Yesterday, Barb, her daughter Maddy, and I were our way to the Jolly Farmer Cliddesden for dinner after visiting some interesting sights. I looked to the side of the road and saw what looked like Stonehenge with some people and sheep. I gave my phone to Barb, and she took some pictures for me:
Yup. It was Stonehenge alright. We didn’t realize you could see it from a nearby road. The last time we visited, we took a about a two-hour bus ride from London to the entrance. This is from the opposite side.
It turns out that A303 goes right by it:
The visitor center is much further away as seen in the upper left-hand corner in the picture below:
After getting home today, I went out to do some errands. It was such a pleasure to drive on the correct side of the road. And so many of the roads there were very narrow and without shoulders.
Are they letting people walk through the actual monument (the stones) again? The first time I was there was for a summer solstice in 1976, and they had allowed a small group of neo-Druids access to the “altar stone” for sunrise…which came up right over the heel-stone, showing that the builders knew their sun cycles.
I went back in (I think) 1996 or so as part of a business trip when I had a half-day before I had to catch my flight. They had completely eliminated access to the monument, fearing that so many people were visiting that the turf was being trampled down too much, and that the standing stones might start to have their stability affected. But from the pictures it appears that people are walking right through it again.
A MUCH bigger stone circle (albeit with smaller standing stones) can be see at the village of Avebury, where the moat/ditch is an enormous circle almost surrounding the current village.
I don’t believe that I’d want to visit the UK again, given the general nature of the complete lack of rule-of-law. Besides which, I haven’t flown in a commercial flight since 2002, refusing to check my constitutional rights at the airport entrance.
No. People are kept some distance from the stones.
Barb and I will continue to go to England as long as her daughter continues her education (a PhD. in computer science) there. Her daughter plans to leave once she graduates.
Didn’t the “Far Side”, have a cartoon about the Stonehenge builders losing funding for the new mall so it was left un-finished?