Tomorrow, of course, is the biggest day of the year — as well as the shortest. It’s the Winter Solstice, the moment when Stonehenge is perfectly aligned with the rising and setting sun. The hippies and self-proclaimed “druids” may mostly prefer to gather there at midsummer, but the evidence suggests that for our Neolithic ancestors — who spent centuries erecting that great circle and thousands of years worshipping there — the winter ritual was more important.
It is for me as well! During the summer months this part of Salisbury Plain fits Ernest Thesiger’s famous remark about the First World War: “My dear, the noise, the people!” You can’t move for coach parties — literally, if you are jammed on the permanently clogged A303 as