This Mysterious Monument

David Miles leafs through recent books on Stonehenge to see what’s new and what’s not.

In the 1970s I was sent a pile of books to review for Encounter magazine: all devoted to Stonehenge; none with much new to say. Stonehenge was one of the best known prehistoric monuments in the world and one of the least understood.

For a place that virtually symbolised the British past, Stonehenge and its landscape had received surprisingly cavalier treatment from archaeologists and the bodies that were entrusted with its care.

During the 18th century the antiquarian William Stukeley wrote of Stonehenge that he was at pains ‘to perpetuate the vestiges of this celebrated wonder and of the barrows, avenues, cursus etc for I foresee that it will in a few years be universally plowd over and consequently defaced’. Unfortunately Stukeley was right when he prophesied plough damage. Several generations of archaeologists, sometimes unskilled, always under-resourced and often unpublished, had not helped much either. So it was, perhaps, no surprise that by the time I joined English Heritage, Stonehenge’s legal guardian, in 1999, the emphasis was placed on the protection and preservation of archaeological sites.