stonehenge - English Heritage

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The present Salisbury to Devizes road (A360) was
turnpiked in 1760. Soon after, in 1762, the Amesbury
Turnpike Trust was established by Act of Parliament. This
body constructed a road followed by the modern A344.
Roads were turnpiked soon after 1762, subsequently
realigning and improving the existing network. A number
of listed milestones and toll-houses exist within the
Stonehenge Landscape (DoE 1988; Illustration 68).
Although the economy of the Stonehenge Landscape
was largely based upon sheep-crop husbandry, there is
considerable evidence for various industrial activities
around Amesbury. For example, in 1662 Thomas Fuller wrote
that ‘the best [pipes] for shape and colour … are made at
Amesbury’ (Brown 1959). This accolade seems to relate to a
clay-pipe factory owned by the Gauntlet family from c.1600
to 1698. It was situated at Wrestler’s Gate outside the Priory
Manor between Normanton and West Amesbury. Remnants
of clay-pits were found at the site in c.1840 (Ruddle 1895).
Small-scale gunflint-making sites have been identified on
Rox Hill and at Rox Hill Clump, part of a little researched but
seemingly fairly extensive industry around the Salisbury
area (Fowler and Needham 1995).
Mills were also present along the main rivers, some
perhaps on earlier sites; a millstone and a number of
timbers have been recorded at Durrington.
Intellectual interest in Stonehenge and its surroundings
increased with visits by notable antiquarians of the day,
Inigo Jones between 1633 and 1652, John Aubrey in the
1660s, William Stukeley in the 1720s, and John Wood in 1747
amongst them. The wider interest they promoted no doubt
led to others making visits and it is interesting that several
views of the site from the 1750s onward show casual visitors
arriving by carriage and on horseback. One picture of 1790
shows a shepherd-guide wearing a smock showing two
gentlemen and a lady one of the great trilithons (Illustration
69). Graffiti carved into the stones from the seventeenth
century onwards is further evidence of its attraction to
visitors, in some cases perhaps because of the midsummer
games that in 1781 at least included a sack-race, cricket,
wrestling, and bowling (Goulstone 1985, 52). Other ancient
monuments in the area also found novel community uses, as
with the Prophet Barrow (Wilsford 43 in the Lake Group)
which according to local tradition was used as a preaching
place by French prophets in about 1710 (Grinsell 1978, 38).
NINETEENTH CENTURY AD
Bond’s (1991) analysis of a major part of the Stonehenge
Landscape provides an excellent overview of nineteenthcentury
changes. Map P shows the distribution of the principal
recorded sites and features relevant to the nineteenth-century
archaeology of the Stonehenge Landscape.
Enclosure through Act of Parliament played a major role
in altering the physical organization of the countryside in
some areas during the nineteenth century. Amongst the
earliest parishes to enclose open fields and downland under
the Parliamentary Act were Shrewton, Winterbourne Stoke
in 1812, and Durrington in 1823 (Bond 1991, 424). Later
piecemeal mergers and subdivisions have also contributed
to the present form of the field boundaries. Prompted by the
desertion of communal farming techniques and the
introduction of enclosure, isolated farmsteads and field
barns appear in the nineteenth-century landscape:
Durrington Down Barn by 1811; Fargo Cottages west of
Stonehenge in 1847; Grant’s Barn in Winterbourne Stoke by
1841; and Greenland Farm by 1887.
Not all areas were enclosed however. Extensive tracts
of the higher ground remained under permanent pasture,
retaining their existing characteristics; these included
Tenantry Down; Durrington Down; Normanton Down;
Countess Court Down; West Amesbury Down;
Winterbourne Stoke Middle Down; and Wilsford Down.
New turnpike roads were created during the early
nineteenth century. The Swindon, Marlborough and
Everleigh Trust turnpiked the modern A345 Amesbury–
Old Sarum road in 1836, and in 1840 the Amesbury–
Rushall–East Kennet road was turnpiked by the Kennet
and Amesbury Trust. A number of public and private roads
in Durrington and Winterbourne Stoke were constructed to
replace unfenced tracks and open-field baulk and headland
ways.
Water meadows created in the eighteenth century
continued in use and benefited from the introduction of
better mechanical systems for sluices and drainage. Most
were in the Avon Valley below Ham Hatches, at Durrington,
and at Winterbourne Stoke in the Till Valley.
Plantations of trees, both conifer and deciduous, were
a new feature of the landscape from the early nineteenth
century. Early plantings were mainly for shelterbelts, game
coverts, and ornamental clumps. These include the Long
Barrow Plantation in Wilsford; Normanton Gorse (also
known as Furze Cover); Fargo Plantation; and
Luxemborough Plantation (Bond 1991, 425). Extending to
the north of Vespasian’s Camp and to the west towards
King Barrows are dispersed sets of ornamental clumps
which first appear on the Ordnance Survey map of 1879.
Since the 1960s it has been widely believed that these
clumps represent the disposition of ships at the opening
of the Battle of the Nile (1798) or Trafalgar (1805).
However, there is no evidence to support this idea (RCHM
1979, xxi), and recent studies have concluded that in fact
the clumps were planted about 30 years before 1798 and
therefore can have nothing to do with the Battle of the Nile
(Chandler 2002, 15–16).
Although attempts to rear rabbits in formal warrens had
ceased by the early nineteenth century, the rabbit
population of the area remained high and Long (1876, 118)
notes how in 1863 the under-gamekeeper of Sir Edward
Antrobus was digging deeply for rabbits in the vicinity of the
fallen trilithon at Stonehenge.
Many local crafts and industries continued, chalk-pits
for example being worked in most parishes to provide roadmetal
and top-dressing for cultivated land (Bond 1991, 426).
The scale of visitor interest in Stonehenge increased
through the nineteenth century, and from the 1860s a
Mr Judd ran a photographic business at the site
photographing visitors and then developing the pictures
in a mobile dark-room (see Chippindale 2004, 148–9).
Goulstone (1986) has drawn attention to a mid
nineteenth-century description of hare-coursing around
Stonehenge and suggests the presence of a turf-cut
geoglyph or emblem in the form of a shepherd’s crook at
or near Stonehenge itself. There are several superb
pictures of the site by renowned artists from the early
nineteenth century, including watercolours by Bridges in
about 1820, Turner in 1828, and Constable in 1835
(Chippindale 1987; 2004).
Perhaps the biggest change of the nineteenth century,
and one that has had a far-reaching impact ever since, was
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