ALMOST every day this month, I have had a wondrous site to marvel at — and all for free. Driving, as I have been doing, up and down the A303 in Wiltshire, I crest a hill and see, spread below me, the ancient boulders of Stonehenge. However many times I pass this prehistoric monument, it never fails to raise a thrill. But if the heritage bodies have their way, I may soon have to park my car two miles away, take a tourist train and pay for the privilege.

English Heritage and the National Trust are convinced that traffic noise from the A303 and A344 blight the “visitor experience” at Stonehenge. They have been lobbying for years for the A344 to be closed, the A303 to be buried in a tunnel and the visitor centre to be moved much further away, all for the price of £500 million and counting. The Government agrees in principle, but naturally balks at the cost.

This week I went to Stonehenge as a visitor, to see how bad the blight really was. After years of enjoying the drive past, I had expected to curse all the people like me, whizzing by in their cars. Much to my surprise, the traffic was not nearly as intrusive as I had expected.

You spend more than half your time with your back to the roads, and all of it with an audio guide clamped to your ear. As a result, you don’t hear the cars, and for much of the time, you don’t see them either. To be honest, because you are not allowed to go close to the stones, the “visitor experience” is not that much better than it is from your car.

On the way home, we tried to calculate how many cars drove past in a day. On a conservative estimate, we reckoned that it must be some 10,000. If, on average, each holds two passengers, then more than three million people a year have the stirring experience of seeing Stonehenge from the road, compared with just 800,000 who actually visit the site. Why should they be any less deserving?

You might say that the stones predate the A303 by some 5,000 years, so they should have priority. But even that is suspect. If the A303 didn’t exist in prehistoric times, how did those gigantic stones get there? Now that’s another of Stonehenge’s great mysteries . . .

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