Representation by David Church
- Date submitted
- 11 December 2018
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
The greater stonehenge site is unique in the world and Britain in character and completeness, so is of utmost cultural significance, as recognised by UNESCO when designating it a World Heritage Site. The proposed scheme would not only cause irreparable damage to the WHS, its archaeology and setting, but would also destroy so far undiscovered and unrecognised aspects of the local prehistory which are integral to the understanding of Stonehenge in particular, but ancient British history and origins in general. If this scheme goes ahead without chance to carefully excavate and preserve parts of so far unrecognised significance, the opportunity to discover from our History will be permanently lost. So much of British and world heritage has been lost already through needlessly destructive schemes (or just vandalism), that it is of the utmost importance to protect what is left remaining for careful study. There has already been recent damage to settings of neighbouring parts of the monument, such as Blick Mead Mesolithic site and its setting. The settings, including horizon markings and skyline alignments are known to be an extremely important aspect of these monuments and landscapes, and need to be preserved at least until we can adequaetly examine and record and understand them; or else the opportunity will be lost FOR EVER. I am concerned that there is a conspicuous lack of alternative options in consultation that would not damage the greater stonehenge area and World Heritage Site by taking a larger scale view of alternative traffic routings. Many people only use the A303 route because of it's current accessibility, but alternatives significantly further north and south, by splitting the traffic flows, could actually be of massive benefit to the smaller more local roads in those areas, and the communities that live near them. There is also concern that proximity of a major road to the stonehenge site could cause sufficient noise pollution to forever prevent the proper acoustic examination of the site, an aspect which is developing a necessity to understand, but at stonehenge has never yet been possible, due to existent traffic noise. The proposed tunnelling, apart from causing massive disruption to the entrances and cutting areas archaelogically, and skyline/horizonally, would not be sufficiently far away to allow full acoustic and electromagnetic examinations, which are now suspected to be extremely important to our understanding of megalithic and mesolithic technologies such as transportation of massive stones and communication of massive distances.