Stonehenge

Stonehenge, I’m sure, features on many a bucket list and it’s one of those places that I’ve wanted to visit but never really got around to. I finally got the opportunity whilst in the area for a (exceedingly lovely!) wedding and headed over on many a train and bus on my return journey home.

It is certainly an impressive site, more for the idea of the amazing things humanity can do when it puts its mind to it, and the audio guide you receive as part of the admission price is certainly informative, as is the official guidebook. Facts I did not know about Stonehenge were considerable – it’s not something I’ve been interested in enough to read up on till now – my favourite being that it was put up for auction in 1915 and sold for £6,600 to a man who thankfully presented it as a gift to the nation. Who knows what would have happened to the site if he hadn’t.

I journeyed there via The Stonehenge Tour who were excellent. The tour bus was really easy to find – right  outside of Salisbury train station – and the bus drivers were very friendly and well-informed. The audio tour on the bus was very interesting and focused more on the area around Stonehenge than the site itself, particularly its significance during the World Wars, which was probably a good thing as otherwise there would bound to be too much of an overlap with the audio tour you receive at Stonehenge itself.

English Heritage have lots of plans for the future of Stonehenge which you can read about here. Being part of a tour group meant I could skip the queues, which was definitely a good thing as the place was very busy – no doubt the fact that it was a surprisingly hot and sunny weekend for the beginning of September had something to do with it. I was, however, quite impressed with how close you are allowed to get and how well the crowds are managed and as you can see I did get plenty of shots that weren’t disrupted by people getting in the way.

There are lots of other sites in the vicinity of Stonehenge to visit as well. I was on a fairly tight timetable the day I visited Stonehenge so didn’t get to take in Salisbury and the cathedral but I did manage to visit Old Sarum, which will feature in my next post.

You can see the rest of my Stonehenge pics at my flickr account here.