Читать книгу Crap Days Out - Gareth Rubin - Страница 17

Just two miles to the north-east of Stonehenge, outside the village of Durrington, a monument exists that makes Stonehenge look like St Peter’s in Rome. That monument is Woodhenge. That’s right. Stonehenge on the cheap.

Woodhenge was ‘saved’ from obscurity in 1925 by Alexander Keiller, an amateur archaeologist and the millionaire inheritor of the Keiller family’s Dundee Marmalade fortune, and his archaeologist friend OGS Crawford, who identified the site from an aerial photograph taken by a First World War air hero, Gilbert Stuart Martin Insall VC.

Yet while those making the discovery might have a pleasingly Boy’s Own feel to their names, the site itself is far from King Solomon’s Mines. Apart from anything else, all the wood has gone. Stonehenge, only made of wood, and missing all the wood. All that remains are circles of holes which probably had big wooden staves in them. Or maybe not.

Still, this was long before television, and Keiller and Crawford’s discovery led to a full-on, three-year-long excavation of the site led by Maud Cunnington, a fellow archaeologist whose parents can only have chosen her name from a Jeeves & Wooster story. Had she been asked, Cunnington would probably have said something like: ‘Woodhenge is a rich discovery of great historical interest that promises to significantly increase our knowledge of the pagan religious rites of Neolithic Britain, but I wouldn’t visit on a bank holiday if I were you. Why not go for a walk in the countryside and stop in at a friendly pub?’

If you felt let down by Stonehenge or enraged by the Stanton Drew Stone Circles, Woodhenge will have you spitting blood.