Posted on 03/05/2008 7:08:40 PM PST by blam
Edited on 03/06/2008 6:57:48 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
The final insult
It is our greatest monument, on a par with the pyramids. But soon it will be plagued by Tesco juggernauts. Why don't we care about Stonehenge? Jonathan Jones finds out
Interactive guide to Stonehenge
Wednesday March 5, 2008
The Guardian (UK)
The winter light is kind to the stones. Its mild greyness reveals the beauty of the blue lichen that has grown for thousands of years over their surfaces and even, from the right point on the path, lets you see the sinister shape of a bronze-age dagger carved into bleak rock. I'd love to be able to say it's an encounter that leads me far from the modern world into eerie reveries - but that would be a lie.
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".
GGG Ping.
Didn’t some American family, on vacation, knock these stones to the ground a few years back?
Classic!
I never understood the fascination with stonehenge. It’s just what’s left over of a fort after the small stones were swiped to build hearths in peasant huts.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=stonehenge&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=15
You can see here just how close the roads pass by Stonehenge, you have to wonder about who decided to build them there.
For a minute there, I thought they were putting a McDonalds in the middle of it.
To Post #6!
The first time we visited Stonehenge it was just a box to check off on the living in England list. It was far more impressive than I expected. For a good perspective on this region I would suggest a book called “Sarum” by Rutherford. BTW I love Tesco too.
I’d pay to see Banksy to tag Stonehenge.
And the food concession at stonehenge is god awful, even by working class British cuisine standards. A nearby Tesco could only improve things.
uuhhh - been there, seen that. Not sure, but don’t think so.
Then again...my Dad was a naval officer and an astronomer. He and my mother visited Stonehenge before it was fenced off, and he spent hours computing the solar progressions and seeing how it worked.
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I’d build a Wal-Mart around it....
Any State Highway Department here would do the same. Stonehenge has gotten off lightly; if it were a Civil War battlefield, the road would go smack through the center.
If Stonehenge were in Northern Virginia, it would have been bulldozed years ago to make room for townhouses or a strip mall. A stone or two might have been left as a gateway ornament to Stonehenge Commons.
Uh.....no....
That's not at all what Stonehenge was...wow.
Slim
lmao
where did you hear that?
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