Rolling stones

Musicians rehearse at Stonehenge for an English Heritage event to mark 100 years since the ancient landmark was donated to the nation. English Heritage has commissioned music from the London Sinfonietta to mark the centenary and it will be played throughout the site today.

One hundred years ago today, Cecil Chubb gave Britain the best present in its history. He donated Stonehenge to the nation, only three years after he’d bought the stones for £6,600 – around half a million pounds today.

A year later, Lloyd George made Chubb a baronet in gratitude. He should have been given a dukedom.

Thanks to Chubb, Stonehenge wasn’t turned into a Neolithic Disneyland. By handing Stonehenge over to the nation – it’s now looked after by English Heritage – Chubb ensured that the stones were properly conserved for the first time in their history.

In the 17th century, Christopher Wren was carving his name into the stones. By the time Chubb gave the monument away, they were propped up with wooden poles and some were on the verge of collapsing. English Heritage’s predecessor, The Office of Works, restored fallen stones and began the conservation programme which continues today.

If Chubb had had his way, however, the British would enjoy an even closer relationship with the monument than they do now. His deed of gift declared, “The public shall have free access … on the payment of such reasonable sum per head not exceeding one shilling.” Sheer pressure of numbers means the public can’t have the free access that I remember in the 1970s. Locals still get in for free – outsiders have to pay £17.50.

Still, that’s more than worth it to see the greatest prehistoric monument in the world.

Stonehenge is so very familiar that it’s almost impossible to look at it objectively. When you try to do so, you begin to appreciate its peerless significance.

How extraordinary that the stones should survive for 4,500 years; that the Pembrokeshire bluestones should have been dragged (or taken by boat) 150 miles from the Preseli Hills. What simple, bewitching beauty there is in a ring of vast stones on an empty Salisbury Plain.

As a boy, I was driven dozens of times past the monument on the old A344, grassed over in 2013. For years, Stonehenge was the highlight of the 100-mile journey from my London home to cousins in Somerset: the first glimpse of the stones, standing proud on the grassland; the thrill as you got closer; the unbearable excitement as the A344 closed in and practically touched the Heel Stone, marking the entrance to Stonehenge.

The A344 has gone; the latest row is over a proposed two-mile tunnel of the A303 under the stones, brutally slicing into the ancient landscape, critics say. Still, things are much better than in 1928, when the stones were flanked by a café, an old aerodrome, iron railings, a turnstile, a kiosk and a bungalow.

The real allure of Stonehenge lies in its mystery. No one is really certain how old it is – the outer ditch is thought to date to around 3,000 BC. No one really knows what it was for. A hospital with magical healing stones? An open-air temple for human sacrifice?

Thanks to its careful orientation with the sun, the monument clearly played a ritualistic, religious role. That precise role is, thank God, impossible to know. However many thousands of times you visit, Stonehenge remains, as Henry James said, “immensely vague and immensely deep”.