ort did not appear until
1995 (Cleal, Walker and Montague 1995).
The origins of the debate over road access to Stonehenge,
which this dicument addresses, can be found in the period immediately
after the First World War. During the War, much of the area immediately
surrounding Stonehenge had been used as an aerodrome. There were makeshift
buildings associated with this, a horse hospital, a pair of cottages,
a café and a series of advertising hoardings, and when some of
the land was given back to its owners by the War Office in 1927 they proceeded
set up a pig farm. The struggle to improve the immediate surroundings
of the site began in 1930, with a national subscription organised by Sir
Lionel Earle to buy 1500 acres of this land and turn it over to the National
Trust (Chippindale 1983: 174). This set up a situation in which the monument
was in the hands of the Office of Works, later the Department of the Environment,
and eventually English Heritage, but the surrounding land was owned by
the National Trust. The clutter on the land was torn down, and with the
increasing access to motor transport in the inter-war years visitors climbed
to 20,000 a year. In 1935 a patch of the National Trust land was leased
as a car park, to discourage people from parking around the monument itself.
It was this on-the-spot decision which effectively decided where the visitor
facilities which still exist today should be located. In the post-war
period this area was tarmaced, and an underground café, toilets,
bookshop and entrance tunnel under the road added. In 1933 the Office
of Works had recommended that this road, the A344 from Amesbury to Shrewton,
should be closed.
Between 1950 and 1964 another campaign of excavations was
undertaken, by Stuart Piggott, Richard Atkinson and J.F.S. Stone. Initially,
this digging was undertaken in order to facilitate the restoration and
concreting of certain stones, but gradually Atkinson began to dig more
and more in an attempt to make sense of Hawley's records (Cleal, Walker
and Montague 1995: 15-17). The ad-hoc way in which these excavations took
place meant that rather limited records were kept. In 1956 Atkinson published
his popular account of the site, which was subsequently revised several
times and reprinted by Penguin. Atkinson pulled together all of the stratigraphic
information and established a three-phase sequence for the site (Atkinson
1956). However, being a popular book, it contained rather little of the
primary evidence. In the early 1990s, Hawley's and Atkinson's records
were collected and worked through under the aegis of the Trust for Wessex
Archaeology, resulting in the definitive publication (Lawson 1992).
In the meanwhile, visitor numbers continued to soar, and
by 1962 the grass in the centre of the site had died off. Eventually,
the authorities replaced it with orange gravel. By the mid-1970s, over
600,000 people visited Stonehenge annually, climbing to 815,000 in 1977,
when the stones were finally closed off, and a green tarmac walkway across
the earthwork enclosure put in. From 1976 to 1979, a governmental Stonehenge
Working Party sat, and produced a series of recommendations, including
the closure of the A344 and the removal of the car park and visitor facilities
to Stonehenge Bottom. At around the same time, the Royal Commission on
Historical Monuments undertook (and published) an inventory of sites of
archaeological sites within the environs of Stonehenge (RCHME 1979). This
in turn was to lead in the early 1980s to the Trust for Wessex Archaeology's
Stonehenge Environs Project, directed by Julian Richards, and intended
to put the monuments in their context through fieldwalking and sample
excavation (Richards 1990). So the late 1970s saw a growing awareness
of the landscape context of Stonehenge, and a recognition that Stonehenge
should be presented to the public in this wider context. The Stonehenge
Working Party compiled its report in 1979, but this was never published,
as it coincided with the coming to power of a new Conservative government,
which intended radical changes in 