Fact 1: Stonehenge was once surrounded by barbed wire
Many people reading this will remember the battles that took place in the 1980s between the police and Peace Convoy travellers who wished to gain access to Stonehenge for their midsummer festivities. In June 1985, the Battle of the Beanfield led to the arrest of 537 travellers, the largest mass arrest of civilians since the Second World War. The authorities of the day feared that the archaeology of Stonehenge would be damaged by the lighting of fires and the digging of latrine pits by those planning to hold a free solstice festival.
A century earlier, the casual vandalism being routinely inflicted by tourists on Stonehenge was the subject of stormy letters to The Times on a par with those generated by 20th-century revellers. One correspondent complained in 1885 about the presence at the site of people with ‘no intelligent interest’ in the monument, and others pointed to the ‘irreparable injury to the stones constantly going on at the hands of thoughtless and mischievous visitors’, who, with the help of ‘neighbouring rustics’, were in the habit of hammering off fragments of stone to take as souvenirs.
In 1886, a deputation from the Wiltshire Archaeological Society visited the monument to inspect the damage and come up with a solution. Ironically, the group included Henry Cunningham, who had previously been forced to publish a public apology in the local press after being caught undertaking illicit excavation at the monument. Worse still, Neville Story Maskelyne, the author of a pioneering paper on the petrology of Stonehenge published in the Wiltshire Society’s journal in 1878, freely admitted that he had taken 20 fresh samples from the stones without seeking permission. Indeed, the owner of Stonehenge at the time, the third Sir Edmund Antrobus, was adamant that more damage was done by archaeologists than by ‘excursionists’, while a Times leader insisted that rabbits and the ‘natural processes of decay’ were a greater threat to the monument than ‘human wantonness and vulgarity’.
