And before that, a long time ago, the stones were the crashing, shocking, visually intrusive man-made newcomer.Mark Hewitt wrote: ↑Fri Aug 06, 2021 08:54 Any idea that visitors to the stones should pay to have the road removed is about the daftest thing I've ever heard. As said above the road is the newcomer to the area so the mitigation of the road should be down to the roads budget, nobody else. To suggest otherwise is the worst kind of car blindness and entitlement.
If today's NIMBYs and "put it in a tunnel" crowd had been around then, Stonehenge would never have been built. At the time it would probably have been the biggest man-made intervention in the British landscape of all time, the HS2 of its day.
Today's "you can't have a dual carriageway within sight of the stones" would have been "you can't make that massive clearing in the forest to put up that monstrosity" and we'd have had "What's the point in expending all that effort bringing massive stones from Wales when people are still living in huts on a subsistence diet?" as well - not to mention the howls at the despoliation of the natural landscape involved in quarrying the stones in the first place.
And we'd probably have had "Can't you make it smaller with shorter stones so it doesn't stick out so much?" and from the tunnellers "Can't you put the stones underground? Won't that be OK as long as they're pointing in the right direction?"