Message #91005

[Bianca]

The current Stonehenge Riverside Project aims to link the monument to its landscape and adjacent prehistorical sites such as Durrington Walls, Woodhenge and Sidbury (not Silbury) Hill near Tidworth. Its leader is Mike Parker Pearson, whose speciality is archaeological tha natology. It is not surprising, then, that he is persuaded of the probity of his Madagascan colleague Ramilisonina's observation that it is "blindingly obvious - this is all for the ancestors". It will do until the next conjecture is mooted. What won't do is the persistent governmental failure to address the problem of traffic, preferably by rerouting the A303 to the north through Bulford and Larkhill, army camps which are aesthetic disgraces and entirely expendable.

Hill is dauntingly comprehensive and often drily funny. Stonehenge has long been a magnet for devotees of extravagant belief systems. She gives us many species of druid, including some in false beards, the Universal Bond of the Sons of Men, whose leader was the inventor of Sanatogen tonic wine, Inigo Jones's assertion that the monument was Roman, and James Fergusson's amendment that it was a post-Roman Buddhist temple. She is by no means dismissive of John Michell's once-reviled theories and notes how they are now accepted by academe as they were by the untidy but harmless New Age travellers assaulted in "the Beanfield" at Cholderton crossroads in 1985 by 1,400 uniformed, helmeted bullies from six forces under the command of Wiltshire's deputy chief constable Lionel Grundy.



newstatesman.com/articles/2008/1024/024_p54