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The tunnel debate has fixated on construction- the damage & inconvenience, the cost, the effect on things as they are now (no view of the stones from your car). What I’d like to do is think about why the tunnel has been proposed, and what it’s future impacts might be... https://twitter.com/morrisjonathan/status/1353764056088379392
Objections to the high cost, or that the scheme is not cost effective, ignore heritage and public value. The expensive tunnel is there entirely for reasons of sentiment, of respecting archaeology, landscape and public enjoyment & appreciation. So what are those goods? ...
The key effect, looking ahead, is no road across most of the WHS. Landscape or road? That was the choice. The A303 has progressively shaped the world around Stonehenge & how it is perceived since it was first built in the 1760s. Before road, main approaches to the stones ...
...were over downland from south & west. Stonehenge rose from a sea of grassland and arable, & if anything shaped perceptions it was the natural topography, a bowl closed to E & W by ridges and open to N & S. The road turned movement into an E-W corridor. Turner & Constable ...
drew Stonehenge from the same place from which you now see it above your steering wheel as you drive E on a dual carriageway & it comes into view, unable to escape the confines of the road cutting. There are other views...
As well as shrinking the plain into a line, the road, passing immediately south of the stones, isolated the site from half its world: at first psychologically, in recent decades increasingly physically as well, the fences and continuous, fast traffic making it uncrossable ...
...by people and wildlife. It cuts Stonehenge off from what today is the better preserved & more ecologically rich side of the WHS. Archaeological research has been almost exclusively N of the road. Effectively 100% of public engagement is now N of the road...
Removing that barrier is the first step towards a new Stonehenge: new engagements, new ideas, new discoveries, new approaches to conservation and management. Tunnelling the A303 would offer Stonehenge, and all its visitors and wonderers, the opportunity for a new future.
