Times. Stonehenge -Fleecing Tourists

Fleecing Tourists Is Our Heritage

By Kent Barker

Somewhere in the box of family photos in the attic there’s a picture of a (much) younger Barker at Stonehenge. If I’m not actually standing on one of the menhirs, then I’m certainly in the centre of the circle touching it.

This wonderfully tactile experience was brought to mind on a trip to the West Country recently for a funeral. Myrtle was being good in the back of the car, but heavy panting hinted she needed to stretch her paws.

I was aware that changes had been happening at the stones and that a proposal to build a massively expensive tunnel to hide the A303 from visitors had been resurrected. So I thought we’d take a look.  And what a depressing experience it turned out to be.

Now, let me come clean. It was my first trip in probably 50 years and so I have no idea what the ‘visitor experience’ was like until the new centre was opened in 2013. Though I gather it was fairly minimalist: entrance via a tunnel under an ‘A’ road, no proper café facilities and only Portaloos available.

But my first impression of the new reception area was: what on earth is this awful tin roof, apparently supported by dozens of redundant Acrow props, covering disparate huts with ticket kiosk, tea room and gift shop? It looked completely out of place on the Wiltshire plain and had no resonance whatever with ancient barrows or henges. The new car park, which covers half a hillside, costs £5 to get into – though it’s refundable with your entry fee for the stones. And how much is that? £16 for an adult and £41 for a family. Sorry, HOW MUCH!!!!????? Oh, alright, £14.50 and £37.50 if you don’t add, as you are strenuously encouraged to, gift aid.

OK, that’s quite a lot, but perhaps the experience will be worth it. It does include a shuttle bus ride 2.4 kilometres down the recently closed A344 to the circle. But we didn’t want to travel in a noisy, smelly, diesel-powered motor bus, (if ever there was case for a fleet of electric vehicles, this is it!)  So Myrtle and I decided to walk. And that was pretty miserable too. A white line painted on the road demarcates the pedestrian route. So, although you can see the lovely surrounding countryside, you are actually walking along a tarmacked road with buses passing every minute or so. We finally found a proper public footpath and set off across a field full of unfenced cows with overly-curious calves. I didn’t mind, but Myrtle—and a fair number of other visitors—were severely intimidated by them.

So eventually the public footpath arrives at the prehistoric monument? Well no. Actually it arrives at a building site in front of the monument. There’s a pile of polystyrene cups, sandwich wrappers and plastic bags in one corner and mounds of earth and rubble strewn around. Ah, this must be the old car park that closed a year ago. How come they’ve not finished grassing it over in time for this season? Better not to ask.

Anyway, if you walk round the back of the building site you can get quite close to the stones. Yes, there’s an ugly wire fence in the way, but then the punters who’ve paid their £41 can’t get much nearer. They are restricted to walkways and barriers within the compound. So there we stand, walkers and official visitors, ten metres or more from the monument itself, unable to go into the circle, unable to touch the stones, unable to marvel at the construction as I had done half a century earlier.

As we set off back to the visitor centre car park we met a man in a threadbare sweater advising tourists they don’t need to pay the extortionate entrance fee but can, as we did, walk round via the public footpath and see the stones for nothing.

“You can’t be very popular with English Heritage?” I suggest. He nods. It turns out he’s been objecting to the ‘improvements’ at the World Heritage Site for years. “It’s absurd. This is a public byway so you don’t need to use the visitor car park at all. And there’s technically a footpath running right through the compound along the now closed A344. And the proposals for a tunnel are absolutely crazy. They’d wreck important archaeological sites and be a complete waste of £2 billion.”

Certainly you can’t help feeling angry on behalf of the tourists who’ve been fleeced of their entrance money and given a rotten experience to boot. If only they’d been allowed to wander at will and wonder at the 4,000 year old circle set among the most extraordinary Neolithic and Bronze Age burial sites. There must be a better way than this to ‘do’ heritage.