whipangel wrote:
"Even worse, this fashionable view of Stonehenge fails to address or evoke its singularity. Its obsession with Woodhenges, Sea Henges and Time Team demotic digging only succeeds in downgrading our greatest monument."
A self-defeating statement surely, in looking at the broader picture of the landscape context, we downgrade it's most obvious aspect? Such thinking might save the tooth, but not the teeth. How do we then ever hope to understand "how, and why ... people float and drag heavy bluestones from Wales to Wiltshire"?
Is he saying that 'save it all' is too much for our esteemed politicians to handle, so we have to concentrate on the pointier bits to get anything done?
Well for a start, its not a very good article, he gets his facts wrong, and he is obviously starting from a non-archaeological perspective. He seems to think that the tunnel WAS a good idea - no-way, it would have been just as obtrusive as any road. To a degree modern thinking is seeing it as a 'sacred landscape' because of the vast necroplis of barrows that surround Stonehenge itself, that there were other functioning monuments within the landscape such as ritual pathways is archaeologically proven, though you can't see them, but how many tourists are even aware of them? And yes he seems to be saying concentrate on the stones if that will save Stonehenge....
Politicians! don't want to go down that road, they are ineffectual, democracy does not reign, but they hold the purse strings, and they are forever filling the purse with any latest scam/scheme that keeps the economy running, even if it means building gigantic hangars for Tesco to fill with food to feed a complacent and apathetic population who can't see the writing on the wall ;) end of rant though I could go on..
