Even at dawn, when shadows have yet to form and mist lies low in the folds of nearby farmland, it is hard to experience Stonehenge without the sound of traffic on the A303. That is one reason why the government has finally earmarked the money for a 1.8-mile tunnel beneath it. The other is that the existing two-lane stretch of road is a horrendous bottleneck. The great trunk road from the home counties to the southwest narrows and grinds to a halt as it passes the obelisks.
The tunnel would be a dual carriageway. You might think that it would please everyone, but you would be wrong. Five archaeology professors have written to The Times today to warn that the tunnel as envisaged would imperil an archaeological site known as Blick Mead, located near Stonehenge and under a proposed flyover at the east end of the tunnel. Blick Mead was discovered only 11 years ago and contains razor-sharp flint tools nearly 10,000 years old.
No other stone-age site in Britain was continuously occupied for so long, say the professors. Our forebears lived and died here from the end of the last ice age to the time of Stonehenge itself.
The fear is that the engineering required to speed Londoners’ journeys to Devon and beyond would raise the water table and destroy organic remains buried in the chalk slopes around Blick Mead, yet to be dated and studied. The historian Tom Holland says that to let this happen would be “an act of vandalism that would shame our country and our generation”.
Engineers who dig in haste repent at leisure. The past is priceless, because to understand it is to understand the present. So, what to do? One option is a much longer, more costly tunnel. Another is to re-route this section of the A303 entirely. The consultation now under way should consider both with a view to posterity, and not just to cost.