In the misty, rainy morning, pairs of bright white lights keep appearing on the near horizon, and across the grass there is the unholy spectacle of a continuous flow of cars and trucks on the A303. Amazingly, this crowded road is soon going to get worse. In February, it was revealed that Tesco plans to build a gigantic warehouse near Andover, from which it is estimated a Tesco juggernaut will emerge every minute - many of them on to the A303.
The Tesco "MegaShed" is just the final, farcical insult after the terrible news that hit Stonehenge three months ago. Just before Christmas, after nearly two decades of ambitious planning to rescue this landscape from traffic, came a brutal government press release: Tom Harris, under-secretary of state for transport, declared that plans to enclose the A303 in a tunnel under Salisbury Plain "would not represent best use of taxpayers' money".
The total collapse of plans to save Stonehenge from traffic means that every bit of news like the Tesco MegaShed is just another callous graffito on the memory of its unknown creators. Come to think of it, why don't we just get Banksy to decorate it? The government might see votes in that. There are those, including archaeologists, who can stand back from all this with a humorous, relativist eye and say it's just another chapter in the strange history of Stonehenge. In his fascinating book Stonehenge Complete, an ironic account of all the mad, untrue things that have been said about this mystifying stone circle - from a medieval historian's claim that Merlin transported it from Ireland, where it had been built by giants, to modern theories about UFOs - the archaeologist Christopher Chippindale has suggested that cleaning up the landscape would be just another form of inauthenticity.
Why don't we care more about Stonehenge? One editorial commented after the recent DfT announcement in a rather weary way that only tourists went there. This isn't true, or it shouldn't be true; it's a way of avoiding the challenge of anything that wasn't built this morning. On a recent wintry weekday, when I expected a lonely encounter with the past, I was surrounded by visitors, many of them British motorists who had turned off for a break and a bit of time travel.
The first view of Stonehenge as you approach from Salisbury is a clutter of what looks like scrap metal. It reminded me of a rural junk yard, but on closer inspection this turns out to be the Stonehenge car park. You can see why English Heritage feels the need to apologise to visitors before they even reach the turnstile; plaques acknowledge the unsatisfactory state of Stonehenge and describe, with beautiful diagrams of an underground museum and visitors' centre, the utopian near-future. None of this is now going to happen.
The visitor centre we're apparently stuck with is right by the main road - not the A303 but a second busy route, the A344 - that cuts through part of Stonehenge, crossing the ancient earthwork "avenue" that was the processional route to the stones. There's the ragged car park, a cafe, a shop selling toy henges. You walk through a tunnel beneath the road on to the path that takes you around the stones at a variable distance - sometimes close enough to make out carvings, at other times so far away the monument is a silhouette. Restricted access was introduced because it was claimed the sheer number of visitors' feet and fingerprints was eroding the site. I don't object at all: I remember my first childhood visit to Salisbury Plain as a nutty 1970s circus, with kids - including me - crawling on the toppled boulders. Today's silent dignity is better; it just isn't silent enough.
One stone you can stand very close to is the Heelstone, a fantastical eroded warren of holes and pockmarks, misshapen like some monstrous face. It is one of perhaps four stones that once marked the mouth of the monument on an alignment to the north-east - so that, like other British neolithic sites, it would respond to the shafts of sunlight at sunset on midwinter's day (not, as is usually said, midsummer's day). But the A344 and a fence sealing it from the site run just feet away; you are right next to the road at what should be the most atmospheric point of all. When I was there, a tank on manoeuvres from Salisbury Plain's vast military area rumbled past.
So it's dismal, but the Department for Transport says the estimated £500m needed to bore a tunnel under the plain is a waste of money. How did we come to this? It's not as if anyone disputes that there's a problem here. A parliamentary commission described the state of Stonehenge as "a national disgrace" back in 1997, and the plans to improve it go even further back. But when you walk in the surrounding countryside you start to see what has gone wrong.
If you return from the stones to the car park, you will eventually find a stile into the fields to the north of the monument. While Stonehenge is owned by English Heritage, this land is in the custody of the National Trust. And these are not just fields: in the eyes of modern archaeology, they are an integral part of the meaning of Stonehenge. This complex and enigmatic sequence of related neolithic and bronze age mounds and earthworks can be walked over from the Stonehenge car park - and suddenly you leave the noise of the road behind. The National Trust has gradually pushed back modern farming, and is restoring this landscape to bare grassy chalk downland. You can walk the paths in a vast hanging silence and stillness, and then turn back and see Stonehenge as it should be seen - a bleak mass of stones with no truck in sight.
In 1995, a new dating sequence was established for Stonehenge: it was first created as an earthwork in the neolithic period (that is, the later stone age) - much earlier than traditionally believed - and reached its final form as a stone circle at the dawn of the bronze age. It is part of a "sacred landscape", still visible on Salisbury Plain, in which nearby Woodhenge was the circle of the living and Stonehenge the circle of their dead ancestors - at least, that's the theory currently championed by leading archaeologists, including Mike Pitts and Francis Pryor, both of whom have written lively books on the subject.
But I think this very theory is to blame for what is happening at Stonehenge. In stressing the religious meaning of the landscape as a whole, archaeology has lost sight of the uniqueness of Stonehenge as a building, and in the process pitted two organisations against each other. The National Trust has been in opposition to English Heritage plans, and contributed to the disagreements that have led to this impasse. The rival guardians forgot they were up against a state that, in the end, will always lapse into philistine accounting.
Even worse, this fashionable view of Stonehenge fails to address or evoke its singularity. Its obsession with Woodhenges, Sea Henges and Time Team demotic digging only succeeds in downgrading our greatest monument.
Stonehenge may or may not be about "the ancestors", and an opposition of wood and stone. But it's about a lot of other things, too. Like how, and why, did a preliterate people float and drag heavy bluestones from Wales to Wiltshire? How did they manage to shape the lintels - the horizontal stones on top of the great vertical stones - so they form an incredibly accurate circle? How and why did they shape and dress the stones in a way comparable to Greek architecture?
Stonehenge is a miracle, a mystery, like the ancient world sites that are its peers: the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico. This is why the tourists come. But official archaeology only tells us what we shouldn't think: we must not believe that this is about astronomy, or druids, or mathematics, let alone - as Oxbridge scholars argued in the 1950s - that the dagger carving on stone 53 betrays a link with the ancient Aegean world. No, it's the very people whose job it is to describe the unique nature of Stonehenge who make it sound as if it's nothing more exciting than all the earthworks they dig up in bogs with a couple of wooden posts stuck in the peat. Stonehenge has been talked down by the experts. And now the philistines have an excuse to treat it as if it was nothing special.
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Useful link
Stonehenge.co.uk
Stonehenge - English Heritage
Save Stonehenge
Stonehenge Organisation
Stonehenge Historic Landscape - National Trust
A303 Stonehenge - Highways Agency
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