Listen to the experts on the Stonehenge tunnel | Letter from Prof David Jacques

Traffic passes along the A303 next to Stonehenge
Traffic passes along the A303 next to Stonehenge. The site ‘is unutterably precious and you tamper with it at your peril’ writes David Jacques. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty

Helen Ghosh, Kate Mavor and Duncan Wilson’s response to John Harris’s article about the Stonehenge tunnel (Letters, 27 April) entirely misses the point. The Stonehenge world heritage site landscape is unutterably precious and you tamper with it at your peril – you cannot make it come back. There should be perpetual inquiry here and the UK government, the National Trust and English Heritage either value that or they don’t. The tunnel scheme will clearly compromise the archaeology. Whose interest would that be in? It would be better to trust the experts. The joint statement from 21 archaeological specialists working at the Stonehenge site from 14 UK universities and the international Icomos-Unesco team report recently provided detailed and empirically based rebuttals of the tunnel plans and clearly highlight various dangers it poses to the area’s archaeology and sense of place.
Professor David Jacques
Blick Mead project director, University of Buckingham

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