The stones saved by marmalade, and other wonders

DANGER — Tank Crossing. It’s not everywhere you’ll pass a road sign like that, but there are plenty of them on the road across Salisbury Plain to Stonehenge. The Plain has been a British Army training ground since 1898, and the military warnings give a certain frisson as you trundle along.
Not that there is any real danger, of course. All the action takes place a long way from any public road. With about a million people a year visiting Stonehenge, probably the most famous prehistoric monument in the world, the army can’t afford to take any chances.
Like everything famous, Stonehenge has its imitators. I once visited one of the more bizarre, a place called Carhenge in deepest rural Nebraska, where old cars are painted grey and buried upright in the style of the standing stones of old.
The real thing is so much better. Even in a chilly and damp March breeze it was good to walk around these ancient stones, brought from Wales by stone age people and set up as a place of great ritual significance — an open air cathedral-cum-observatory.
The only disappointment is that you cannot walk up to the stones, or touch them. The entire circle is cordoned off by a rope. The official reason is to protect the unexcavated ground from the impact of millions of tourist feet. I couldn’t help wondering if it is also to discourage modern druids.

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