Stonehenge in the sunshine

Years ago I learnt not to bother telling people that I live in Wiltshire. It usually just gets a blank look. So I took to telling them I live near Stonehenge. Most people, even Americans, can conjure up Stonehenge in their mind’s eye.
When our kids went to university, they quickly adopted the same trick. But the list of places we could also use makes you wonder how Wiltshire remains hidden in plain sight. To live in Wiltshire means to live near Salisbury Cathedral. Near Avebury stone circle. Near Lacock, where countless period dramas and Harry Potter were filmed. Near where the world’s most famous canoe race starts. Near where Brunel based his Great Western Railways. Where crop circles appear. Where Wadworth’s beer is brewed and Dyson is based. Where the white horses are carved into chalk hillsides. Where the greatest cavalry battle of the English Civil War was fought. Near Longleat safari park. Near where the Army train on Salisbury Plain, the wildest, most untouched, open grassland in Europe. You know, the vast open vistas that surround the A303, that you only see through a car windscreen as you shuffle between the south east and Cornwall. The bit where you pass Stonehenge. That is Wiltshire. It is been my home for the last fifty years, and I promise you it is the most wonderful place to live on earth.
Walking the dog, up on the Wessex Ridgeway, I can see everywhere I’ve lived since 1969. Is this a good thing, to have seen so much of one place, risking the loss of a better life somewhere else? Perhaps, and I certainly thought so as a teenager stranded in a rural wasteland, peering into a brighter world through the prism of the BBC's Radio 1 and motorcycle magazines.
So this will be an attempt to share the joy and beauty of Wiltshire starting, predicatably enough, with a little on Stonehenge. It has around 1.6 million paying visitors a year, many of whom see nothing else of Wiltshire. That even included Barak Obama, so they're in good ompany.
These photos were taken a few weeks bck on the National Trust's Stonehenge and Avebury Walking Challenge starting at Durrington Walls. You can walk from the spot in the photo above almost to the stones, following the route the original makers of Stonehenge took in a ceremony we will probably never understand. But we do know they weren't Druids




 

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