There’s a bloody great road that roars past our most famous historical site, Stonehenge, and for some years now there have been plans afoot to try and do something about it.

It’s a thorny issue, because there’s not many options that don’t do just as much harm as they do good. Stonehenge is by no means a lonely monument; the landscape in that area is riddled with archaeology, some of it of as much interest to professionals as Stonehenge itself. Almost any plan for re-routing the A303 is going to involve destruction or damage to something historical.

There have been various ideas floating about. One was a dig a huge tunnel, hiding the road for miles in either direction. This would, of course, cost an absolute fortune and would be by no means easy; if you read the details at the Highways Agency site, you find that to dig any kind of tunnel they’d have to modify the water table itself, and build huge retaining walls to keep the sludgy Wiltshire clay from cascading down on to the road. There’s a reasonably informative PDF you can download, from which the map above was snipped.

The government has issued a press release about it, mentioning some options. But perhaps more useful are the dates and times for a public consultation, to be held in Salisbury and London during February. If you care about Stonehenge or its surrounding landscape, you might like to try and make it along to either the White Hart Hotel in Salisbury, between the 9th and 11th of February; or to The Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, Piccadilly, on the 17th and 18th.