When doing my turn on the night shift, sitting up and reading Douglas Adams to a comatose Dad through the night, I got to have some of the day to myself until it was time to relive my brother in the late afternoon. Sleeping, at least consistently, rarely felt like an option, so I would visit friends and find excuses not to be hanging out around the house.
One of these lost days I met an old friend in Andover, maybe an hour from Guildford, and we decided to kill an hour by going to Stonehenge. I’d been to Stonehenge once, on a school trip, and I have a earlier, vague recollection of driving past as a kid on the way to somewhere on a family vacation. I recall it being almost in the middle of a junction of two roads, with a rather drab visitor centre that you stepped out of and there, with no drama whatsoever, was the fence that kept parties of school kids safely away from the stones themselves.
I recall it all being rather anticlimactic and not nearly as much fun as exploring a castle, or where ever else the teachers desperate for a day out of the classroom took classes of 12 year olds for history fieldtrips.
It is a little embarrassing to admit, but I spent a few months in my late teens living literally 10 minutes away from Stonehenge in Amesbury. I was sent to RAF Boscombe Down for some training as an apprentice, I do not recall exactly for what now. Not once only did I not visit Stonehenge, I’m not even sure I was aware it was so close by.
So many years later I find myself following signs for Stonehenge and it’s not as I remember. There is a new visitor centre, with engaging exhibits, full size replica stones and stone age houses outside. It is quite wonderful and so far from the dull, uninviting place I remembered from all those years eariler.
The one thing you cannot see from the visitor centre is Stonehenge itself, that’s on the other side of a ridge. It was a fine autumn day and we decided to take the 20-minute walk across Salisbury Plain to the stones, rather than the bus.
As you crest the ridge and emerge from the trees the stones themselves come into view. It really is beautiful, and as you get closer the view becomes increasingly impressive. Not just that it was built 4500 years ago, or at the industry and effort it took to quarry and move 350 ton stones 180 miles, but that the very idea of the place. I’d really like to have heard that discussion “OK lads, I’ve got an idea… We go to Wales and quarry some rocks, and then… No quite big rocks…”
Yes the A303 runs very close, and that takes away from the setting a little, but it is now presented in a style far more worthy of such an extraordinary place.
As a quick aside, the
re is a full size replica of Stonehenge at Maryhill in Washington. We’ve been there once or twice on the Oregon Trail Rally and Maryhill Hillclimb. The replica was built by Sam Hill as a memorial to local soldiers killed in the First World War. He also commissioned the Peace Arch at the Blaine border crossing and paced the first road in the Pacific Northwest, the Maryhill Loops road where the annual hillclimb is run.
