The A303 Drive-By Guide to Stonehenge

For the motorist doing 4 mph past a World Heritage Site

You are stuck in traffic on the A303. You know this because you are reading a blog post on your phone, which I trust means you are the passenger. Somewhere ahead, beyond a Eurobox towing a caravan, is Cornwall. Somewhere to your right, rather sooner, is Stonehenge.

The official advice is to visit the visitor centre, park a mile and a half from the stones, and take a shuttle bus. This is excellent advice for people with a spare half-day and a healthy tolerance for other people's children. You, however, have a holiday cottage to get to, and the geometry of the situation is entirely in your favour: the A303 passes within about 165 metres of the monument, considerably closer than the visitor centre does, and your current speed is ideal for detailed observation. What English Heritage sells as a premium experience, the Highways Agency provides free at the point of delivery.

So here is what you are actually looking at, in order, westbound from Amesbury. Eastbound readers should hold the guide upside down.

Countess Roundabout

The jam traditionally begins here, so consider it the ticket barrier. As you crawl off the roundabout and up the hill, the wooded lump immediately on your left is Vespasian's Camp — an Iron Age hillfort that has nothing whatever to do with Vespasian, who never went near it. The name is antiquarian enthusiasm, not history. At the foot of the hill, out of sight by the springs, is Blick Mead, a Mesolithic camp where people were feasting on aurochs thousands of years before anyone at Stonehenge lifted anything heavier than an opinion. You cannot see it. Very few people can. But you have now driven past the oldest bit of the story, which is more than most visitors manage.

The King Barrows

As the road climbs, look right at the clumps of beech trees along the ridge. Those trees are planted on the New King Barrows — a cemetery of Bronze Age round barrows, each one the burial mound of somebody who mattered around 4,000 years ago. The beeches are an eighteenth-century landscaping decision, which tells you the barrows have been furniture in a gentleman's view for longer than the United States has existed.

Stonehenge Bottom

The road then drops into a dry valley. Somewhere in the grass here, invisible from the car, the Stonehenge Avenue crosses it— the earthwork processional route that once linked the monument to the River Avon. Prehistoric people approached Stonehenge along it on foot, in ceremony. You crossed as you climbed the hill in an MPV, which is at least a novel form of procession.

The Main Event

And there they are, on your right, on the skyline and then broadside on. A few points the shuttle bus commentary won't make:

You are looking at the back. Stonehenge has a front — the north-east façade, with its neat run of lintelled sarsens, faces the midsummer sunrise and, conveniently for English Heritage, the paying customers. The A303 shows you the south and south-west side, which is the ruined side. Roughly half the monument is missing from this arc: stones fallen, broken up, carted off over the centuries for bridges, buildings and ballast. Whether that sector was ever properly finished at all was a live question until a dry summer in 2013, when parchmarks revealed the buried holes of missing circle stones — spotted, as it happens, because a hosepipe didn't reach far enough. The discoverers may be known to the management of this blog.

The tall one. The single upright towering above the rest is Stone 56, the surviving half of the Great Trilithon — the largest stones on the site. Its partner fell over long ago and lies broken. Stone 56 itself was leaning at an alarming angle until 1901, when Professor William Gowland winched it upright and set it in concrete. So the most imposing thing you can see from the road is, strictly speaking, an Edwardian restoration of a prehistoric monument. It is not the only one; a fair amount of what stands today was straightened and concreted in the twentieth century. This information is best deployed loudly at the summer solstice.

What you can't see. The Heel Stone, the famous outlier on the solstice axis, is on the far side of the monument by the line of the old A344 — closed in 2013 so that visitors could enjoy the stones without the sound of traffic. The sound of traffic was then supplied entirely by you.

The Left-Hand Side

While the driver gawps right, passengers should look left at the ridge to the south. That skyline is Normanton Down, one of the richest Bronze Age cemeteries in Europe. Among those mounds is Bush Barrow, whose occupant was buried with a sheet-gold lozenge of astonishing craftsmanship, now in the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes. Devizes has parking. Just saying.

Longbarrow Crossroads and Release

At the roundabout by Winterbourne Stoke you pass another barrow cemetery, anchored by a genuine Neolithic long barrow — several centuries older than anything standing at Stonehenge. Nobody photographs it. It has borne this with dignity for five and a half thousand years, and shortly afterwards the dual carriageway resumes and so, briefly, does your holiday.

A Note on Why You Are Stationary

You may reasonably ask why a single-carriageway trunk road still runs 165 metres from Britain's most famous monument. The answer is that for thirty years governments proposed to put the road in a tunnel, and in 2024 a government decided not to, after spending some £179 million on the scheme. In March 2026 the planning consent was formally revoked, so the not-building of the tunnel is now official and complete. You are, in a sense, driving through the result of the most expensive decision to change nothing in the history of British heritage. Do slow down and take it in. You will anyway.

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Drivers: eyes forward, hands at ten and two. The stones have waited four and a half thousand years; they will still be there next jam.