THE SOCIETY of Antiquaries of London, the world’s oldest learned society devoted to the human past, has written to the Government endorsing a short-bored tunnel as the best available answer to the Stonehenge roads problem. In a letter to the Highways Agency, Professor Eric Fernie, president, said that the society “appeals to the Government to end the current inertia surrounding the future of Stonehenge and its immediate environment so that the dignity and quality of visitor experience at this country’s greatest prehistoric monument can be restored within a reasonable timescale”.

Many of the 2,300 Fellows of the society, which was founded in 1707, have long been engaged in vigorous debate over how to save Stonehenge: some, led by Professor Geoffrey Wainwright, the former chief archaeologist with English Heritage, wanted a much longer tunnel for the A303 than the 2.1-kilometre scheme that the society is now backing. Others felt that a short “cut- and-cover” tunnel past the immediate vicinity of the stones, perhaps with the dual carriageways stacked above each other to minimise the surface damage, would be more economically feasible, and thus stand the best chance of getting done.

The Society of Antiquaries has now rejected both ideas, the long tunnel because of “the disproportionate cost and the engineering challenges involved” and the cut-and-cover tunnel because it “would result in a permanent artificial alternation to the Stonehenge landform” as well as short-term effects during construction.

The short-bored tunnel, now known as the Published Scheme, falls between the two in terms of cost and impact: first proposed more than a decade ago, it has emerged as the least-worst solution to an intractable problem, in which the demands of modern traffic are set against the survival of an iconic monument in its landscape.

The roads past Stonehenge, notably the A344, which skims the edge of the monument and cuts across the ancient avenue linking it to the River Avon, are themselves of considerable age: closing the A344, seen as a vital part of every plan, would change a pattern of access between Shrewton and Amesbury going back at least to the Middle Ages. The United Kingdom National Commission for Unesco has also endorsed the short-bored tunnel, while urging the Government to fulfil its commitment to the 1972 Unesco convention concerning the protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage Sites, which Britain ratified in 1984.

“The actions of the UK over the management of its own cultural heritage of ‘outstanding universal value’ will be closely scrutinised by the international community,” the commission has told the Highways Agency.

The Published Scheme, the Society of Antiquaries says, is the only solution that can be completed within this decade and the best chance for completing work in time for the 2012 Olympics. “Many Fellows hold the view that 2012 presents a unique opportunity to maximise the economic value of this nation’s heritage through improvements to Stonehenge and other key monuments,” Professor Fernie concludes.

• Last month’s expanded list of “Icons of England” from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport added several new images from our ancient past: Roman Britain is now represented by Hadrian’s Wall, as the Neolithic was by Stonehenge in the original dozen.

  Anglo-Saxon England is represented by the Sutton Hoo helmet (why not the much better-preserved one from York?) and the Lindisfarne Gospels, the high Middle Ages by the Domesday Book and York Minster. The beginnings of the modern world are seen in Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII and the Globe Theatre (Sam Wanamaker’s half-timbered reconstruction is presumably what DCMS has in mind, since the real thing is still buried beneath a row of houses and a car park).

  But where are our icons for the earlier past? Stonehenge apart, there is nothing to represent the half-million years of English prehistory before the Romans came. The Palaeolithic could be seen as Boxgrove Man, 400,000 years old and one of the earliest Europeans, although his actual remains — a shin bone and a tooth — are not all that iconic. Perhaps the 12,000-year-old cave art found recently in Derbyshire would be a better bet, although its outlined animals hardly compare with Lascaux.

  For the Bronze Age, one of the mammiform round barrows that stud the chalklands of Wessex would be a simple image, sex and death at the same time; and for the Iron Age Lindow Man, the mummified bog body so beloved of children visiting the British Museum. Our most impressive Iron Age monument, the great hill fort of Maiden Castle in Dorset — one of the most impressive fortifications in Europe — looks best from the air. But Sir Mortimer Wheeler showed in the 1930s that it had been stormed by the Romans, probably in

  AD 45. Britain conquered from Europe? Not an Icon for England, perhaps. So there are still openings for suggestions to the DCMS, which intends its final list to have 100 entries.

  www.icons.org.uk