On this day 100 years ago Cecil Chubb gifted Stonehenge to the nation.
He had bought it at auction 3 years earlier narrowly beating a local farmer who may have removed the stones and ploughed it up.
Originally given to his wife Mary, who is believed to have been unhappy with the present, the couple gifted the monument to the nation.
Work was begun straight away to ''restore'' the stones, many of which had fallen over or were leaning dangerously.
his picture shows workers on the site in 1901 in a restoration which caused outrage at the time but which is rarely referred to in official guidebooks. For it means that Stonehenge, jewel in the crown of Britain’s heritage industry, is not all it seems. Much of what the ancient site’s millions of visitors see in fact dates back less than 50 years.
From 1901 to 1964, the majority of the stone circle was restored in a series of makeovers which have left it, in the words of one archaeologist, as ‘a product of the 20th century heritage industry’. But the information is markedly absent from the guidebooks and info-phones used by tourists at the site. Coming in the wake of the news that the nearby Avebury stone circle was almost totally rebuilt in the 1920s, the revelation about Stonehenge has caused embarrassment among archaeologists. English Heritage, the guardian of the monument, is to rewrite the official guide, which dismisses the Henge‘s recent history in a few words. Dave Batchelor, English Heritage’s senior archaeologist said he would personally rewrite the official guide. ‘The detail was dropped in the Sixties’, he admitted. ‘But times have changed and we now believe this is an important piece of the Stonehenge story and must be told’.
https://wikkorg.wordpress.com/2013/07/0 ... tonehenge/
