STONEHENGE: A MAGICAL MOMENT IS CARVED IN STONE

So, on a whim, we took a left into the slip road, joining the cars and coaches as they poured towards Stonehenge.

It’s £3 to park but you get the money back when you pay the entrance fee. Then there was a queue to buy the ticket (£6.50 each) and a nitwit in front who was paying by cheque, was expecting a discount and demanded a full receipt.

The joyful thrill of the mad impulse was beginning to pall as we followed the army of flip-flop, back-pack, T-shirt-wearing tourists, the mums, the dads, the bratty children, the grannies, the vigorous retirees.

It was the usual sea of humanity on a summer’s day, trudging past the cafes selling hot dogs, the souvenir shops with their undesirable, zip-up ’henge hoodies, down into the tunnel that goes under the road and leads you up to the site. It was getting hot, too.

But there it was. Stone­­henge. “Wow,” as they say on Grand Designs (and they don’t get much grander than Stone­henge). All petty irritation immediately blows away on the breeze scudding across the plain.

There is an on-top-of-the-world feeling here. The grass is lush, the clouds freshly laundered. The fierce blue sky vibrates against the familiar outlines of the broken circle, piercing the gaps. Massive as they are, the stones appear to reach up, ready to break free from the earth.

Until 1977, you could walk right in, inspect the 19th-century graffiti, lay a hand on the cool sandstone. Now that is forbidden and there is a low perimeter fence: a circle around the circle. Hundreds of people move round, pausing, photographing, phoning (not “I’m on the train” but “I’m at Stonehenge”). It is a slow ritual dance, solemn from a distance, light-hearted when up close. It seems timeless. It seems right.

Still no one knows why Stone­henge was built or by whom. The 12th-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth hazarded that it had been constructed by giants with stones from Africa. It’s as good a theory as any, though the smart money says some of the stones came from the Preseli Hills in Wales more than 150 miles away.

But why so much back-­breaking effort thousands of years ago, by countless generations, expending millions of man hours? What for?

I don’t want to know the answer, thanks all the same. The mystery is what takes us there, even if we don’t all dress up in Druid robes and attend the summer solstice (though 30,000 did this summer).

The one certainty about Stone­henge is that it pulls people in like a great magnet and there can be no question that – for whatever reason – was its purpose.

Whether it’s to do with ley lines or Merlin or that it is now a designated World Heritage Site, the truth is that human beings are drawn there – nearly a million in the last year in fact. It is owned by English Heritage, which is about to launch yet another public consultation on the monument’s future.

To date, £25million has been spent on proposals and inquiries about the crummy visitors’ centre, the plan to re-route the A303 underground and bypass the nearby village of Winterbourne Stoke.

A good new book, Stone­henge by Rosemary Hill (Profile Books, £15.99), examines how succeeding generations have used the stones to mirror their preoccupations, whether romantic, scientific or hippyish.

It is a miracle the megaliths survived. In Victorian times visitors liked to hack off chunks as souvenirs and, apparently, the site rang “with the sound of banging and scraping”. There was also once a scheme to concrete over the inside of the circle.

Less threatening is the detail that Charles Darwin studied earthworms among the stones and that planners at Milton Keynes aligned the new town on an identical axis so the rays of the rising midsummer sun would strike “a large kinetic structure and a branch of John Lewis”.

“Have you handed in your wand, Nicholas?” a very Home Counties lady demanded of her companion as we departed through the turnstile.

How marvellous! Was Nicholas a real-life magician and why was he required to hand in his wand?

Above him was an English Heritage sign in the usual tasteful green. Have You Returned Your Audio Wand? it read.
A very different sort of magic.