ace camp outside the cruise missile base at Greenham
Common, and the phrase 'Peace Convoy' began to be stencilled on some of
the vehicles. In reality there was no single entity called the peace convoy,
rather than a fluid pool of travellers constantly mingling and splitting
up - but to the government of the time they appeared to be 'an army of
medieval brigands' (Rosenburger 1991).
1984 was the last year that the Stonehenge free festival
would be tolerated. Some 30,000 people attended, and left the site in
something of a mess, although the cost of clearing up should not be overestimated.
The festival had been run by a committee, who, amongst other things, had
banned professional drug dealers from the site. However, some of the latrine
pits which were dug were close to the ploughed-out round barrows of the
Cursus Group, and may possibly have done some archaeological damage (Fowler
1990). In late 1984, the National Trust announced that no festival would
be allowed on its land the following year. This was followed in April
of 1985 by a joint announcement by the National Trust and English Heritage,
supported by Wiltshire County Council, that both the festival and the
Druids would be banned from Stonehenge itself. The monument would be totally
off limits to the public for the summer solstice. Injunctions were served
to ban particular individuals from entering the county of Wiltshire in
June. Negotiations were undertaken by Green CND to attempt to find an
alternative site for the festival, but the National Trust declined, arguing
that they should not be expected to finance any such event. In late May,
a convoy of vehicles gathered at Savernake, south of Avebury, with the
aim of moving on Stonehenge and securing the festival site. They set off
on the first of June, and were met at Cholderton by 1,000 police in riot
gear. The vehicles left the road and assembled in a field where, after
an uneasy truce, the police moved in and began to pull people from vans,
beat them up, wreck vehicles and destroy personal belongings. This was
the so-called 'Battle of the Beanfield', which resulted in one of the
longest ever civil actions against the police, ending in the award of
£23,000 in damages.
We have dwelt at some length on the recent events surrounding
the question of access to Stonehenge. The has principally been as a means
of demonstrating the way in which the monument and its landscape are implicated
in a series of conflicts of interest between contemporary groups: English
Heritage, the National Trust, the local Council, the Druids, the travellers,
the military, archaeologists, and so on (Bender and Edmonds 1992). In
part, this serves to explain the vexed character of the present debate.
Over the years, solutions to the problems of the proximity of roads to
the monument and of the siting of visitor facilities have repeatedly foundered
on differences between these various communities. For instance, in 1992-3
an architectural design by Edward Cullinan for a visitor centre screened
by trees at Larkhill was approved, but the plan was refused by Salisbury
District Council (Sudjic 1993).
The present plan for a tunnel
At present a two-lane road, the A344, passes within a few metres of the
northern boundary of the stone circle at Stonehenge. The A303, a major
but also two-lane road, comes within 200 metres of the opposite side of
the stone circle. The junction of the A344 and A303 lies 600 metres to
the east of the circle (see Figure 2). The stone circle stands at the
centre of a World Heritage site, in a depression known as the Stonehenge
Bowl. The A303 enters the World Heritage site from the east at Countess
Roundabout and from the west at Longbarrow cross-roads. Almost five and
a half kilometres of the A303 lie within the World Heritage site. An agreement
to close and turf over the first two kilometres of the A344 was reached
in the early 1990s, but no agreement on how to deal with the A303 was
achieved at that time.
In 1997 the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology
published a report which set out a range of alternative improvem