Stonehenge tunnel row set to flare up again

Submitted by Andy B on Sunday, 23 September 2001 Page Views: 736

Maev Kennedy arts and heritage correspondent
Monday September 17, 2001 - The Guardian

The festering row over the future of Stonehenge is about to flare up again as the National Trust is urged by members to abandon plans for a new road tunnel at the site, on which millions have already been spent in consultancy fees and planning meetings.
A resolution for next month's AGM is tactfully worded, but implicitly a bitter criticism of the trust's stewardship of Stonehenge.

Wiltshire archaeologist Kate Fielden, a member of a coalition of archaeologists and environmentalists which is deeply sceptical of the plans, accused the trust of being "economical with the facts", specifically of misleading members over the potential impact of the road plans. She is not a proposer of the motion, but supports its aims.

Although the monument itself is managed by English Heritage, the trust owns thousands of acres of surrounding countryside, including hundreds of smaller monuments, which are crucial to the plan to restore the stone circle to an open downland setting. The entire site is a Unesco world heritage site, ranked among the world's most valuable and sensitive areas.

What to do about Stonehenge has been a thorn in the side of the National Trust and English Heritage, and successive governments, for decades.

In 1989 the parliamentary public accounts committee condemned the present situation - with the monument clenched between the A303 trunk road and the minor A344, and minimal visitor facilities - as "a national disgrace".

An agreement was reached, after years of argument, planning meetings and reports, to close the lesser road, scrap the present visitor facilities for an interpretative centre out of sight of the stones, and bury the main road in a tunnel.

Consultants for the highways agency have another year to produce detailed plans. The agency is proposing a two kilometre tunnel, with entrance portals outside the saucer-shaped plain around the stones, but still within the world heritage site.

Some objectors, including the influential Wiltshire Archaeological Society, are demanding a tunnel twice as long under the entire site.

However, the resolution put down for the trust's annual general meeting by physicist Christopher Gillham and 14 other members, takes the position that there should be no new road building, as this would increase traffic.

The council of the trust has rejected the argument, and urged members to vote against it.

A trust spokesman said no final decision could be reached until the details of the final road plans are complete. Guardian Story

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