Damage to Stonehenge prompts call for replica

Press, 10 October 1984, Page 21

Damage to Stonehenge prompts call for replica

NZPA-AAP London A replica of Stonehenge may be built to save the 4000 year-old monument from further damage by visitors, the “Sunday Times” reports. The English Heritage Commission, which took over Stonehenge from the Government in April, wants new moves to protect the monument from the 800,000 tourists which visit it every year. Members of a working party set up to tackle the problem believe a lavishly equipped replica — just out of sight of the real thing —

could reduce the number of people wanting to get close to the real stones. The commission was unhappy at the “squalid clutter” of barbed wire, snack bars, and lavatories that disfigure the approaches to the site on Salisbury Plain in southern England, the newspaper, said.

It was hoped many visitors would be content with a tour of the replica followed by a distant glimpse of the real Stonehenge on a bus ride, leaving the site to scholars.

The replica would be

equipped with an elaborate audio-visual presentation of the building of Stonehenge and the theories which account for it.

The Heritage Commission has yet to decide how a replica would be built, but a recent study by a construction firm calculated it would cost £332,640 ($880,000) to rebuild the monument with stone quarried in the Welsh mountains, as the original was.

The firm said it could do the job with 30 men. The original builders used at least 1000.