New Stonehenge visitor centre to open in 2013?

The new visitor centre planned for Stonehenge in Wiltshire could open its doors by 2013 if funding can be found, according to a report in the Salisbury Journal.

It was announced earlier this year that the coalition government would not be providing the £10m funding promised by the former Labour administration towards the centre's £27m price tag.
Operators English Heritage (EH) nevertheless decided to proceed with the project, which has already received planning permission.

At a meeting of Wiltshire Council's Amesbury Area Board on 2 September, EH project development manager Martin Harvey said: "We believe the project remains absolutely achievable.
"If all goes well with the remainder of this year, we believe we can still start work on the site in 2012 and open for business the following year."
He added that EH have put in an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund, and is completing current plans in the meantime using money from previous sources.

Needless to say we will be keepng a very close eye on this and will advise as and when we reciev news.

Stonehenge Tour Guide

Stonehenge was a site for sore eyes in 2300BC

Druids gather at Stonehenge for sunrise on the summer solstice. A new book suggests the gathering should take place in December
Stonehenge was the Lourdes of its day, to which diseased and injured ancient Britons flocked seeking cures for their ailments, according to a new theory.


For most of the 20th century archaeologists have debated what motivated primitive humans to go to the immense effort of transporting giant stones 240 miles from south Wales to erect Britain's most significant prehistoric monument.

IMAGE: Druids gather at Stonehenge for sunrise on the summer solstice. A new book suggests the gathering should take place in December


Stonehenge was the Lourdes of its day, to which diseased and injured ancient Britons flocked seeking cures for their ailments, according to a new theory.

For most of the 20th century archaeologists have debated what motivated primitive humans to go to the immense effort of transporting giant stones 240 miles from south Wales to erect Britain's most significant prehistoric monument.

Stonehenge was built in different stages between 3000BC and 1600BC and theories about their meaning and purpose have ranged from the serious to the wacky. The most widely accepted view is that it was to honour their ancestors.


Now Timothy Darvill, professor of archaeology at Bournemouth University, has breathed new life into the controversy with the publication of a book which proposes that the monument was in fact a centre of healing. Prof Darvill also backs the recent view that modern-day druids and hippies who celebrate the summer solstice at the site in the belief that they are continuing an ancient tradition should in fact carry out their rituals in December.

In his book Stonehenge: The Biography of a Landscape, Prof Darvill points to evidence that many of the human remains excavated from burial mounds around Stonehenge, dating from around 2300BC, show signs of the individuals having been unwell prior to their death.

Chemical analysis of their teeth has shown that a good proportion of those buried near the monument were not locals, but in fact came from as far away as Wales, Ireland and the Lake District. A grave uncovered in 2002 three miles from Stonehenge revealed the remains of a man who became known as the Amesbury Archer. He was found to have originated in what is now Switzerland.

Prof Darvill also points to 14th century folklore in the form of written accounts referring to a magician bringing the stones from the west of the British Isles.

"It was believed that these particular stones had many healing properties because in Preseli there are many sacred springs that are considered to have health-giving qualities," said Prof Darvill.

"The water comes out of the rocks used to build Stonehenge and it's well established that as recently as the late 18th century, people went to Stonehenge to break off bits of rock as talismans.

"In the case of Stonehenge, I suggest that the presiding deity was a prehistoric equivalent of the Greek and Roman god of healing, Apollo.

"Although his main sanctuary was at Delphi in Greece, it is widely believed that he left Greece in the winter months to reside in the land of the Hyborians — usually taken to be Britain.

"With the incorporation of the stones from Wales, Stonehenge is a very powerful and positive place of pilgrimage."

Prof Darvill believes those seeking to tap into the monument's powers should do so in December during the winter solstice when our ancestors believed it was occupied by Apollo.

Stonehenge Tour Guide

Secrets of Stonehenge

Though there was much in the recent series of Doctor Who that niggled me, the sight of our heroes galloping towards Stonehenge couldn't fail to squeeze out a gasp of delight. While I know nature is remarkable without exception, certainly not only cordoned off by a gorsedd of standing stones, there's something dizzying about the presence of stone marshals in formation.

Summer news from Salisbury Plain suggests Stonehenge is no longer the only megalithic player in town. Pricking the arrogance of singularity, archeologists have found confirmation of a woodhenge buried beneath ground level within chanting distance of the stone circle. Professor Vince Gaffney calls the finding "remarkable", suggesting it will "completely change the way we think about the landscape around Stonehenge".

Is that so? Presumably this is the same landscape that was so dramatically unaltered in October 2009 when another bluestone circle was discovered a mile away to the left. The same landscape that counts chalk horses, wood henges, barrows, tumps and stone avenues among its closest neighbours.

And while it is almost beyond excitement to witness archeologists using clever machines, allowing them to see the subterranean landscape and map it digitally, the sun's unhurried arc across the sky seems to make more progress than the body of scientists exploring what these sites were for and how they were assembled.


Those old stones sing to us still, that much is evident from the thousands of visitors who daily pay their fare to shuffle round them. Such is their popularity that the many have to be herded round them widdershins (anti-clockwise, hence decreasing the power of the stones) and reminded at regular intervals not to touch them. But what is it about them that keeps drawing us back, distracted from asking what we want to know by the multi-lingual audio-guides babbling away in our ears?


I am lucky enough to live way out west, about as far as you can get before reaching the Irish Sea. The landscape of Pembrokeshire has more than a tangential link with that of Stonehenge. The bluestones, which form such an integral though subtle part of the stone circle, have their origins in the wild rock-crested ridges of the Preseli mountains. The link between West Wales and mysticism is as intact as the one between Wimbledon and strawberries. Out on the fringes of the land you don't have to walk far before passing a lonely dolmen or recumbent burial chamber. Indeed, much like armoured police vans in central London, sacred sites out west seem to be becoming more frequent by the day.


So confident was the modern world in claiming to have the number of our stone-moving ancestors, Coca-Cola mounted a challenge in 1999 to show how easy it would be to move a bluestone from Pembrokeshire to Wiltshire, using only the technology assumed to be available 4000 years ago. They jolted the stone downhill to Milford Haven using tree trunks as rollers and once at the estuary, attached it to a simple boat, with the intention of sailing it across the Bristol Channel. No sooner was it off shore than it sank, taking the Coca-Cola challenge with it. But the legacy of this millennial endeavour was to suggest that whatever energy helped form Stonehenge it was more than brute force and grunting.


There are many different ways of gaining information from the natural world and the established scientific method presents one of them. The more intuitive and spiritual methods of consulting with the spirits of place, element, plant and animal might seem hilarious to those who would consider Glade Air Wick the acme of rational achievement, but they have as much a place in our relationship with the world. More, sometimes, in that they offer the individual conducting the questions a sense of humility instead of hubris, and don't see the need to kill or smash the object of enquiry. Or drop it into Milford Haven.


Stonehenge attracts some because it's a riddle. For others, it is the most obvious situation in the world. A circle is a place to gather, to dance and drum or sit in silence and meditate. It's a place to heal and whisper and tell the time. For those who want to know how the stones got there and what they may mean, I'd advise putting down the audio guides and asking them; providing that the impossible is permitted to be an answer. Alternativly take a tour with the Stonehenge Tour Company or Histouries UK for a far better experience


There is a field not far from me where a stone has just risen, as if being born from the earth. Where there was recently nothing but tussocks of grass and clusters of Poppets-shaped sheep poo, there now stands a megalith. As compelling, even reassuring, as the rational method is, it is never the whole story. I can't help thinking the originators of sites like Stonehenge, however they constructed it, had a better understanding of this than us. For all our machines.

Stonehenge and Avebury Stone Circle Tour Guide