23rd April 2022
When the car moved from the B&B in Salisbury at 9.07am – I saw a big banner for a model railway exhibition, then out in the countryside there were lots and lots of massive yellow fields of rapeseed, some horses being led across a green one, and at 9.25am we reached Stonehenge. It felt freezing and I immediately began wishing I had my fur hat.
With me, we went down a long path and got blown around a lot; at the visitor entrance Mum nearly lost her receipt due to the gusts (meaning some chasing of it was necessary – a random man managed it), and further inside the building was a timeline. That room had examples of late Neolithic tools, the skeleton of a man buried in the Winterbourne Stoke longbarrow around 5000 years ago, another skeleton (in lots of pieces), Bronze Age tools, fragments of barrows people got buried in, remnants of peoples food (including cattle and pig bones) (and my mother thought the replica of the skeletons head was very handsome), a description of Woodhenge, and what was done at Stonehenge. A woman had a child in a chest carrier (seemingly self made from a scarf) – and when asked, we discovered that the child was 3 ½ weeks old; outside there were several thatched huts and a massive replica stone (apparently the original weighed about 28 tonnes) that people were invited to try and move.
Then we got on a Stonehenge bus at 10.30am, got off 5 minutes later, there was an emergency defibrillator on the path, a woman wearing really big fluffy earmuffs, a couple of signs saying ‘slip hazard’, several people with selfie sticks, a small group of people in martial arts clothing who appeared to be posing for photos, and the unbelievably long queue of traffic on the road in the distance was getting longer. A sign said a stone weighed about 40 tonnes, there were more American people taking selfies, and walking back down the hill I saw a little pug dog wearing a harness that said Kevin on it, and we set off- on foot – back to the car park at 11.02am. Aubrey, Sarsson, The Lone Ranger, and The Rock were other buses seen on the walk (and a couple of skylarks in the sky); back in the visitors centre at 11.32am – there were wooden swords, ‘The Amazing Pop Up Stonehenge’ books, packets of chocolate sheep droppings, cork hot plates, shot glasses, chocolate golf balls, lots of other chocolate things, various animal soft toys, Neolithic human soft toys, and woolly clothing for sale. A very fluffy Dachshund was being carried/cuddled, and I saw a man wearing a black hoodie with ‘1984 IS NOT AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL’ on it while we walked back to the car park in extremely cold gusts, and made it just before 12pm.
And we continued our explorations for the next 2 days….
