Quick plug (I have no special loyalty to or arrangement with this company): The tour was timely, the bus was comfortable, uncrowded, and had huge windows allowing great views of the countryside. I found the driver friendly and knowledgeable, pointing out several fascinating features along the drive, including the Westbury White Horse - a chalk drawing sculpted into a hillside below an Iron Age fort. The price of the tour covered tickets (no standing in line - yay!) as well as an audio guide (this would have also incurred a fee). I found the tour well worth the price.
Ticket and audio guide in hand, I was set loose for a couple hours to wander and wonder. The territory of archaeological interest around Stonehenge is actually quite extensive. In fact, just from the parking lot to the visitor center and stones is 1.5 miles! Normally I would have relished that walk, but due to my timetable I was obliged to join a queue for a short, park-furnished ride that ferried me to the historic site itself. The wait for this ride was only perhaps 15 minutes, so it was not long after I debarked my tour bus that I stepped down, my stomach jumped, and my nerves tingled with the knowledge that I was about to pass through a looking glass into ancient history.
I encountered the Heel Stone, touching with my mind its time-cooled face. Broken clouds stalked across the sky, the sun shone and faded as if time had accelerated and days, years, millennia were passing. My imagination tried to conjure a vision of the Avenue of approach that once passed from north to south into the ring of stones, and is now only evident from a faint groove in the earth. For those with eyes like mine (not very sharp), a picture of the site in winter is provided, wherein snow paints this broad path more clearly.
The Heel Stone - a solitary sentry standing a stone's throw, as it were,
from the main ring
Look closely at the snow in this informational board, and you see
the parallel grooves that mark the ancient, vanished road
striding south to Stonehenge
Meadows yawned in all directions. To the north and southwest barrows burbled up from the earth. A rime of trees lined the northern border of my sight. I let the inscrutable majesty of the past swallow me, as the majesty of enduring human history touched my senses in the present. I paced clockwise around the stones, studied wisdom whispered into my ears by the audio guide. Broken sunlight gleamed on broken, austere totems of Sarsen and Bluestone. On the southwest side of the circle the path curved inwards, inviting me oh-so-tantalizingly-close to Stonehenge itself. From a distance of about ten feet, I pondered the crows that casually perched on the stones: ignorant, as far as we know, of what it means, or at least indifferent. Nature is blessed by intimacy with history we cannot touch quite so carelessly.
Between the visitor center and the monument, to north and south, are broad fields
and barrows (notice the small bumps where the land meets the sky)
Glorious Stonehenge, green earth and summer sky
Birds enjoying sun on their backs and cool, mossy stone beneath
their feet. Nature's lifetime, all access ticket to the monuments
of humankind
I am glad for the regimentation, the care that protects our past from our present. It is a delicate, necessary balance if future generations (much less we) are to enjoy or learn from the vast riches we are blessed to receive from our ancestors. Here at Stonehenge, investigation continues, discovery continues, but the threat of degradation also continues. The site has been rehabilitated before and will probably be again.
Many stones have fallen. An interesting question: to what extent
does rehabilitation rehabilitate? Several times in my trip I wondered
how custodians decide what moment in time to capture when
maintaining a historical site.
The visitor center included model thatch-roof huts, an approximation of dwellings that those who built this site may have lived in. I touched a replica stone, awed by its cold immensity and the mystery of how, and why, people bore these 20 miles or more. I marveled at the vision and dedication, and was sobered by the probability that forced labor was involved.
On the ride back into the Bath of the present, I sat beside a young woman who’d just completed her studies at Oxford. I regret that the details of our conversation have disintegrated, in a dim, personalized shadow of the lost details of Stonehenge, but I remember that the woman was friendly and energetic. I believe she was from Eastern Europe, and had done a bit of traveling of her own, but hoped to do more. In the short term, though, she just wanted to go home and settle down for a while - not very different from my own current course in Bath. Once we arrived I bid her well and also traded pleasantries with the guide, with whom I’d chatted a bit.
I was glad for the timelessness of Bath and of my stay there. It meant that I did not have to come all the way back to the present from Stonehenge - not yet. Instead I was able to rest for a while in what I’d seen and learned, and let myself unconsciously prepare for the very modern hubbub that would await me in London.
I am captured...
in Stonehenge's own memory...
...as the gates of time yawn open. I always enter, I always leave,
I observe from a distance and also look out from within the circle*
*artistic license - this picture is actually from outside the circle. An inner circle tour was more than I wanted to pay
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