Interesting thread this, isn't it?!
In message , Roland Perry
writes
In message , at 21:04:36 on
Mon, 11 Feb 2008, Ian Jelf remarked:
Although Stonehenge is often described as "disappointing",
It is *much* smaller than most people imagine.
The circle may be. The monument is much more. And much bigger.
And sufficiently less visible and less well described that the average
tourist (not someone on one of your tours) will generally be unaware of
it. All they see are the standing stones.
Absolutely. I was only speaking from a personal perspective.
Although that's partly because you can't get very close to it any
more (I can remember when you could wander round inside).
In fact you do go inside the monument; just not the stone circle
itself.
See above, for most visitors stonehenge *is* the stone circle.
there is a reason it is so famous.
It is very old.
Actually, compared to other monuments, the present stone circles isn't
especially old. The earthwork on certain other features are indeed
much older, though.
It's older than Roman, which is the oldest constructions most people
get to see elsewhere. (Outside Egypt etc).
The oldest Earthwork, notwithstanding you perfectly valid point above,
dates from ore than 3000BC, so is not only pre-Roman but also pre-Greek.
This is the circular ditch which is pretty much clearly visible.
The oldest of all the monuments in the landscape, the delightfully-named
"Robin Hood's Ball" (not accessible) and The Cursus (on the open access
land only half a Kilometer or so North of Stonehenge) go back much
further, even predating the Pyramids of Egypt.
But I accept that this is just semantics and that the Stone Circle is of
most people's interest, of course.
When tourists come from a *State* that's only got 100 years of
history, some
thing that old is almost literally unimaginable.
To be fair, most people come from somewhere a bit older than 100 years
(even excluding any indigenous cultures. I regularly take people to
see attraction newer than many US or even Australia features, eg
Beamish, the Black Country Living Museum, Ironbridge Gorge, etc.)
I'm not sure I understand what that list of features is for. In the USA
the very oldest stuff you come across normally is "anteBellum", and
there's very little of that.
What I meant by that is that many of our tourist sites depict a way of
life from only a century or so ago and that there are similar tourist
items of interest in the New World, old Western Towns, Sovereign Hill in
Ballarat (Australia) and so forth.
It is, as far as I am aware, absolutely unique among the stone
circles of Western Europe for having the lintels across many of the
stone uprights. This represents the absolute pinnacle of what
Neolithic to Bronze ages peoples achieved.
Very few people seem to go to Stonehenge to wonder over the
architecture.
Mine do! ;-))
I'm afraid I find it's all a bit "why did they build Windsor Castle so
close to the Heathrow flightpath".
For the record that really *does* happen. I've also been asked where
Windsor Castle was, while standing at the entrance to the Central
Station with the Castle directly behind me and in full view of the
questioner (who wasn't one of my clients but someone who'd interrupted
me!).
So people seem to think "oh, it's all fallen down", rather than "gosh
how wonderful it must have been when intact". As with the Parthenon in
Athens, photographs usually give a misleading impression of how much is
still intact, so when you visit, it's a disappointment.
A slight variant on this was a lady who gave me a *lot* of grief about
Stonehenge a few years ago because when she came before "it was on the
ocean". Never worked that one out, although she also said the same
about her "previous visit to Bath".
--
Ian Jelf, MITG
Birmingham, UK
Registered Blue Badge Tourist Guide for London and the Heart of England
http://www.bluebadge.demon.co.uk