A silent solstice at Stonehenge
For generations people have been gathering at Stonehenge before dawn on the year’s longest day. They hope to see the sun rise, but if it doesn’t – mist or rain often intervene – there is still a good party, a compact crowd that in recent years is said occasionally to have exceeded 30,000.
Not so in 2020. In one of the most striking symbols of the strange, oppressive time in which we live, Stonehenge is closed (or closed as it says on Google maps). On June 21 – as it happens, a Sunday, which in the past would encourage a larger than ever attendance of visitors, many of whom would need to be at work on a weekday – there might be someone operating a camera and a few security guards.
This suppression of activity is due to occur only weeks from a promised announcement about plans for the nearby a303 – one of the uk’s most expensive road projects that is supposed to help traffic move faster and to improve the experience of over a million tourists a year. Originally scheduled to have been revealed on April 2, the transport secretary’s decision on whether or not to put the road in a tunnel is now expected on July 17. It’s likely there will be no one at the stones to celebrate or protest a scheme designed for a world that, for now, no longer exists. Strange times.
One thing is clear: early in the lockdown you might as well have howled at the moon as object to shutting down Stonehenge. There could be no visitor centre: cafés, retail businesses, museums and galleries had to close. Stonehenge trilithon socks would probably not pass the test of “basic necessities”, but in any event the shop would be closed and you can buy them online. Places of worship had to close (and an attempt by two witches and a Druid to prove that the European Convention on Human Rights gave them unrestricted access to the stones was thrown out on appeal last December). You could leave home for “very limited purposes”, including “one form of exercise a day”. But this should happen “near to your home where possible” (there are no homes near Stonehenge), and you should keep at least 2m apart from anyone outside your home “at all times”. And were English Heritage to retain the slightest doubt, failure to follow these rules could lead to the outfit’s responsible individuals being prosecuted.
Stonehenge had to close. But the government is being pressed to relax restrictions, and English Heritage – already grappling with a barely viable financial settlement from its set up as a charity in 2015, and worried about Brexit – must be desperate to re-open the site. Overall, visitors and members supply more than half its income. Perhaps Stonehenge will welcome visitors again soon?
Despite appearances, the monument is more of a museum than a green space. The visitor centre rarely has spare capacity. Annual ticket sales recently passed 1.5 million, and at the stones those people cram onto a narrow path. At any time social distancing would be hard to manage, but on midsummer day it would be impossible. On May 12 English Heritage said that dawn on June 21 would be livestreamed on social media, but the site itself would be closed. A week later the National Trust, owners of much of the land around Stonehenge, announced that it was taking the same line. The landscape too will be off limits for this year’s summer solstice.
To add perspective, this might be the first time people have been banned from Stonehenge on the solstice since it was built. Even when open access was restricted between 1985 and 1999, in a doomed attempt to police a free festival that had got out of hand, a few hundred people were admitted every year – and notoriously many more often crowded outside the fences.
A midsummer trip has been popular for well over a century, though the introduction of an admission charge by Stonehenge’s then private owner in 1901 seems to have temporarily dampened interest. When whHudson went there in 1908, he numbered visitors in hundreds (“the noises they made… suggestive of a Bank Holiday crowd at the Crystal Palace”), but a decade before “as many as one or two thousand persons would assemble during the night to wait the great event”. Hudson wondered how long this custom had been practised. “From the time of the old people,” replied a local farmhand along for the fun. “The Druids.”
The solstice alignment does not seem to have been commented on before the 18th century. Lone antiquaries reported seeing the rising sun in the 1850s, and groups of a few dozen were assembling in the 1870s. But if evidence for a midsummer crowd is no more than 150 years old, banishing everyone may have deeper roots. Who knows? A silent solstice might re-enact the intentions of Stonehenge’s creators: a taboo space inside a ring of stones, fit only for the sun and observed from a distance.