Stoned Again

We're enjoying some very pleasant Spring weather here just now, which was why Mrs. Bhagpuss and I came to be driving out on a sunny March morning last week to take a look at the standing stones at Stanton Drew. There's no shortage of ancient stoneworks within a short drive of where we live and we've visited quite a few but this one was new to us both.

It's unfamiliar to a lot of people, apparently, despite being possibly the third largest stone circle in Britain, after the far better-known Stonehenge and Avebury. Julian Cope, ex-lead singer of the Teardrop Explodes and self-styled Modern Antiquarian, called it "undervalued" and it's certainly under-visited, especially when compared to its two big rivals.

We only thought to visit it because we'd recently been to the village to look at a nursing home for my 93 year-old mother. She's gone somewhere else but the home she didn't move into is right next to the stones so we thought we'd go back for a closer look.

And you can have as close a look as you'd like. Climb all over the things if you want. No-one's gojng to stop you. 

The three competing pre-historic attractions stand orders of magnitude apart in terms of access, with Stonehenge on one side of a massive barrier, literally and financially, with the other two a long way outside.

Stonehenge is fully enclosed and zealously guarded, thanks to decades of varying use and abuse, everything from would-be druids holding solstice ceremonies to the Convoy staging pitched battles with the police. 

As a child, I visited the henge on a school trip. I seem to remember it was already sufficiently commercialized even then to feature a gift shop but we were allowed to touch the stones and there was no fence around them, or at least not in my memory. 

Now you have to book in advance and pay almost £30 just to get inside the main fence as far as the next security cordon, where ropes keep you at a distance from the stones themselves. It's £3 to park your car, too.

If you want to walk among the stones, inside the circle, you'll need to buy the full "Experience". That'll cost you £70! And even then you still don't get to touch anything.

Avebury is a lot more relaxed and it's free, too, although if you use the car park it'll set you back £7. Plenty of free parking in the village, though, or there was when we last went, which admittedly was over a decade ago. You can wander up to the stones and lay on hands, too, which to my way of thinking is pretty much the whole point.

Visiting Stanton Drew costs £1 and that's only if you're honest. There's a box on the gate and you're trusted to drop a coin into it as you go through. If you don't, no-one's going to know because there's no-one there. 

Even with a nominal entrance fee it's still cheaper than Avebury because there's a free car park. The pound goes to the local farmer who owns the land on which the stones are sited. It's a working farm and there are sometimes livestock in the fields, which is why no dogs are allowed. (Avebury is dog-friendly.)

 The size of the car park gives you some indication of the number of visitors the circle at Stanton Drew sees. I'd guess you could get eight cars in it, if everyone parked very carefully. The morning we went, there was just one other vehicle there but a few more people wandered in on foot. It's the kind of place that attracts neo-hippies and ancient history buffs alike but the history buffs tend to come in cars.

Because we had Beryl with us, we had to take it in turns to go to the stones. It's a surprisingly long walk, not least because the stones are bigger than you think, so they look closer than they are.

When I went in, there were a few other people strolling about, moving from monolith to monolith, taking pictures. One guy was lying on one of the stones, his feet higher than his head, taking a photograph of another. 

As I said, if you want to climb up the stones and sit on top eating an ice cream, there's nothing and no-one to stop you. You'd have to bring your own ice-cream, though. There's no gift shop.

The whole place is extremely chill. Laid back. Relaxed. On a gorgeously warm, sunny Spring morning it's hard to think of anywhere more so. I'd have liked to have had a thermos of coffee and a good book with me. I'd have lain down on one of the flat stones and basked.

With Beryl not being allowed past the gate, we couldn't do anything like that, sadly, so we went to the pub instead. And in the pub garden are three more standing stones, a thousand years older than the circle, so it's said, although how they're dated I don't know.

Those stones are known as The Cove and I didn't take any pictures of them. They're big, though, I can tell you that.

We had a coffee in the pub garden while Beryl frolicked in the grass. Didn't take any pictures of that, either. Sorry.

And then we came home. It was a fine morning's edutainment, although really, for me, the main pleasure of visiting pre-historic sites goes to the senses rather than the intellect. I like to touch them and imagine a connection to the deep past. 

I used to hug trees when I was a teenager. Too much prog rock, I expect. Lucky I grew out of that. Bloody hippies!

When you play games in which stone circles frequently feature, though, it is interesting to see such places up close. If nothing else, it gives some context.

I'm surprised the Druids of Norrath haven't installed any gift shops. Then again, now I come to think of it, I think there might  be the occasional vendor hanging out at one or two. I guess the barbed-wire fences are only a matter of time.