The First Ancient Monuments Legislation

As Christopher Chippindale has argued (1983:3), the classically educated landowners of Victorian England adhered to a narrative of civilization that focused on the Mediterranean and had no place for the ancient British, who had in any case been ousted by their own Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The Scandinavian three-age system, involving the progressive elaboration of technology, had been introduced to Britain by Daniel Wilson (1851) but only found wider approval in the context of a synthesis with Darwinian ideas in the work of John Lubbock (1865, 1870). It was Lubbock who, having been elected as member of Parliament for Maidstone in 1870, began stoically championing a private member’s bill for the protection of ancient monuments. In seeking to conserve specifically prehistoric remains, Lubbock’s contention was that new knowledge about the distant past can be derived from the archaeological study of monuments and that this knowledge substantiated the extreme antiquity of humankind, on an evolutionary timescale (Murray 2008:155; Thompson 2009:69).

Lubbock’s Bill was first introduced to Parliament in 1873, included a schedule of eighty sites throughout the United Kingdom worthy of protection, and would have established a national monuments commission, funded by the treasury (Kains-Jackson 1880). However, it was opposed by Tory MPs such as Lord Francis Hervey, who opined: “Are the absurd relics of our barbarian predecessors, who found time hanging heavily on their hands, and set about piling up great barrows and rings of stone, to be preserved at the cost of an infringement of property rights?” (Wright 1985:50).

Even Lubbock’s fellow Liberals considered the proposal unfeasibly costly. Over the following decade, Lubbock was able to convince a growing number of other MPs of the need for some form of legislation, but the notion that an independent board of commissioners might be given the power to compulsorily purchase threated sites was universally unacceptable. A compromise was eventually found in the form of a government bill drafted by Shaw Lefevre, the first commissioner of works, which made provision for one or more inspectors of ancient monuments and which allowed landowners to voluntarily place sites into the guardianship of the state, without any compulsion to do so (Chippindale 1983:17; Murray 2008:162). The resulting Ancient Monuments Act of 1882 contained a schedule of sixty-eight sites in England, Scotland, and Wales (excluding Ireland) that the state might choose to take into protection through purchase and made provision for other similar sites to be accepted by Order in Council (Fry 2014a:10).

Under the 1882 Act, the care of ancient monuments was placed in the hands of a government body, the Office of Works. The office had been established in the fourteenth century to build and maintain the royal palaces and castles (Thurley 2013:24). A consequence of this purpose was that the organization was somewhat aristocratic in outlook and also that it primarily perceived monuments as buildings. Consequently, prehistoric monuments were for long treated primarily as architecture, isolated from their surroundings. The very first monument taken into state care, the Kit’s Coty House dolmen in Kent (figure 15.2), was promptly enclosed within a set of railings (upon which a Cambridge undergraduate famously impaled himself in 1906) (Bowden 1991:97).

The first inspector, appointed in 1883, was General Augustus Pitt-Rivers, a close associate of Lubbock (Thompson 1977:64). Thereafter, Pitt-Rivers toured the country annually, with his own paid assistants, reporting on the condition of the listed sites and encouraging landowners to place their monuments into the care of the state (Bowden 1991:97). Pitt-Rivers saw a major part of the inspector’s job as making a record of nationally significant monuments and considered that the Ordnance Survey should have been given a role in this process, which would have integrated heritage protection with the practice of map-making (Thurley 2013:46). However, after the general’s death in 1900 the inspectorship effectively lapsed for a period, and the task of inventory of ancient monuments and historic buildings was given to three Royal Commissions on Historic Monuments, established in 1908.

Access to the Landscape

Early steps to safeguard ancient monuments took place alongside the development of an “open space movement,” dedicated to making the countryside available to the people. From the eighteenth century, common lands that had been collectively used for economic and recreational purposes began to be legally enclosed by larger landowners, on the grounds that they would provide better stewardship and management (Neeson 1993:259). This process of enclosure coincided with the concentration of population in the cities, and the right of working people to seek exercise in the open country was defended by the Commons Preservation Society (CPS) and the emerging rambling clubs during the 1860s and 1870s (Murphy 2002:19). The CPS, the National Footpaths Preservation Society, and the Kyrle Society were among a number of groups seeking to improve access to the countryside or enhance urban environments in the later nineteenth century, but they were all essentially small, elite pressure groups. In the Lake District of northwest England, threats ranging from the potential incursion of the railways to the private purchase of Lodore Falls had exercised the clergyman Hardwicke Rawnsley, who identified the need for a nongovernmental landholding body that could acquire places of natural beauty or historic interest on behalf of the nation. Influenced by John Ruskin’s belief that access to the countryside was a life-enhancing right that should be enjoyed by all people, Rawnsley, together with Octavia Hill of the Kyrle Society and Robert Hunter, the legal representative of the CPS, founded the National Trust in 1894 (Waterson 1994:36). The background of the National Trust was in the patrician radicalism of liberals and Christian socialists who operated through contacts and personal influence, and its main priority was access, in contrast with Lubbock’s focus on the conservation of monuments. The trust provided a means by which landowners could donate property to the nation, both for recreation and education. The first properties acquired were the coastline of Dinas Oleu in Wales and the wetlands of Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire, but these were followed by a historic building: Alfriston Clergy House in Sussex, in 1896 (Morgan Evans 1996:28; Waterson 1994:42). So, interestingly, the Trust was capable of taking ownership of roofed buildings, while under ancient monuments legislation the Office of Works were initially restricted to “ruins.”

These developments provided the background to a transformation in the social significance of both landscape and ancient monuments during the earlier twentieth century. During this period relationships between the state and the citizen altered, arguably as a culmination of the process that Michel Foucault identified as the shift from sovereignty to progressively more encompassing forms of governmentality, regulating the production of political subjects (Foucault 2003:247). David Matless (2016:31) has argued that in the interwar period in Britain, planning and preservation became linked in a form of modernism that stressed both progress and tradition and, above all, order and discipline. Under these circumstances the landscape took on a new moral significance, as a space for the activation of both embodiment and subjectivity. The landscape became the context in which orderly, modern citizens achieved self-realization through their healthy leisure pursuits, in contrast with selfish, untidy, and immoral forms of recreation. This new kind of English citizenship was supported by a dramatic expansion of the open-air movement, with the foundation of the Youth Hostels Association in 1930 and the Rambler’s Association in 1935. Hiking was the paradigm example of this modernist self-formation, as it combined healthful bodily discipline with the observation of nature and navigation (Matless 2016:105). Yet while country walking was identified as a moral pursuit, the demand for access to the land had also taken on a more radical edge, manifested in the April 1932 mass trespass on the grouse moor at Kinder Scout in Derbyshire, supported by the communist British Worker’s Sports Federation (Hey 2011:208).

At the same time, an entirely different kind of modernist leisure activity was developing with the increasing popularity of motoring among the middle classes. Motor touring was often portrayed as a means of immersing oneself in an older England, as in H. V. Morton’s In Search of England (1932), which Matless describes as a “motoring pastoral” (2016:101). Here the English landscape comes to be identified as a set of experiences to be consumed and explicitly as a way of engaging with a premodern world. Morton’s writings coincided with a popular upsurge of interest in archaeology within its wider landscape. This tendency was manifested in the popularity of the Ordnance Survey’s maps of Roman Britain and Neolithic Wessex, which opened up the possibility of visiting ancient monuments by car. Although motor tourists and hikers were otherwise unalike, they shared a fascination with England’s prehistoric past (Harris 2010:209).

In this new era the British state was increasingly willing to set aside the rights of private property in the public interest. The despoiling of the countryside was now often attributed to undisciplined development, including the proliferation of advertising billboards and the creeping expansion of the towns along the arterial routes, which Clough Williams-Ellis referred to as “the Octopus.” This extension of urban tendrils into the countryside had the effect of “averaging England out into a dull uneventfulness” (Williams-Ellis 1928:21). In place of unregulated growth, Williams-Ellis advocated orderly progress driven by planning, maintaining the separation of town and country, and restricting the spread of squalid bungalows. 1932 saw the passing of the Town and Country Planning Act, reflecting a desire to overcome unregulated development, property speculation, and a lack of designed order. “Preservation orders” could now be applied to inhabited buildings, affording them some level of protection (Thurley 2013:89).

Tidy Monuments and Country Houses

This same imperative for order, balance, clarity, and harmony manifested itself in an entirely different way in the activities of the Office of Works. Following the appointment of Charles Peers as inspector of monuments in 1910, a distinct Ancient Monuments Department was created, charged with producing plans, photographs, and guidebooks for all guardianship sites. With the 1913 Ancient Monuments Consolidation and Amendment Act, monuments were identified for the first time as material documents of national history, in which all citizens had an interest. As Simon Thurley points out, this development formed part of the general process by which the British state took responsibility for the nation’s history, also seen in the creation of the Public Records Office, the National Library, and the National Portrait Gallery (2013:80). Thurley also makes the important point that it was at this time that ancient monuments and historic buildings were first identified as a “national heritage collection,” a portfolio of properties that collectively had the function of educating the public about the past, rather than simply being preserved for their intrinsic value. As such, they constituted a kind of extended museum, dispersed across the nation. So as the landscape became the space for the actualization of healthy, moral, clean-limbed citizens, monuments took on the didactic role of placing English identities into a chronological narrative of race and nation, complementary aspects of governmentality. At the same time, the 1913 act transformed the significance of the distinction that Lubbock had made between scheduled sites and monuments in guardianship, by offering a level of protection to the former on the understanding that not all places of archaeological importance would ever be taken into public ownership (Stout 2008:138).

Peers’s new approach also manifested itself in a new aesthetic for the presentation of ancient monuments. From the 1840s onward, many English churches had been reconstructed in an overenthusiastic manner, resisted by William Morris and the “antiscrape” campaign of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, with the result that reconstruction had fallen into disrepute (Donovan 2007). Now, the Office of Works set about the ruthless clearance of many sites, removing any postmedieval additions in order to render the structure legible and comprehensible to the visitor (Thurley 2013:145). The emphasis on order and clarity was also reflected in the addition of neatly mown lawns, flower beds, and custodian’s huts so that in later years it was a common joke to refer to the “Ministry of Tidy Monuments” (Adams 2015:41).

While the public role of ancient monuments was being transformed, the National Trust was undergoing fundamental changes. In 1907 the National Trust Act gave the organization the ability to acquire property inalienably so that it could not be sold, mortgaged, or appropriated by the government. Parliament may not have fully appreciated how powerful a gift it was giving to the trust (Waterson 1994:53). An important statement of the trust’s changing philosophy was provided by G. M. Trevelyan’s Must England’s Beauty Perish? (1929), which demonstrated a growing interest in ancient monuments and historic houses, echoing the Office of Works’ new emphasis on their educational value. Yet Trevelyan also identified the importance of the landscape setting of monuments, arguing that a site such as Bodiam Castle is best appreciated amongst the beauty of meadows and trees. In 1934, Lord Lothian raised the issue of the breakup of country house estates at the trust’s annual general meeting, a process that had escalated since the First World War (Montgomery-Massingberd and Sykes 1994:181). Under the influence of James Lees-Milne, the secretary of the Country Houses Committee between 1936 and 1951, the trust began acquiring increasing numbers of great houses and developed a concern for Georgian as well as earlier architecture.

The country house policy of the 1930s was decisive in turning the trust away from its Christian socialist beginnings and toward domination by aristocrats, connoisseurs, and senior academics (Nixon 2015:531; Waterson 1994:171). The trust’s shift from public access to preservation during this period was precisely opposite to the direction of travel of the Office of Works. After the Second World War, landowners who had fallen on hard times were generally more inclined to donate their properties to the trust than to the state, especially since the former would usually allow families to continue to occupy their ancestral homes. As a result, the trust received 168 new properties between 1949 and 1954 (Nixon 2015:532). Despite the comparative neglect of countryside and ancient monuments, the mushrooming scale of operations demanded an increase in staff and a more efficient organization. This expansion coincided with growing public affluence and leisure time and with increasing demand for access to the trust’s properties. In 1965 the trust launched Enterprise Neptune, an ambitious project intended to secure stretches of beautiful and unspoiled coastline threatened by development. However, Neptune served to expose internal tensions and contradictions, between preservation and conservation for public amenity or from the wrong kind of public access, as well as a perceived lack of internal democracy. The resulting Benson Enquiry of 1967 caused the rapid professionalization of the National Trust, with stronger management and an increased emphasis on the commercialization of its assets (Nixon 2015:548). Subsequently, the trust also increased its commitment to archaeology and began to understand many of its properties as historic landscapes that demanded systematic investigation (Thackray 1996:218).

The Office of Works was now demonstrating a greater interest in the landscape surrounding its monuments. The Ancient Monuments Act of 1931 empowered the commissioners to restrict building or other activity in the vicinity of monuments, in response to the threat of quarrying in the “wild and beautiful scenery” around Hadrian’s Wall (Thurley 2013:173). By the 1970s there was greater coordination in the protection of material heritage, with the listing of historic buildings and the scheduling of archaeological sites unified within the Directorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings of the Department of the Environment (Thurley 2013:236). However, the end of the seventies saw the eclipse of the statist “planner-preservationism” and the emergence of a more neoliberal outlook within government. The 1979 Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act brought a decisive end to the practice of bringing ancient monuments into state ownership, with greater protection for scheduled sites and an emphasis on management agreements negotiated with landowners (English 2002:7). The Office of Works, which had been subsumed into the Department of the Environment, was in 1983 replaced by a quasi-autonomous agency, the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England (HBMCE), which operated under the title of English Heritage (complemented by its devolved equivalents, Historic Scotland and Cadw in Wales). English Heritage was charged with developing more imaginative strategies for presentation, education, and marketing, with a view to making the national monuments collection self-funding. Its first chair was Lord Montagu, who had been highly successful in commercializing his stately home, Beaulieu Palace House in Hampshire, where he had established a National Motor Museum and a jazz festival (Bender 1998:117). Since April 2015, the HBMCE has been retitled as Historic England, while the name English Heritage has been reassigned to a self-funding, nongovernmental charitable trust, which is licensed to manage the national heritage collection, the state properties that are now entirely separate from the scheduled and protected archaeological sites in private ownership (English Heritage 2015).

Heterodox Perspectives

The views of the bodies charged with the conservation of heritage and landscape in England have been diverse and unstable and much the same is true of the wider society. As Matless points out, the modernist planner-preservationism that dominated official discourse between the 1920s and 1970s was always shadowed by other perspectives, including various forms of organic ruralism and radical traditionalism (2016:32). From an archaeological point of view, one of the most significant and long established of these was modern Druidry. The Ancient Order of Druids was founded in 1781 on the model of freemasonry, but also drew on ancient texts such as those of Diodorus Siculus and on the opinions of antiquaries including William Stukeley and the somewhat suspect Barddas manuscripts of the Welsh poet Iolo Morganwg (Hale 2011:88; Hutton 2011:210). Although there is little evidence that the prehistoric Druids were linked to Stonehenge or other megalithic sites, Stukeley’s important insight that these monuments predated the Romans led him to attribute them to a generalized Druidic prehistory (Piggott 1985:80). This connection was picked up by William Blake in writing Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion ([1804] 1991), which presented Britain as the original home of a primordial religion. Blake’s narrative is one that links the essential national spirit of Albion with the possibility of redemption in a fallen world (Fisher 1959:592). “All things begin and end in Albion’s ancient Druid rocky shore,” says Blake, and his illustrations make repeated use of the image of the Stonehenge trilithon (figure 15.3).

By the start of the twentieth century, modern Druidry had taken on a greater interest in magical ritual, informed by its encounter with the Order of the Golden Dawn (Worthington 2004:56). The Ancient Order first conducted rituals at Stonehenge on August 24, 1905, but the Universal Bond, a more radical group influenced by Theosophy and occultism, had already been visiting the site at the summer solstice for some years (Stout 2008:144). While there was some mutual distrust between the Ancient Order and the Universal Bond, they shared the view that great wisdom, unequalled in the present, had existed in the past. This belief that people in antiquity were capable of brilliant feats, were sensitive to the earth’s energies, lived in balance with nature, and were morally superior to modern capitalist societies is foundational to many “alternative archaeologies” (Chippindale 2004:249). The notion of a lost golden age contrasts with archaeology’s increasing focus on evolution and progress as it became a professionalized discipline (Stout 2008:51). As we will see, it also explains why such perspectives proved so attractive to the counterculture from the 1960s onward, since they potentially serve to delegitimize the contemporary sociopolitical order. Yet while some contemporary Druids aligned themselves with the counterculture, others seek personal enlightenment and social respectability, and this remains a tension within the movement (Blain and Wallis 2007:38; Sebastian 1990:88).

A similar emphasis on the advanced achievements of past peoples distinguished a series of unorthodox viewpoints, which collectively fed into an alternative synthesis in the 1960s and 1970s. When Sir Norman Lockyer proposed an astronomical function for Stonehenge in 1906, it was resisted by archaeologists including Mortimer Wheeler and T. D. Kendrick, who preferred a funerary interpretation of the site (Michell 1977:17; Parker Pearson 2013:75). Subsequent approaches to archaeoastronomy have varied between the identification of megalithic monuments as computers capable of predicting lunar and solar eclipses (Hawkins 1965:98) and the more modest isolation of solstitial alignments (Ruggles 1999:41). Similarly, in proposing that “ley lines” (or straight, line-of-site trackways) connected significant sites of various periods in the British landscape, Alfred Watkins (1925) argued that they must have been laid out by skilled “men of knowledge,” whose methods are now lost to us. Watkins had originally hypothesized that leys were related to ancient trade and navigation, and “ley hunting” became popular between the wars, helped by the wide availability of Ordnance Survey maps (Stout 2008:178). Nonetheless, Major Tyler, Watkins’s successor as the central figure in the Old Straight Track Club, eventually resorted to the view that leys were an inheritance from a universal civilization originating in Atlantis (Stout 2008:206). Contemporary with Watkins was the ruralist, antimodern English organicism of H. J. Massingham, which disparaged evolutionism as “the religion of the modern state” (Radford 2010:108). Massingham presented the “Downland Man” of prehistory as possessing an instinctual bond with nature, which was broken by the introduction of metallurgy, beginning the descent into rootless urban life (Massingham 1926:145–6).

In the late 1960s, these various strands of unconventional thinking about prehistory and landscape were drawn together by John Michell, in his book The View over Atlantis (1969). Although Michell was a central figure in the emerging London counterculture (Miles 2010:187), he identified himself as a “radical traditionalist” and advocated a return to a traditional society based on spiritual principals and a sacred monarchy. He viewed the modern world as disordered, degraded, and corrupt and followed Blake in arguing that England had a unique redemptive destiny (Hale 2011:79; Michell 2005:48). While there was already an interest in what have become known as “earth mysteries,” Michell synthesized ideas of sacred geometry, Druidry, ley lines, earth energies, archaeoastronomy, and numerology, paving the way for the esoteric boom of the 1970s (Devereux 1990:53). He specifically identified prehistoric monuments as a source of connection and continuity with a past that was spiritually richer than the present and suggested that they might have a role to play in regenerating a rural way of life articulated around a series of seasonal festivals (Blain and Wallis 2007:22; Hale 2011:87).

Festivals and Travelers

The historical processes through which the interpretation and safeguarding of places of historic and scenic importance developed in Britain formed part of the concatenation of circumstances that hardened into conflict surrounding Stonehenge from the 1970s onward. The Druids had succeeded in popularizing the notion that the site represented a “national temple,” a view that began to resonate in unexpected ways. One of the utopian ideas that emerged at the end of the 1960s was that of free music festivals, self-policing and spontaneously organized. This notion lay behind the tearing down of the fences surrounding the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 and also the planning of the Glastonbury Fayre in Somerset in 1971 by Arabella Churchill and Andrew Kerr. Kerr was inspired by John Michell in seeking to hold the Fayre at Worthy Farm, close to the location to which Joseph of Arimathea had reputedly brought the Holy Grail, within the terrestrial “Glastonbury zodiac” identified by the Theosophist Katharine Maltwood and beside the supposed ley-line linking Glastonbury Abbey with Stonehenge (Kerr 2011:190). The iconic pyramid stage was built by Bill Harkin on the basis of Michell’s study of the Great Pyramid. Henceforth, esoteric views about the ancient past and the English landscape became integral to the free festival movement. From 1974 onward, official obstruction of the national free festival at Windsor Great Park led to the emergence of a Stonehenge Free Festival (figure 15.6) held at the summer solstice, inspired by countercultural figure Wally Hope (Phil Russell). This event was initially very small in size but gained in significance from 1976, when participants entered Stonehenge alongside the Druids in order to scatter the ashes of Phil Russell, who had died under suspicious circumstances in police custody. By the final year, 1984, the festival attracted 100,000 people on National Trust land north of the A344 (Worthington and Deering 2005:5).

By this time many of the attendees were “New Age Travellers,” young people who had left the cities for a nomadic way of life in converted motor vehicles and who were viewed with suspicion by the authorities (Hetherington 1998:329; Martin 2002:724). For the travelers, Stonehenge had become a site of annual pilgrimage (figure 15.6). As Michell saw it, they “instinctively began to imitate their ancestors and gather at their national temple for free-spirited solstice ceremonies” (2005:60–61). However, the National Trust at best tolerated the festival, while the pressure of visitors on the site itself was increasingly being recognized, with access to the stone settings themselves being restricted from 1978 onward (English 2002:10). Fatefully, the travelers had attracted the attention of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, becoming closely associated with the antinuclear protest movement after the deployment of US cruise missiles at Greenham Common and Molesworth air bases, and the establishment of “peace camps” at both sites. In 1985 it was announced that the festival would not be allowed to take place, and English Heritage and the National Trust took out injunctions against eighty-three named individuals, forbidding them to enter the vicinity of the monument, as well as excluding Festival Welfare Services and the St John Ambulance Brigade (Worthington and Deering 2005:25). A convoy of 140 traveler vehicles set out from Savernake Forest on June 1, 1985, intending to break through the police cordon and enter the “exclusion zone,” but at a roadblock at Shipton Bellinger they were turned into a field, where they were attacked by 1,400 police in riot gear. People, including pregnant women, were battered with truncheons, many vehicles were destroyed, and 500 were arrested. The tactics employed by the police echoed those used against striking miners at the “Battle of Orgreave” in South Yorkshire precisely a year earlier, and they demonstrated the government’s willingness to deploy force against its perceived “enemies within.” In 1991, twenty-one of the travelers received £28,665 in civil court damages for false imprisonment, damage to property, and false arrest (Aitken and Rosenberger 2005:147). The so-called Battle of the Beanfield explains why the question of access to Stonehenge became not only a matter of heritage management but of civil liberties.

After the Beanfield

The violent aftermath of the aborted festival, the exclusion of all members of the public from Stonehenge during the summer solstice, and the declaration of a parliamentary committee in 1975 that the visitor facilities represented “a national disgrace” (Millar 2006) made it imperative to find a solution for the management of the site. The fundamental problem that such a solution must contend with is the contradiction between huge visitor numbers and the desire for an authentic experience of the site in its setting (Chippindale 2004:272). In 1992–1993, a joint English Heritage (EH) and National Trust (NT) plan identified the main objectives as the closure of the A344; the diversion of the more major A303, which runs immediately to the south of the monument; and the creation of a new and more extensive visitor center farther away from the site. This immediately introduced another stakeholder into the equation, the Department of Transport. For while the EH/NT plan agreed that the best option for the A303 was to run the road through a bored tunnel throughout most of the WHS, the Department of Transport declared this too expensive and proposed a shorter cut-and-cover tunnel, which would be more archaeologically destructive (Kennet and Young 2000:949; Wainwright 2000:338). Approaching the millennium, new attempts to solve the Stonehenge problem were prefigured by the return of the Druids for the solstice of 1998 and of a wider public under conditions of “managed access” in 2000 (English 2002:15). Under the aegis of UNESCO, a WHS Management Plan was published in 2000, which sought to harmonize the views of numerous landowners and statutory authorities on issues of landscape and heritage conservation, tourism, traffic, and archaeological research (English Heritage 2000; Hunt 1996:214). However, the Management Plan was preempted by a “Stonehenge Master Plan” presented by EH and the NT with minimal consultation, which emphasized the importance of reestablishing the “dignity and isolation of the monument,” with a particular emphasis on the removal of the roads (Wainwright 2000:340). Some commentators believed that the “Master Plan” fell short of UNESCO’s requirements for the management of a World Heritage Site, which were embodied in the management plan (Fielden 2000:947). In particular, the latter emphasized the need for the A303 to be buried in a long bored tunnel and rejected the notion that the new visitor center should be placed in the hands of a commercial operator (Baxter and Chippindale 2000:944).

The management plan was complemented by a Stonehenge Research Framework (Darvill 2005:3), which followed the agenda set by the former, in identifying an agreed set of priorities for understanding the archaeology of the WHS through a resource assessment and a strategy for future work. This framework has now been upgraded to cover both the Stonehenge and Avebury areas, identifying common research themes between the two regions (Leivers and Powell 2010:12). Again, this framework has the benefit of achieving compromise between the different stakeholders involved in the WHS. Another recent achievement has been the creation of a new visitor center. After abortive attempts to build a facility at Larkhill, Fargo North, and Countess East, the new center at Airman’s Corner in the west of the WHS was opened on December 18, 2013, following the closure and removal of the A344. The new center is intended to act as a “gateway” into the Stonehenge landscape and contains displays of artifacts as well as audiovisual facilities and a group of reconstructed Late Neolithic houses based on those excavated at Durrington Walls (figure 15.7).

More intractable has been the issue of the A303, which represents the principal trunk road from London to the southwest of England and passes within 165 meters of Stonehenge. Here the comparison with Chaco Culture National Heritage Park is clearest, for in each case the protection of the “core” monuments is not in doubt, but the integrity of the wider landscape is threatened by contemporary developments around its periphery (Higgins 2019:11). Years of stalemate over the best way to manage the Stonehenge landscape have meant that during the summer months, the overused A303 is regularly jammed with stationary vehicles with their engines running. Owing to expense, the plan for upgrading the A303 was again dropped in 2007, but in January 2017 it was reinstated as one of nine schemes managed by Highways England Southwest that will collectively create a southwest expressway. English Heritage have agreed to Highways England’s proposal of a 2.9 km bored dual carriageway tunnel, on the condition that the western portal is moved farther away from the Normanton Down group of prehistoric burial mounds than initially intended. The proposal is opposed by the Stonehenge Alliance, composed of the Ancient Sacred Landscape Network, the Campaign for Better Transport, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, and Friends of the Earth and Rescue (the British Archaeological Trust). The alliance notes that the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS)–UK, the official advisor to UNESCO on cultural World Heritage Sites, has expressed concern over the 2.9 km tunnel and the 1.6 km of new dual carriageway that would be constructed within the WHS (Stonehenge Alliance 2019). Troublingly, the eastern part of this carriageway and the expressway flyover at the Countess Roundabout are perilously close to Blick Mead, a long-lived Mesolithic site with evidence for the hunting of aurochs and for far-flung social contacts (Jacques and Phillips 2014). A 4.6 km tunnel would remove the need for any new road, and a 6 km tunnel would remove the entire surface road from the World Heritage Site. Such long tunnel solutions are supported by the Council for British Archaeology (2017) and the Prehistoric Society, but at its Annual General Meeting in October 2017, the National Trust voted to support the Highways England Plan (Stonehenge Alliance 2017). It is apparently unlikely that government will accept such a model on the grounds of expense, and it is argued that the 2.9 km tunnel is the best compromise that can presently be achieved (Higgins 2019:10). However, it is open to question whether future generations will agree that the destruction of archaeological heritage in the name of political expediency is an acceptable outcome.

By complete contrast, a case has been made for the retention of the A303 in its present form, on the grounds that it represents an integral part of the historic landscape. Dan Hicks (2017) argues that the “scraping” of later elements from the surroundings of Stonehenge—including the café, the cottages, and the horse hospital—has the effect of creating an artificial “heritage landscape” that never existed in the past. It is a tasteful museum landscape that has stopped developing and become static, an embodiment of middle-class values and aesthetics. Hiding the A303 in a long tunnel has the effect of stopping passing motorists from viewing the stones as they head toward Devon and Cornwall on vacation, obliterating the valued democratic experiences of a mobile public.