Stonehenge

 May 25, 2025

Rapscallion Magazine Feature: a new visitor centre, a massive car park and vegan pasties on the menu – but at least the stones remain the same at Stonehenge

By Harry Mottram: Stonehenge is many things but in the 21^st century it’s also a monument to the evolution of the British tourist industry. In 1966 we picnicked at Stonehenge on the way back from London in my mum’s Morris Oxford. Then the road ran right past it, there was a hut selling tickets and books, a toilet and a subway that took visitors under the road to the monument where we could sit on the stones. No fences, no wardens and no interpretation boards. And along with a few fellow visitors we walked our dog, ate our sandwiches, sipped tea from a thermos and may or may not have scratched our initials on the altar stone.

In May 2025 I visited the English Heritage site for the second time – this time by bicycle – and although the stones remain the same it’s the visitor centre that’s been transformed. Instead of a few dozen visitors when I last pondered the meaning of the stones in the 1960s now there are thousands of tourists and day trippers there. A huge new visitor centre has been built – the size of a small airport terminal – plus a massive carpark that any supermarket would be proud of and a fleet of buses to transport the people down the road to the stones. And everywhere are helpful interpretation boards, and with a downloadable app for a running commentary and an exhibition both inside and outside – so there’s no excuse not to gain a rudimentary understanding of the history of the place, the Avenue and the different stones that make up the monument.

That said I stood next to one couple – the man said to his wife that all the stones were brought from Scotland – and she said it was a shame they didn’t finish it. As you circle the stones on a perimeter path – you are not allowed in amongst them now – it’s an education to listen into conversations from people who either didn’t bother with the interpretations and exhibitions or had made up their own minds. A conversation between three young men dressed in black with the tell-tale graphics of goths on their hoodies were putting forward the idea that it was built by a pre-communism communist society. While nearby a South African couple were mystified as to why the neolithic people had brought the Blue Stones from West Wales when there were perfectly good stones available locally. As one of them said ‘they [the Neolithic people] hadn’t thought it through.’ Then there were the self-appointed experts in family groups (always men) who were busy explaining the intricate history of Stonehenge to their bored looking children and despairing partners. “Look,” they’d say, “that’s the blood stone where they sacrificed teenagers who complained they were bored.” Although the most useful tip I overheard from one elderly chap leading a party of grey-haired folk was, ‘the toilets are over there.’

Much has been written, filmed and documented about Stonehenge and although we now have a comprehensive idea of the sequence of its construction, its history and the types of stones it incorporates we still have no real knowledge of the religious and ceremonial practices it was intended for – although it is obviously connected to the seasons, the winter and summer solstices and presumably the farming year. The best we can do is to look at similar Neolithic structures around the world and they largely are built on the say so of a ruling elite or family – mainly through coercion, at the point of a sword, or on the pretext of worshiping various gods. As much as I like the idea of a Utopian society collectively pulling together over many centuries surely there was an element of compulsion since it needed a large number of workers – who would have had better things to do than dragging stones hundreds of miles to Salisbury Plain. Whoops – there I go speculating like all the other amateur historians on Youtube.

While there I cycled down the track to Lark Hill and on down to Woodhenge where concrete posts mark where the timber henge was excavated in the 1920s by Maud and Ben Cunnington. It’s the little sister to the one up the road and it was built around the same time – probably as a sacred site. It’s free to enter but there wasn’t one single person visiting it. A couple were walking their dog over the road by the interpretation boards explaining Durrington Walls – an excavated site of a small Neolithic town thought to be where the builders and their families lived. And in a field up the road was the Cuckoo Stone – a lone Sarson stone – and the site of a shrine – so it is supposed. These together with the impossible to detect Avenue are slightly underwhelming and not great as backdrops for selfies which perhaps is the reason they had so few visitors. The Stonehenge Cursus is also near impossible to spot – a long oblong shaped enclosure now lost to view in the fields – its bank and ditch barely detectable. Durrington Walls, the Avenue and the Cursus can only really be appreciated from the air – since I’m not a skylark I had to imagine them – and more importantly the hours of work by those long-lost inhabitants of the landscape that must have been put in.

Back up to the Stonehenge Visitor Centre that replaced the hut I visited in the 1960s. Built in 2013 it’s almost as much as a marvel as the stones since it has no foundations and essentially sits on the ground and is kept in place by its roof. A café, an exhibition, shop, toilets and a large atrium plus offices and storerooms – it is pretty impressive – and it took so long to upgrade the portacabin down the road at the stones for this replacement to be constructed – considering the amount of visitors the stones attract. Thankfully the A344 road that ran right past the heel stone and within yards of the stones was closed and the plan to build a tunnel under Salisbury Plain to take the traffic of the A303 away from the henge has been all but abandoned. The Visitor Centre relies on its own bore hole for water and due to the status of the land around the sacred sites, no power lines, sewage pipes or ground works are permitted which means it could be removed in the future ready for a new one without leaving much of a trace. Perhaps a replacement could be one that floats above the land when we visit in our flying cars in a hundred years time.

What the original builders of Stonehenge would make of it now I wonder. Since they liked a meat rich diet of slaughtered pigs and cattle I’m not sure they would have approved of the café with its vegetarian options and vegan pasties but they may have taken to the elderflower wine on offer – but balked at the price of £12 a bottle. I had an onion and chickpea pasty and a coffee – £8.50 – but didn’t have to pay the £3 car park fee since I was on a bicycle – and nor would they since bicycles hadn’t been invented. And since they built it, I don’t see why Neolithic time travellers would have to pay the £30 entrance fee as I did. Or buy the guidebook for £6 – which I did. But then English Heritage needs the cash since they announced that cost cuttings need to be made this year along with scores of redundancies in order to survive.

I heard quite a lot of mutterings about it being ‘pricey’ and ‘a tourist trap’ but also several comments about the ‘magical power of the stones’ and a place of ‘mystery and incredible atmosphere’. I have interviewed druids and New Age folk for work on the newspaper but I’m afraid I have a more prosaic attitude and soak up the mix of ancient and modern on display – since it makes good copy. For me it was a sort of pilgrimage to a place I vividly recall from my childhood when with my mum, my sisters, our Morris Oxford and pet dog stopped and we had a picnic. It is much changed as a tourist attraction – but the stones remain the same.

For more on Stonehenge visit https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stonehenge/