Stonehenge would benefit from tunnel

THE news last week that the £1.7 billion tunnel beneath Stonehenge has got the go-ahead from the Government has been greeted with fury from the extremely well-informed, at least about ancient history and archaeology, protesters who have opposed this plan from the start.

- PHILIP BOWERN

I grew up near Stonehenge, drove past it almost every weekend on the way to visit my Granny, attended one of the last free festivals there during the solstice weekend and am old enough to remember when you could visit and touch the stones.

I guess historian Tom Holland, leader of the Stonehenge Alliance, the powerful lobby group that launched an initially successful legal challenge to overturn the original permission for the tunnel, would say that suggests I am not at all serious about this important historical and spiritual site. Therefore, he might argue, I am disqualified from having a view on the plan. But as someone who, like hundreds of thousands of others, has often stared at the stones through the car window on numerous trips back and forth along the A303, I think the plan to bore a two-mile-long tunnel underground close to the site is a good one.