Stonehenge- history.

The attitude to prehistoric monuments has changed considerably during my life time.

When I was a child, aged just eight or nine years old, Stonehenge was only just on the map.

But it did have a car park.
This was the mid 1960’s, there were no guards or wardens of any kind, there was no hint of the troubles in Stonehenge’s past. or yet to come.

In my memory, Stonehenge was a very big field with large stones, toppled and balancing. A lonely, windswept and too silent location beside a road on Salisbury plain.

When I visited again, in the early eighties, the stones of Stonehenge were surrounded by little pyramids created to house guards.

It was an amazing change.

Stonehenge was now a defended space.


In the 1980s New Age travelers dressed in tie dye, all multicolour, dread locked with ear-lobes full of rings, would beg for money off any straight edge visitor (who didn't have a small child with him or her).

Mike Pitts ran the wonderful museum there, and his partner had created the best vegetarian restaurant in England.

The New Age travelers had started their nomadic trek during the 1970s.

People would spend the summer driving in convoys of buses, cars, and vans between festivals and living in their vehicles.

It ended in the 1980’s, the 5th or 6th of February 1985 to be precise. In June 1982 approximately 150 vehicles drove to Greenham Common USAF base after the annual Stonehenge Free People's Festival.

Greenham Common was ostensibly a part of ‘our’ national defense system.

It was the location of American nuclear weapons (Pershing and Cruise, the soldiers would take them out for rides on their trucks).

A lot of people resented the paranoia the weapons represented; most people just hoped that the game of mutually assured destruction was working.

I had planned to go there,. But going was dependent upon failing my radiography exams.

I passed, I got a job; which tells you exactly how counter culture I really am!

The traveler convoy set up camp at Greenham  until the night of 5-6 February 1985 when police and military, destroyed the protest in the name of freedom.

A much abused word.


Class isn't a word I care to use.
I don't believe in class, but Britain sure is a land of different cultures.

In the 1980s Stonehenge became the front line where the vaguely extropian, Gnostic culture of Britain's Conservative government took up arms against the 'live for the moment' pagans.

Capitalism only sits well with an earth centered ethos expressed in the midsummer festivals if there is money to be made.

More than that. Parties and wild celebrations were considered, by the Conservatives to be degenerate;  the old enemy; a return to the Bacchanalia.

But not even the outrageously bloody Bacchanal as found in Euripides which would, if revived today, be something worth banning.

The horror of Pagan Stonehenge was the Roman interpretation; a fall from the true, Greek Bacchanalia. It was a battle against drug-crazed and drunken hoards taking antisocial and treasonable liberties.

A fall from the white-marble Classical Greek past (that never existed).

As in Rome it was axiomatic to the Conservatives that the degenerate Bacchanalia signified a catastrophic end to law and order, and law and order must be strengthened to prevent mindless chaos and destruction.

Ostensibly the war at Stonehenge was portrayed as protection.

But the damage had already taken place, in the name of preservation and exploration.

Those had taken bags full of cremated ash from the ground.

To unlock the hidden code.
And incidentally find a burial with grave-goods to rival Howard Carter's tomb of Tutankhamen.

Today, no archaeologist would be allowed to behave as archaeologists of the past did, but unfortunately no one will ever recover the quantity of information that has been destroyed, literally by the sack loads.

The Pagans and Hippies, Joe Blogs and family, and assorted fans of Hawkwind who went to Stonehenge to see the midsummer sun rise and sat on the high triathlons were guilty, in the minds of those determined to see decorum established and preserved, of using the stones as they appear to be.

The Pagans, the Travelers were guilty of taking the stones at face value.
Of acting as if 'they own the place'.

Stonehenge has always been a dramatic mix of theater and temple, and the people who gathered there were not going to worry about any changes they themselves made (in a universe whose only sure law is that everything changes).

Especially when the true infrastructure of our world could be destroyed in a mega tonne flash of Plutonium madness.

The war at Stonehenge was and still is, about meaning.

It is a war between Transcendent Gnosticism and a more immanent belief system.

The Gnostic view casts Stonehenge as a code-book containing hidden order, an assemblage of transcendent information frozen invisible within the mother of all henges. And Those of a Gnostic persuasion demand their right to treat Stonehenge as an un-deciphered text.

Unfortunately immanance is a spirituality more earth bound, more here and now. Gnostiocism, with its dislike of the materiality of this world, will always be at odds with it. Stonehenge for the Travelers became a location in this world with deep connections to the other.

Stonehenge was,  and perhaps always was. the place to meet and trade, to party and to be in awe.

To be fair, the Conservatives either then or now, would not recognize them selves as Gnostics or extropians.

Rather they prefer to see themselves as  guardians of our heritage, charged with the difficult and expensive task of  protecting it from the multi-coloured party of travelers, dancing in the ‘garden of the sun’. In other words, protecting 'our heritage  from naive children who would, sooner or latter conspire to drain the nations wealth as they grew older, got ill, reproduced, expected the state to help them out.

Stonehenge today is an even more difficult place to understand. The car park is mostly full. The shop is teeming.

But if you can get in touch with one of the Gate keepers’ and get yourself some time within the circle, you will experience the strange deadening of sound and something like claustrophobia.

Oddly, I like Stonehenge more now than I used to, but only because I ditched any idea that I should like it.

After you have driven away towards Devizes, quitting the military reservation, you may find Avebury.

Avebury is quiet, and used.
It succeeded where the Battle of the Bean-field failed.
People live within and around the circles and there are sheep.

Back in Avebury 2012, the multicoloured crew of New Age-ers has gone, leaving only a new wave of books in the gift shop to explain dowsing and labyrinths, Wicca and Druidry.

Sparkly crystals in silver adorn bracelets and earrings, pendants and wands; un-dyed wool, and Kendal mint cake make the shop (by the post office) a treasure trove.

The National Trust now administer the whole site. Their ethos of eighteenth century order turns the massive henges and stones into a curious, country park  'Capability Brown must have planned the grounds, so unusual! A rustic folly, a one off, a never to be repeated riot of stone surrounded by a most impressive haha'.

Avebury is a good place to be, still more authentically British in its acceptance of 'eccentricity' than Stonehenge dares to be, and perhaps in its way, more grown up 'Traveler' that it can ever admit.

So it goes.