Stonehenge is Still Here

In the first place, it is difficult to recognize this gathering of large rocks in the photo as Stonehenge. Mostly, the significance of an act of vandalism may have been more prominent in the minds of two vandals than in anyone else. I get it. Summer was about to begin. That’s a big day for some. Just Stop Oil, the organization behind the vandalism, said their motivation was to demand the next UK government end extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030. Whatever. Apparently it took an oversized hair dryer to blow the powder paint from the rock surfaces without harming colonies of lichen that developed there. If people know about the incident, it’s been forgotten by now.

Having done my tour of duty on the Salisbury Plain, my memories are scant. I stayed at a youth hostel, and made visits to Salisbury, Bath and Stonehenge. Another traveler, who spent the previous few weeks wandering about the moorland of southwest England, invited me to accompany him. I declined. It sounded too much like Iowa, and a bit dreary. I bought a post card at the Stonehenge gift shop and worked my way from the chalky plateau to the chalk cliffs of Dover and then to Calais, where my journal of Salisbury and England was pinched with my backpack after crossing the channel in a hovercraft.

I never looked back on England, and don’t understand the fascination with Stonehenge at solstice. It is an old thing, shrouded in lost history. I’m more thankful the days start getting shorter, and planning for autumn can begin in earnest.

One surviving account of my visit to Stonehenge remains.

Very sunny here today near Stonehenge, and other ancient ruins. Stonehenge yesterday brought to attention the very tourist like notions of seeing something only to tell your friends about it when you get back. It may be that these days this is the notion you should have or at least most common, but it is also a notion of which I refuse to partake. It is only a very insensitive person who will go look and come back in one hour as the tour bus takes, but then there’s hours and barb wire fence to keep you from doing it any other way. Yet here too comes the notion that since there are so many books and pictures and articles about Stonehenge why even bother the few minutes to even see the thing.

On the way from the rocks to the return bus, the drivers were talking and one said to another, “It’s too bad it started to rain. It spoiled their trip.”

Here it seems that there is such a “holiday” preconception among these drivers (and all Britons as well) that it prevents them from seeing what is really, actually there: some rocks with barb wire about them with people crowded within these premises. At any rate, I was no different from the others when I paid my 65p and walked, took some photographs, and bought some postcards which I today mailed to the states.

Journals, Winston Churchill Gardens, Salisbury, England, 11:45 a.m. on Aug. 27, 1974

In the 5,000-year history of Stonehenge, Wednesday’s protest is less enduring than the lichen that over millennia colonized the massive stones. I don’t wish ill on the two vandals. I just hope they receive their just desserts. I’m sure the ancient druids could care less about this week’s events.