Crap Days Out. Gareth Rubin

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      STANTON DREW STONE CIRCLES

       SOMERSET

      Many thousands of visitors to Stonehenge in Wiltshire go to marvel at prehistory’s answer to the Millennium Dome and its surprising lack of size or inherent interest. Yet, astonishingly, few visitors are aware that in the nearby county of Somerset, Neolithic man built another, equally mysterious monument to disappointing bank holidays and unhappy children.

      The Stanton Drew stone circles are a group of big stones so uninteresting that they aren’t even on top of each other. That’s right. A bunch of big stones which don’t even merit the word ‘henge’.

      As if in apology for not having tried to balance a few on top of the others like those other guys did in Wiltshire, the Neolithic stone gatherers at Stanton Drew did, at least, offer an extra couple of circles for your visit. So it’s a bit like your plumber saying he hasn’t put in a bathroom as you wanted, but he has set up your DVD player instead and still wants paying.

      The larger of the two rings, some 113m in diameter, is called the Great Circle. As if Stanton Drew’s contribution to the putting stuff in circles community wasn’t quite poor enough, not all of the big lumps are even there. According to archaeologists, the Great Circle probably originally consisted of 30 or more stones, of which just 27 survive today, and was surrounded by a ditch, which is now filled in. So at some point, someone came and took away three massive stones. For God’s sake, why?

      An attraction that could scarcely be crapper if it was made of wood. Imagine that, eh? Woodhenge.

      WOODHENGE

       DURRINGTON, WILTSHIRE

      Just two miles to the north-east of Stonehenge, outside the village of Durrington, a monument exists that makes Stonehenge look like St Peter’s in Rome. That monument is Woodhenge. That’s right. Stonehenge on the cheap.

      Woodhenge was ‘saved’ from obscurity in 1925 by Alexander Keiller, an amateur archaeologist and the millionaire inheritor of the Keiller family’s Dundee Marmalade fortune, and his archaeologist friend OGS Crawford, who identified the site from an aerial photograph taken by a First World War air hero, Gilbert Stuart Martin Insall VC.

      Yet while those making the discovery might have a pleasingly Boy’s Own feel to their names, the site itself is far from King Solomon’s Mines. Apart from anything else, all the wood has gone. Stonehenge, only made of wood, and missing all the wood. All that remains are circles of holes which probably had big wooden staves in them. Or maybe not.

      Still, this was long before television, and Keiller and Crawford’s discovery led to a full-on, three-year-long excavation of the site led by Maud Cunnington, a fellow archaeologist whose parents can only have chosen her name from a Jeeves & Wooster story. Had she been asked, Cunnington would probably have said something like: ‘Woodhenge is a rich discovery of great historical interest that promises to significantly increase our knowledge of the pagan religious rites of Neolithic Britain, but I wouldn’t visit on a bank holiday if I were you. Why not go for a walk in the countryside and stop in at a friendly pub?’

      If you felt let down by Stonehenge or enraged by the Stanton Drew Stone Circles, Woodhenge will have you spitting blood.

      ABBOTSBURY SWANNERY

       DORSET

      Love swans? Then you will like the Abbotsbury Swannery. But if you don’t like swans, or only quite like swans, you probably won’t like it as much.