One of the great things about living in or near Southampton is that it’s really easy to leave and go somewhere else. There’s a nice big motorway that brings you almost to the doorstep, several train stations, a ferry port and of course for the seriously affluent, there are the local busses.As a PhD student I have way too much time on my hands and so have taken to exploring. In 6 years in Edinburgh I never once did a ghost tour, I refused to pay the £75 to visit the castle, I failed to set foot on a city tour bus and I only discovered the royal museum was free (because all government owned museums in Scotland are free) in my last few weeks.
To be fair my reasoning for this was pretty sound, the beer in Scotland is better and I lived within falling distance of the greatest real ale pub in the land (‘Cloisters’ if anyone is going that way).
However, English beer is rubbish. To illustrate this point, my local has 5 real ale pumps which dispense 5 types of IPA, essentially the same watery beer 5 times. The urge to explore has become that much greater.
My fellow explorer, Jim, and I grabbed the AA road map and had a look, where should we go….? The choice was huge: Oxford, London, Salisbury, Cornwall, Bournemouth, The Isle of Wight, France…
One choice stood out, Stonehenge. Jim had never seen Stonehenge and I had only seen it from my car, travelling at several miles an hour. We made the decision to be grown up and cultured. We would drive to Stonehenge and display our new found maturity and revel in our new found love of places of historical interest…
‘SIX POUNDS FIFTY TO STAND IN A FIELD AND LOOK AT SOME ROCKS? F**K OFF’.
I don’t think the other people in the queue were appreciating my new found maturity or love of places of historical interest. Jim was however.
You have two choices when visiting Stonehenge, a visitor attraction operated by the utterly shameless money grabbing English Heritage. You can pay £6.50 to walk under the road in order to re-emerge 20 feet later in a field where you then walk around the collection of rocks in a big circle, to then walk back under the road and out. Alternatively you can cross over the road, and stand looking over the fence, not really much further away from the collection of rocks than the mostly foreign tourists who have just shelled out nearly seven quid each.
It is true that neither Jim nor I contributed to cost of maintaining this fantastic stone monument for future visitors, but I do begrudge the cash cow use of Stonehenge, why does it need maintaining? How do you maintain some rocks! Stonehenge has been in the same place for about 4500 years, English Heritage was set up in 1983. Obviously it should be protected from vandals, but Stonehenge is not something you stumble across and decided to paint, it’s in a field 2 miles from the nearest town. You would have to REALLY want to vandalise it. Prevention method; CCTV, a large fence and a security guard, charge everyone a quid to get in, job done.
Incidentally, there are plans afoot to re-route the A303 so the monument can no longer been seen from the road. Soon visitors will have to approach up wind and blindfolded.
That said it’s a place everyone should see. It’s a World Heritage site and one of the most famous prehistoric monuments on earth. Something about those rocks makes you want to just stand and look at them- and it can’t be the entrance fee, we didn’t pay it.
There is definitely a magic about Stonehenge, it’s a place that reminds you that you’re very young, and you’re not going to be around for long. Sadly that sense of magic and mysticism is devalued by the cynicism of those who exploit visitors to this amazing monument.
