Stonehenge – threatened wonder
Traffic at Stonehenge has put Britain’s most famous prehistoric monument on a list of the world’s most threatened sites.
The government’s decision to abandon, on cost grounds, a plan to bury roads around Stonehenge in a tunnel underground and the cancellation of plans for a permanent visitor centre, have put the site on the Threatened Wonders list of Wanderlust magazine.
Other sites are the 4×4-scarred Wadi Rum in Jordan, and the tourist-eroded paths and steps of the great Inca site at Machu Picchu in Peru.
Lyn Hughes, editor in chief of Wanderlust, said the A303 and A344 junctions near Stonehenge meant the site was “brutally divorced from its context”.
“Seeing it without its surrounding landscape is to experience only a fraction of this historical wonder,” she told the Guardian.
“The fact that the government and various planning bodies cannot agree on implementing a radical solution to this problem is a national disgrace.”
In 1989, the parliamentary public accounts committee damned the presentation of the site and the facilities for tourists as “a national disgrace”.
Since then millions have been spent on alternative road plans and architectural designs for the visitor centre, on exhibitions, consultations and public inquiries.
It is hoped that a simpler and cheaper visitor centre can still be created, a mile from the site, in time for London’s hosting of the 2012 Olympics.
Wanderlust has also named three places that need more visitors: Zimbabwe, north-east Thailand and Madagascar.
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