A STOP ALONG THE WAY....

About 120 miles from home is the World Heritage Site of Stonehenge and on any journey westwards it makes for a sensible place to have a pit stop.

There is a charge of £3.00 to park the car (refundable if you pay the £6.50 adult charge for a fenced off, close-ish up view of the monument) but seasoned travellers like myself avoid this charge by parking in the adjacent trackway, which just happens to be a public byeway and thus "open to all traffic."

There`s a gateway from the trackway into Stonehenge`s own car park and`facilities` area and I confess to having used those facilities for more years than I care to remember. They include a catering outlet and I recall on one occasion making an exhorbitantly priced impulse purchase of a plastic cup of warm mud and a rock cake (they seem to have adopted a neolithic catering theme in keeping with the surroundings.)

Years and years ago when our three sons, who are now all in their forties, were very young, it was then possible to park for free, wander up to the monument and have a `tactile experience` with the stones - I still have a photo of our boys sitting on one of them.

However, back to the facilities. I can imagine a neolithic planning meeting going something like this:-

Ogg : "Err, why don`t we include some loos just down the hill a bit?"

Ugg : "Good idea. I can see this place becoming very popular in years to come."

Ogg : "Yeah, and we don`t want people making a mess of our nice new temple or whatever it is, do we?. So we`ll go for it, yeah?"

Ugg : "Nice one, Ogg - I`ll get the lads on it right away."

Each time I stop at Stonehenge, I see visitors getting off coaches from Germany, Italy, France and all over the UK. I hear American accents and see scores of Japanese photographing everything in sight. What must they think of the `conveniences` available in this world-wide World Heritage Site? They are a disgrace - worse than that, they are an embarrassment - but if you live in Boise, Idaho or Council Bluffs, Iowa and you`re thinking of making the pilgrimage to see Stonehenge before you go to the great prairie in the sky, you might find a little consolation in the knowledge that you will be getting two ancient monuments for the price of one. Even so, `Buy One Get One Free` is hardly the way to sell such an international treasure.