Unacceptable Stonehenge Tunnel Southern Route Option

The plan for the southern route and its junction is, in my view, completely unacceptable.

The junction is directly on the solstice alignment as identified by UNESCO (http://www2.astronomicalheritage.net/index.php/gallery/entities/stonehenge-world-heritage-site-united-kingdom), an alignment they recommend is kept free of any building. (Map below)

The position of the junction is at the same height as Stonehenge. The OS benchmark on Stone 16 is 103m above sea level, the A360 at this point is between 100 and 105m. Normanton Gorse ridge which is intended to shield the view is 111m. Clive Ruggles has published photographs of Stonehenge taken from a position taken 100m south of the proposed junction. http://www2.cliveruggles.com/index.php/image-coll/category/40-stonehenge-mwss which show its intervisibility.

The junction is planned to involve a flyover which would raise it above the visible horizon.

The new dual carriageway runs in the direction of the solstice alignment, head lights would be pointing directly at Stonehenge so even without any road lighting the light pollution would be unacceptable.

Stone 16 Tenons

Enlargeable by clicking them

More on Stone 16 and her breast at http://www.sarsen.org/2015/03/the-breast-on-stone-16.html and Simon's spiral  (spotted by Simon Banton) http://www.sarsen.org/2012/10/the-stone-16-spiral-carving.html

On top of Stonehenge - The tenon on Stone 56

Looking down to 55, the fallen lintel and the Altar Stone

And the view across to the Great Trilithon top

Click any to embiggen - Thanks to J for the photos

Your tourist snaps can help preserve threatened heritage sites for the future

Andrew Wilson, University of Bradford

Our present is intrinsically bound up with our past, our sense of identity shaped and moulded by the cultural legacies of our forebears. That’s why organisations such as UNESCO exist to protect the cultural heritage of the world for current and future generations.

Recent years have all too clearly shown the need for that protection, with wars in the Middle East leading to the destruction or looting of many ancient monuments, while others are lost to natural disasters, cultural vandalism and iconoclasm or neglect. What can we do to prevent the loss of precious cultural heritage in the future?

One way of preserving ancient monuments at least in a sense is to safeguard heritage using digital means such as laser scanning to create 3D models. But sometimes these efforts come too late for heritage sites – as with the iconic Drummond’s Mill in Bradford, ravaged by fire this year, or the deliberate destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.

While this approach often requires specialist imaging equipment, another approach is to use something that we already have in abundance: the effort, curiosity and holiday photographs of millions of travellers worldwide. Curious Travellers is a project launched by researchers from the universities of Bradford, St Andrews, Nottingham Ningbo China and Birmingham, alongside international heritage consultancy MOSPA, that aims to preserve a record of sites and monuments in 3D digital form, built not from specialist scans but from compilations of tourist snaps.

Have you visited ancient sites and monuments? Do you have photographs of sites that are now at risk – or even those that have since been damaged or destroyed? The crowdsourcing project takes tourist photos and videos and combines them with other freely available resources scraped from websites such as travel blogs and social media sources in order to create 3D models of ancient monuments and sites. The reconstructed content is placed in context using relevant survey data that describes the site and landscape.

Syria has seen its cultural heritage suffer irrevocable damage, such as at the historical city of Palmyra.
Youssef Badawi/EPA

A community response to threatened sites

There’s more to this project than simply preserving tourist sights for those that haven’t seen them. Cultural heritage plays a key part in the quality of our lives, building our sense of identity, proving a rallying point around which we build social cohesion and pride in a shared heritage. Many sites also provide leisure opportunities, particularly for families, and provide an economic boost from tourism that can be particularly important for developing nations.

Global travellers are encouraged to get involved by donating images to Curious Travellers, a truly worldwide response to the threat of disappearing heritage and an opportunity to play a part in preserving it. The project will hopefully shape a fresh approach to recording sites and monuments, with travellers in future encouraged to photograph more obscure viewpoints at sites they visit. There have already been significant donations of images since launching at the British Science Festival in September – with some of the first 3D models soon to join examples on the project website.

A statue head of Antoninus Pius (138-161AD) at Cyrene dating from about 140 AD.
Tony Baggett/Shutterstock

Initially the project will highlight threatened or damaged heritage sites in North Africa, including Cyrene in northeastern Libya near present day Shahhat, as well as those in Syria and the Middle East where as many Islamic sites have been damaged and destroyed as pre-Islamic sites that have often received most media attention. However, the project is accepting images of any threatened historic site around the world. Previous archaeological surveys and 3D scanning efforts at sites such as Cyrene are being added to the project through a framework that can be augmented by additional crowd-sourced imagery.

Creating 3D digital models of sites alone is not a sufficiently strong argument for the project, but by putting them in context within their site and landscape setting we can continue to learn from them and use them to help inform site management and conservation. By linking these 3D models with geospatial data and other historic records within a historic environment record framework creates a meaningful legacy that can be used for education, future planning and development control.

Rebuilding

Aspirations to rebuild cities from the tatters of war-torn countries are emerging – architects are imagining ways to rebuild them and using architecture to heal deep rifts in the countries’ social fabric.

Technically, a digital model can be used to 3D-print, or CNC-mill a physical recreation. This isn’t feasible at a site or landscape scale, but viewing 3D digital models in context may serve an important purpose in highlighting and campaigning for the protection and repair of damaged and threatened areas.

A recent talk by Jeanine Abdul Massih presented at the World Archaeology Congress in Kyoto highlighted how important it is that the profile of threatened heritage sites is kept high to ensure they don’t suffer as cities are rebuilt. For example in Lebanon where international funding has flooded in to rebuild its cities, heritage sites face an uncertain future in the face of development pressure and soaring land prices. Without continued protection, the risk is that rebuilding during peacetime can be as damaging as the destruction during war.

Andrew Wilson, Senior Lecturer in Forensic and Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Looking down on Stone 11

On the southern side of the now incomplete outer sarsen circle at Stonehenge there is a diminutive stone that leans. This is Stone 11 which has been broken. How it was broken and whether it has been re-erected are unknown. Its small size is often claimed to be evidence that the circle was never completed with lintels but the stone is broadening as it goes up and would have had a top that would have been wide enough to support lintels. Whether it did or not will never be known. I think the size of it may be related to it being on the route in from from the southern entrance to the henge. Next to it there is the remarkable Stone 10 which does still have its full height and as can be seen in the picture two tenons. it is obviously designed to hold a lintel on both sides, including one to go over Stone 11. There appears to be wear and a ridge formed on the top surface where the lintels were. Maybe evidence that the circle was completed with lintels.

Stone 10 on the ground plans is slightly out of true with the circle, but the stone twists as it goes up and the top is exactly in line with the circle, one of my favourite demonstrations of the clever engineering that went into building Stonehenge.

Click to enlarge - Thanks to J for the photos.

Archaeologist: the A303 is a crucial part of Stonehenge’s setting

Dan Hicks, University of Oxford

Stonehenge has a traffic problem. The A303 has been the UK government’s preferred trunk road from London to the West Country since 1958 – but it runs within 165 metres of the 5,000-year-old monument. Narrowing to a single carriageway, it slows many a summertime car journey. The bottleneck brings noise and pollution, and presents a barrier to exploring the landscape on foot.

On January 12, Transport Secretary Chris Grayling announced plans for a Stonehenge Bypass, transforming the A303 into an “Expressway to the South West”. It involves building a dual carriageway and tunnel across the Stonehenge UNESCO World Heritage Site. As Highways England launched a six-week public consultation on the plan, the estimated cost of £1.4 billion was heralded by Historic England as “the biggest single investment ever made by government in this country’s heritage”.

But the Stonehenge Bypass is absolutely not in the best interests of cultural heritage.

Map of Stonehenge World Heritage Site with route of the proposed bypass and tunnel.
Highways England

Two old ideas

The Stonehenge tunnel is, in fact, an old idea. Proposed in the 1989 Roads for Prosperity government White Paper, which launched the last major programme of roadbuilding in England, over the subsequent three decades arguments over a variety of schemes have multiplied, at an estimated cost of £30m in consultants’ and lawyers’ fees.

This time around, the project is billed as in the best interests of cultural heritage. The existing road “spoils the setting of Stonehenge”, suggests Highways England. A new road would “improve our understanding and enjoyment of the Stonehenge monument,” chimes the joint National Trust and Historic England statement.

Another old idea is being revived hand-in-hand with the tunnel – heritage restoration. The focus is the stones, not their landscape. Stonehenge is reimagined as a Stone Age exhibit untouched by modernity. The A303 would be grassed over at the stones while a new road twice as wide is cut across the World Heritage Site, but tunnelled within the paying visitors’ view. The aesthetics of this “Stonehenge Restored” are determinedly Georgian. A stately monument within rolling lawns from which shuttles run along a new coaching-road between Bath and London. That carriageway hidden from the monument, so customers can stroll an “authentic” landscape of the past, never glimpsing the present.

A living monument

Why bury a road? The bypass plans turn back the clock to the kind of temporal connoisseurship widely dismissed since John Ruskin argued in 1849 that:

Neither by the public, nor by those who have the care of public monuments, is the true meaning of restoration understood. It means the most total destruction … a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed.

In Ruskin’s alternate vision of a “living monument”, the qualities of age-value and patina emerge through layers built up and eroded through human life and the passage of time. In the 1870s, this became the logic of William Morris’s “Anti-Scrape” movement – the world’s first heritage campaign. Ruskin and Morris understood that erasing later features to restore traces of some imagined original period leads not just to Georgian follies, but to downright misrepresentation.

The 21st-century “scraping” of Stonehenge would conjure the illusion of an unchanging Neolithic relic. But the monument has been a centre of gravity attracting human activity throug five millennia. The mosaic of henges, cursuses, round barrows, inhumations, settlements, enclosures, field systems – and even buildings and roads – represents an ongoing sequence of movement, building, living, and deposition. It’s the prime example of what WG Hoskins famously described as the “palimpsest” of the English landscape, a layered document repeatedly written over.

Approach to Stonehenge in 1930, from the east: A303 running to the left, A344 (closed 2013) to the right.
National Archives

This story encompasses the A303’s own history: laid out in the early 1800s as the “New Direct Road”, a coaching route from London to Exeter. It was less used from the 1840s with the railway boom, then became a major road from 1933, being defined as a trunk road by the Ministry of Transport in 1958. Stonehenge is not a site or an artefact, but an ever-changing landscape.

Driving west on the A303 today, we glimpse the monument. This modern view is endangered. Since the 1960s, archaeology’s Rescue Movement has defended our past against the threat of destruction from the present day. Today, it is Stonehenge’s modernity that is under threat from a narrow vision of the past.

Hiding the road from the stones would hide the stones from the public. Some 1.3m people will pass through the Stonehenge giftshop this year, but perhaps ten times that number will witness the monument from a passing vehicle. Those thrilling, often unexpected views may not be celebrated among the iconic experiences of global prehistory, but they are surely among the most democratic. Through these encounters, Stonehenge lives on as a public space. Year by year since the 1980s, public access to Stonehenge has been gradually restricted. This bypass would deal another blow to any chance of seeing the monument without paying the £15.50 entrance fee.

‘Stonehenge under threat’: the iconic image of the 1970s Rescue movement. © Rescue, The British Archaeological Trust.

Save the A303!

“Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves – or desires,” wrote visionary archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes in 1967. What do we desire for Stonehenge today?

For some, the tunnel is the best compromise. New excavations would add to our understanding of the landscape (and bring jobs for archaeologists). Others call for a longer tunnel. And some dismiss the project as a destructive “time-bomb”. After all, with sliproads and dual carriageways, the project could result in a net increase in road surface within the World Heritage Site.

One promising idea is to make the A303 one-way westbound, building an alternative route for eastbound traffic away from the monument – cutting traffic at Stonehenge in half while saving millions. In preserving the A303, that solution reminds us of the ongoing lives of our ancient monuments in the modern world.

Stonehenge’s value lies not just in its prehistory, but also in its modernity. Today, the A303 is a crucial part of the monument’s setting. Yes, we must reduce the traffic. But why hide the stones from the world?

Dan Hicks, Associate Professor and Curator, Pitt Rivers Museum and School of Archaeology, University of Oxford

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Notes on the Stonehenge Tunnel Proposal

It is important to acknowledge that there are many good and valid reasons why the A303 needs to be improved as it passes Stonehenge. If the monument wasn’t there it would be a trivial Highway engineering problem. We must therefore also acknowledge that the taxpayer is expected to pay something in the order of £1.5 billion in additional costs to protect the World Heritage Site. The benefits to the setting of Stonehenge and associated monuments are largely obvious and need no extensive recital here. These notes only cover the broadest outline of the plan and not minor details.

Highways England have commendably included a mass of technical documents on their consultation page about the Stonehenge Tunnel (https://highwaysengland.citizenspace.com/cip/a303-stonehenge/ ). They include the technical reports and particularly in TAR appendix G and H they score their proposals against the various aims and policies of the stakeholders.
They are holding a series of exhibitions over the next few weeks where the details can be examined and experts are on hand to answer questions. I would recommend visiting one of these.

Originally they narrowed down the options to the tunnel or a southerly non-tunnelled route that would take the A303 outside of the WHS completely. The latter is no longer apparently an option.
They are two options up for discussion. They differ as to whether they take a northerly or southerly route around Winterbourne Stoke. By their criteria there is little to choose between the two options and having studied them both there is no obvious reason relating to Winterbourne Stoke which one to prefer.

The route within the WHS can be split into the eastern and western end for consideration. It can be presumed that, unless another Wilsford Shaft is on the route, the tunnel itself has no possible adverse effect on the area’s archaeology. There is a question as to whether it might change the hydrology and aquifer which might be detrimental to the springs at Blick Mead but that is a question that needs relevant expertise to answer and I am satisfied that Highways England are fully aware of it and will take appropriate measures.

The eastern end of the route involves a new flyover at Countess Roundabout, mainly utilising the present A303 until it reaches a new portal just to the east of where the Avenue crosses the A303, out of sight of Stonehenge.

There is a small area of virgin land that will lost to the portal which is close to Mesolithic finds and the scheme passes close to Blick Mead. The balance of landscape and archaeological loss and gain is so narrow that the cost of moving the portal to the east of the WHS could not be justified to me.

Others with more knowledge and involvement in that area disagree. There certainly is a case for the flyover at the Countess Roundabout running north-south rather than east-west to keep the height of the A303 the same.

The western portal is designed to be hidden from Stonehenge by the small wood at Normanton Gorse and the twenty foot high ridge the wood is on.

The western portal and the new road are planned to be within the vicinity of the Mid Winter Solstice Sunset (MWSS) alignment of Stonehenge. The precise location is still under development, but is expected to be very close to the plans made available for consultation

Detail from plan with MWSS alignment added in red.

Attention has mainly been given so far to the danger that the road will spoil the dark sky and the solstice sunset. Highways England’s Volume 1 TAR red section 8.6 details the assumptions about carriageway and portal lighting, and that until a detailed assessment is done the assumption is that there will be none. My opinion is that even if there is no lighting planned there is a real danger that it will be added, as has happened on so many roads, at a later date for safety reasons. There will, especially with the southern route, shown in orange, also be vehicle lights impacting the night sky.

But the danger of spoiling the night sky is only a part of the problem.

Siting the portal and road within this the most important astronomical alignment of Stonehenge is contrary to the UNESCO Statement of Outstanding Universal Value (see below) and UNESCO’s Astronomy and World Heritage Initiative recommendation with regard to the alignments that: “Assuming that these were once largely clear in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, it is important to try and ensure that the sightlines are as clear as possible today. All plans should ensure that no further planting or development takes place along them.”

In addition the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site Management Plan 2015 (http://www.stonehengeandaveburywhs.org/assets/Stonehenge-and-Avebury-WHS-Management-Plan-2015.pdf) lays out various policies including:
Policy 3c – Maintain and enhance the setting of monuments and sites in the landscape and their interrelationships and astronomical alignments with particular attention given to achieving an appropriate landscape setting for the monuments and the WHS itself.

It can be seen that by ignoring the astronomical alignments and sightlines in their assessment the plan fails both the UNESCO and the local policies.
I believe that this part of the plan is unacceptable for these reasons and there is still time to influence the design to be changed to a more acceptable solution. As Highways England say in their proposal document; “The precise location and design of the portals at either end of the tunnel is something we will be developing in consultation with heritage stakeholders and to take account of additional survey work as it becomes available.”

Appendix:

Extracts from UNESCO’s Astronomy and World Heritage Initiative

Full Description (IAU Extended Case Study format):Stonehenge World Heritage Property, United Kingdom

One of the most important features of Stonehenge – one that has been recognised since the 18th century when it was noted by the antiquarian William Stukeley – is that its principal axis of symmetry is aligned upon winter solstice (“midwinter”) sunset in one direction and summer solstice (“midsummer”) sunrise in the other...

Stonehenge WHP can and should be seen within a regional context of sites in the Neolithic and Bronze Age in north-west Europe that have astronomical alignments. These include monuments such as the Newgrange passage tomb, part of the Brú na Bóinne—Archaeological Ensemble of the Bend of the Boyne WHP, and various stone circles and monuments. All seem to have had some sort of funerary or ceremonial function, although astronomical practices in domestic contexts are also noted on occasion.

The monuments of the Stonehenge WHP provide the earliest evidence in Britain or Ireland of a consistent local practice of aligning monuments with some precision upon sunrise or sunset around the solstices. This is in contrast, for example, to the solstitial orientation of Newgrange, a“one-off” alignment among the Boyne Valley tombs; to the very broad pattern of orientation clustered around the intercardinal directions observed among Neolithic tombs and houses in the Orkney Islands; and to evidence that Early Neolithic long barrows in the Salisbury Plain area, in the vicinity of Stonehenge—which preceded the construction of the Stonehenge stone circle by about a millennium—followed a broad pattern of orientation within the sun-rising/sun-climbing arcs, between north-east and south...

In prehistory, one or more observers would probably have stood at an appropriate point and viewed the sun or moon appearing or disappearing behind a distant horizon at specific times of the year. Thus, clear and unobstructed sightlines and horizons are important to aid our understanding of how these monuments functioned...

There is a growing consensus that the midwinter sightline was more important than the midsummer one. Today the integrity of this sightline, and its intermediate ridge lines and final horizon, is marred. Looking out from Stonehenge, the first problem is the A303 (0.5 km), which runs relatively close to the monument, and presents a considerable visual and noise intrusion to this alignment. Moving further south-west, the round barrow known as the Sun Barrow—which is on the alignment and on the Normanton Down ridge line—is intact (0.9 km), but the sightline then quickly runs into the plantation known as Normanton Gorse (1.1 km), which obscures it. Still further south-west is another plantation known as The Diamond (2.2 km), before the alignment continues towards the place that would form the visible horizon from Stonehenge in the absence of intervening vegetation, at Oatlands Hill to the west of the A360 road (and outside the WHP) (4.4 km). This horizon is also obscured by yet another plantation, at The Park. The sightline probably ends at the site of a much later Iron-Age/Romano-British settlement. It is difficult to determine the exact place because the various obstructions mean that we must rely upon computer modelling.

The Stonehenge Avenue looking south-west (midwinter sunset) shares the same alignment, and the same issues apply regarding its integrity. On the initial approach towards Stonehenge along the Avenue from the“elbow” at Stonehenge Bottom, Stonehenge itself forms the horizon; the more distant landscape only appears during the final stages of the approach.


A retrospective Statement of Outstanding Universal Value (SOUV) was prepared for the Property by the State Party in 2011 and has been approved by UNESCO. The relevant parts of that SOUV in relation to astronomy are quoted here:

Statement of Significance

The Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites WHP is internationally important for its complexes of outstanding prehistoric monuments…

They provide an insight into the mortuary and ceremonial practices of the period, and are evidence of prehistoric technology, architecture and astronomy…

The complexes of monuments at Stonehenge and Avebury provide an exceptional insight into the funerary and ceremonial practices in Britain in the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Together with their settings and associated sites, they form landscapes without parallel.

The design, position and inter-relationship of the monuments and sites are evidence of a wealthy and highly organised prehistoric society able to impose its concepts on the environment. An outstanding example is the alignment of the Stonehenge Avenue (probably a processional route) and Stonehenge stone circle on the axis of the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset, indicating their ceremonial and astronomical character…


Assuming that these were once largely clear in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, it is important to try and ensure that the sightlines are as clear as possible today. All plans should ensure that no further planting or development takes place along them.