Letter: Stonehenge past and present (CORRECTED)

CORRECTION (PUBLISHED 26 JUNE 1993) APPENDED TO THIS ARTICLE

Sir: I do hope the description of one of the proposed routes for an enlarged A303 near Stonehenge as passing 'through virgin countryside' did not come from English Heritage or the Department of Transport. The landscape around Stonehenge is anything but virgin. In it lie the remains of settlement and religious activity from both before and of the time of Stonehenge itself.

In particular, the southern proposed route for the A303 drives right through one of the key centres of both domestic and funerary architecture that would have been known to the very people that saw the erection of most of the Stonehenge megaliths. About as virgin as north America was to European colonists. Or is that the point?

Yours etc,

MICHAEL PITTS

Curator

Alexander Keiller Museum

Avebury, Wiltshire

20 May

CORRECTION

The letter from Michael Pitts of 22 May incorrectly described him as the present curator of the Alexander Keiller Museum in Avebury. In fact he was the curator from 1974 to 1984.

(Photograph omitted)