The Old Way is Often the Best - Or: How English Heritage and Others Have Abused Our Heritage

Anyone wishing to enter the debate on the A303 and the traffic problems a single-carriageway road generates around Stonehenge – recently worsened by the closure of the A344 at the behest of English Heritage  - should have at least a little understanding of the history of the A303 and the surrounding tracks and paths.

Ok, let’s begin with ancient history and few statements of the blindingly obvious.  These are needed to understand the nonsense of English Heritage’s desire to return Stonehenge to its ancient setting.

At some point in time, and no one knows when for sure, ancient man wandered past the area of what eventually became the site of Stonehenge.  Over time, many more people, individuals, family groups, tribes wandered past the same area.  They may have wandered randomly across the ancient landscape, but people don’t tend to move around in that way; they find the easiest and safest routes, the routes that take them to water, food and shelter and they also move towards sites that mean something to them.  For instance, they wandered westwards in Neolithic times, crossing the River Till and later building a wooden bridge whose remains were found recently in Winterbourne Stoke. The more people who travelled that way, the more these paths became permanent features of the landscape.  Most importantly of all, of course,  the scale of the paths and tracks both matched, and was a reflection of the transport needs of pre-Stonehenge southern England.

Once someone had the bright idea of building a wooden prototype (probably during the Mesolithic period (8500 to 7000 BC)) for what would eventually become a glorified rockery in the middle of Wiltshire, paths, tracks and even fairly wide roadways would have been apparent across Salisbury Plain – leading right up to the site of Stonehenge.  Paths pre-dated that pre-dated every phase of the henge.  Routes would have been adapted and adopted to meet the transport needs of the day.  It seems likely that later still, when Stonehenge came into use, paths and tracks would continue to evolve to meet changing needs.

One of these routes already was, or became, a major East-West route; later known variously as the Old Way, the Harrow Way (Harroway) and even the Hoary Way.  It would have been used as a means of travelling east-west for trading, to move armies rapidly (a Herewag or Herepath) or as a route to, or past, a sacred place (Stonehenge?) and again the routes around the stones would have been altered to meet the changing volume of human traffic and other emerging traffic needs.

Around 1930, the A344 seems to have been the dominant road, at least judging by this old photo of a car deciding whether to fork left towards Exeter or continue right, past the AA Box, towards the Stonehenge Cafe:

Judging by the road positioning, the driver is either indecisive or a foreign visitor. This priority probably continued until the Trunk Road Act of 1936.

This evolution of traffic and routes to meet current transport requirements carried on for thousands of years, until 2013, when, at the behest of English Heritage the A344 – A303 link was closed in June 2013.

Call me a cynic if you will, but isn’t it ironic, that the body charged with protecting our heritage has itself buggered up so much of it around Stonehenge?  They clearly seem to want to bugger up yet more of it by closing other tracks and by-ways in the vicinity of the stones, without any historical imperative for doing so.

If English Heritage had any integrity at all, returning Stonehenge to the ancient landscape they claim to want would be a very different prospect to the Disney-fied future they seem to have planned.  They and other agencies involved should honour the evolutionary nature of our English heritage by re-opening the A344, create a dual carriageway to relieve the beleaguered village of Winterbourne Stoke, move the path of the A303 away from the stones, or bury it alongside them, dualling that section as well, all to meet the very obvious transport and economic demands.

If they refuse and obfuscate, as seems inevitable? Well, you have to consider how the A344 and the A303 got there in the first place?  They arose by force of public opinion and use – not through public inquiry, planning consent and parliamentary pontification.  One thing I am sure English Heritage would not disagree about – and that is we should always learn the lessons of history and act upon them.