savage:
It is the sacrificial altar, fed
With living men – how deep the groans
wrote Wordsworth in The Prelude with lip-smacking relish.
One way or another, Druids have made a habit of causing a nuisance at Stonehenge – none more so than the once-celebrated socialist mystic and ranter George Watson MacGregor Reid, Chief Druid of the Universal Bond of the Sons of Men. This outstandingly brazen example of the spiritual adventurer was born in Skye in the 1860s or, quite possibly, somewhere else at some other time. He claimed to have served in both the Royal and the Merchant navies, and to have spent some years fomenting union agitation in the docks at Hull and San Francisco. He had a Zoroastrian phase, during which he began to style himself as a Buddhist mystic named Ayn Subadra, before settling down to militant Druidism.
Reid’s first recorded visit to Stonehenge was in 1912. An article in the Salisbury Journal headlined ‘Sun Worship at Stonehenge’ noted the attendance of Ayn Subadra (‘the messenger from Tibet’) and various followers including Kelkusbru Turnbull (‘A Persian gentleman’). The following year Reid – now additionally styled Dastur Tuatha de Dinaan – arrived with an enlarged Druid contingent for the summer solstice, only to find access barred on the orders of Sir Edmund Antrobus. He responded as a Dastur is inclined to, with a curse, and within eighteen months both Sir Edmund and his son were dead. Cecil Chubb prudently permitted Reid and the Universal
Bond to resume their rites. For some time after Chubb’s gift to the nation, the Ministry of Works continued to raise no objection to the Druids and their ceremonies. They were even given permission to bury their dead beneath the stones, at which point archaeologists set up a clamour of protest. The permission was withdrawn, provoking a mass invasion of the monument at the summer solstice in 1926 and the pronouncement of a curse against the hated custodian, who died the following year.
Eventually Reid decided to withdraw from Stonehenge in protest at the way the Universal Bond had been treated, and against the sacrilege of allowing archaeologists to excavate at the site. He took his Druids off to Normanton Down, on the other side of the A303, where he planned to erect a replica Stonehenge, until the landowner took fright and kicked him out. In time, after the old fraud’s death in 1946, his son Robert MacGregor Reid brought the Universal Bond back to Stonehenge, opening the way for a more general influx of pagans and Wiccans and assorted occultists and psychedelists to annex it in the noble cause of the Free Festival.
The Universal Bond faded away, but the banner of Druidism has been kept aloft for many years by the Battle Chieftain of the Council of British Druids, King Arthur Pendragon. The former soldier in the Royal Hampshire Regiment (under his less fanciful given name John Rothwell) has engineered a long series of largely successful publicity stunts designed to make English Heritage look foolish. These have included his arrest for possession of an offensive weapon in the shape of his sword, Excalibur, and chaining up the doors of English Heritage’s offices in London. Lately he has been pressing for a judicial review of the decision to allow archaeologists to remove human remains from Stonehenge and use radio-carbon techniques to find out how old they are. King Arthur’s flowing white locks and beard are a familiar sight in the car park, where he hands out leaflets calling for the return of the remains of dead Druids.9 In terms of nuisance value, King Arthur has shown himself to be a worthy successor to George Watson MacGregor Reid. The recurrent presence of his dilapidated caravan on the potholed byway that cuts across the west of Stonehenge from the A344 to the A303 is an irritating reminder to the authorities of the limitations of their stewardship.
* * *
Christopher Chippindale, in Stonehenge Complete, describes the established and undisputed data about the monument as ‘technical and mundane’, and the accumulated finds of chips of bluestone and sarsen and fragments of pottery as ‘a dismal collection’. Since the 2004 edition of his book,10 the Stonehenge Riverside project organised by a team of archaeologists from Sheffield University has revealed strong evidence of an abiding relationship between Stonehenge and the Neolithic timber circle known as Woodhenge, on the Avon at Durrington, two miles to the east. Even so, the headline conclusion – that Stonehenge was a funeral and burial site to honour the dead, and Woodhenge and other connected henges were used and inhabited by the living – is no more than plausible supposition. The fact is that there are almost no facts about Stonehenge.
The result is that any theory, however barking, can obtain a hearing. The silence of the stones excuses every kind of jabbering nonsense. We may titter condescendingly at Geoffrey of Monmouth’s version, which has Merlin deploying his magic powers to fly the stones over from Ireland, and at Stukeley’s Druidic fantasising. But there are plenty of contemporary accounts just as batty – without the excuse of ignorance. Many of these depend heavily on astronomical deductions, even though – as Chippindale points out – there is no evidence of astronomical alignments apart from the solar orientation of the axis. But in the half-lit world of the truth-seekers, that deficiency merely serves to fuel the business of speculation. For thirty years until his death in 1999, Donald L. Cyr, an American aeronautical engineer, produced Stonehenge Viewpoint, a journal in which he developed a theory originally propounded by a Quaker teacher named Isaac Vail that the earth was surrounded by a canopy of ice crystals left behind after the final glaciation. This canopy, undetectable by scientific instruments, created mystic haloes visible only at certain times and from certain sacred places, of which Stonehenge was the principal.
Just stones
The stone circle is imperfect in other respects. For sure, it is a striking sight; sometimes – under certain conditions of light and season, and when the swarms of visitors are absent – very beautifully so. But it was built to serve a function and we do not know what that function was. The stones are just that: stones, with their colours of blue and orange-brown rendered grey by a mantle of lichens. They were put up a very long time ago by people of whom we know almost nothing. Furthermore the circle as it stands now is a very meagre affair compared with the original. Half the sarsens and bluestones are missing, and those that remain have been subjected to all kinds of indignities over the centuries. Twenty minutes is about right to take it in close up; even if a lifetime is not enough to consider the possibilities of its past and wander the paths of make-believe.
Stonehenge actually works best from a distance. One good way to see it is to walk or cycle from Woodhenge – where there is really not much other than modern repro – and cut down from Larkhill to the eastern end of the Cursus. I pedalled west along its edge, the epic nature of the design as clear as day. The turf was short-cropped beneath my wheels by the sheep which hardly bothered to glance at me before resuming the eternal nibbling. I saw the stones over to my left, circled by spectators. I took a diagonal over to the car park, had a poke around the miserable visitors’ centre and wondered what all the fuss was about, then followed the byway past King Arthur Pendragon’s caravan (no one home) to the A303. I stood by the road and looked back at Stonehenge and beyond. Beacon Hill rose in the east, the A303 a narrow band beside it. From that distance the road – so insistent and overbearing close at hand – looked remarkably insignificant in that great, wide landscape.
Another slow, satisfactory route is to follow the old pre-bypass A303 through Amesbury, over the river, and up the western side of the Abbey grounds. The Avenue – which may have been used to transport the bluestones from the Avon as well as having an unknown ceremonial function – diverts off to the right, crosses the A303 and loops left to pick up its solstice alignment towards the monument itself. But it is hard to follow; better to take the track to the left past Normanton Farm and along the edge of Normanton Down. The way takes you through a Neolithic and Bronze Age graveyard; burial grounds are on all sides. The mounds are easy to spot, like outsize grassed-over molehills. There is a line of them stretching up the A303 and beyond. From there Stonehenge appears, with more barrows beside the Cursus and to west and east. The feeling of looking out across the vestiges of some system of worship or reverence, dimly understood but engineered with enormous care, is very strong.
The third way to see Stonehenge in its landscape – English Heritage will not thank me for this – is from the A303 itself. From the west the view is good, from the east it is magnificent. I have seen it a hundred times, at speed when the road is empty, at leisure when crawling along. It does not fail to lift the heart and magnetise the senses. The eyes swivel, first to the stones, then across the great sweep of land beyond.
It’s tempting to wonder if this isn’t why the tunnel and the bypasses never came to pass. Maybe there were greater, deeper forces at work, that overpowered our contemporary obsession with moving faster. For five thousand years and more people have looked down on Stonehenge from where the A303 crests the ridge to the east. Maybe the road was just not meant to be put underground or diverted somewhere else.
10
DIGGING DEEP
The road rises easily past Stonehenge in a narrow straight line to the roundabout at Longbarrow Crossroads, where it nods a greeting to the Salisbury-Devizes A360. When I passed this way in August 2010 the land on the south side of the A303 up to the roundabout was occupied by pigs. It was a kingdom of the pig: the ground denuded, broken and trampled by snout and trotter. There were neat roofed shelters in the shadow of which immense, prone backsides could be glimpsed. At strategic points,
round feed dispensers had been placed where the porkers gathered at important times. Great flocks of rooks swarmed around, landing to harvest the worms exposed by the animals; then all of a sudden, for no obvious reason, taking off with a harsh chorus of croaks and violent flapping of wings to circle and come down somewhere else.
Kingdom of the pig
There is something very restful in watching pigs. Their feeding does not have the same urgency that impels the unceasing nibbling of sheep and the strenuous chomping of cattle. Sheep rarely lie down and rest, as if worried that if they stop eating they might forget how to do it. Cows do lie down, but with their heads up, watchful. But the repose of pigs is splendidly abandoned. After a period of thrusting their flat noses through the mud and earth, their absurdly curly tails twitching, they flop onto their sides, their great pink and grey flanks still, their eyes hidden beneath flap-like ears. You imagine them dreaming of a well-filled, well-seasoned swill bucket, or the pleasure of suckling their piglets. And when they resume the food business their progress is unhurried. They give themselves time to pause and look around, as if ready for a grunt-chat about pork prices and the chances of a shower later in the day.
At that time the pig kingdom stretched far into the distance and along the road. It was the early days of the coalition government, and there were signs along the A303 imploring Mr Cameron and his colleagues not to wreck the countryside with cuts. When I walked by a couple of months later cuts of a different kind seemed to have been implemented. The signs had gone, as had most of the pigs. The kingdom had been reduced to a distant corner, and all the rest had been sown for winter barley.