AS THIS column went to press, on December 18th, a band of female druids were preparing to bare their breasts at Stonehenge. This was not a practice run for the winter solstice, when the setting sun will glow orange through the site’s biggest trilithon, a vast staple-shaped assemblage. Rather the women, who belong to a group called the Loyal Arthurian Warband, are protesting against the exhibition of a prehistoric human skeleton at its new visitor centre. This was due to open, 85 years after it was first promised, the same day.

A column of irate motorists meanwhile threatened to snarl up the site’s approach road. They are not druids. Nor had they come to ogle druids. They are the Stonehenge Traffic Action Group, which complains that the closure of a section of road adjacent to the prehistoric monument has caused congestion in a nearby village. Yet this was as nothing to the bruises—barely eased by opening-ceremony Prosecco in the £27m ($44m) visitor centre—among the planners, assorted culture vultures and other parties to the mismanagement of one of Britain’s most iconic attractions.

Hitherto the million tourists who visit Stonehenge each year were served by a ticket-booth and grimly basic toilet block, built as a “temporary” measure in 1968, and a pedestrian underpass across a road that almost touched one of its stones. This was at least an improvement; 19th-century visitors could rent hammers to collect their own souvenirs. It was nonetheless, as a parliamentary committee declared 24 years ago, a “national disgrace”.

The new facilities—a wood-and-steel hangar with a nice café and superb exhibition—are, similarly, a big improvement. Yet they are far from pleasing to all. The centre is over a mile from Stonehenge, which means visitors must be carted to it. More important, though the most intrusive section of road has been closed, the much busier A303 still passes a couple of hundred metres from the stones. When Bagehot visited this week, car headlights glowed golden through the main trilithon.

The farrago is revealing. It illustrates the eternal tussle between private interest and the public good, and the frailties of Britain’s decentralised planning system. For English Heritage, the quango that owns Stonehenge, it signals the end of state control of heritage. Meanwhile archaeologists at the site have suggested a bigger lesson: on the integrity of Britain itself.

That Stonehenge should furnish this is fitting: it has long been taken to signify important things about Britain, its people and their place in the world. At the dawn of patriotic hymn-singing, medieval historians saw it as proof—maybe left by Merlin—of Britain’s marvellous origins. In the more globalised 17th century, a foreign hand, perhaps Trojan or Phoenician, was suspected of raising it. Vikings, druids, and Myceanaeans were also given the credit, reflecting varying views of Britain’s relations with abroad.

Views on how to manage the site have similarly ebbed and flowed. Until 1913 it was in private hands. The stones were then acquired for the nation as part of a broader state takeover of heritage sites—motivated, suggests Simon Thurley, boss of English Heritage, by fear of invasive American culture. Yet that transfer left unresolved a question of what to do with the stones, complicated by the divided ownership of the land around them: the National Trust, Ministry of Environment (which English Heritage was once part of), Ministry of Defence and private landowners all had a parcel. The emergence of neo-druids—who in 1905 held their first mass gathering at Stonehenge, wearing robes and false beards—added a new claimant. Thus began the great squabble.

The main antagonists are English Heritage and the National Trust. The former has launched at least three major efforts to develop the site. These led to over a dozen public inquiries, cost millions of pounds and foundered on objections from the trust (which tends to dislike new buildings of any kind), or from planners, or due to a want of cash. Meanwhile micro-squabbles flickered, often involving druids. In 1985 hippies and the Wiltshire police fought a scandalous conflict immortalised in hippiedom as the Battle of the Beanfield. No wonder even level-headed participants began to suspect the stones might be cursed.

The recent redevelopment is a triumph for which Mr Thurley and his counterpart at the trust, Simon Jenkins (formerly of this newspaper), deserve praise. It also contains lessons. The most obvious is that, as a result of its functioning democracy, zealous bureaucracy and timorous or lethargic governments, Britain has a slapdash approach to heritage. The country is also fairly useless at building things. Referring to another case of this, Mr Jenkins refers to the visitor centre as the “third London airport of archaeology”. Yet progress can be accelerated when the state is absent—Mr Thurley raised the £27m largely from private sources, after the current coalition government abandoned the project. Encouraged by this, English Heritage plans to sever its ties to the state.

Stoned again

In the prehistoric scheme of things, these are footling developments. But archaeologists at the site have recently made giant ones. Excavations of a neolithic village close to Stonehenge have provided new explanations of its origins. It was not made by aliens or foreigners. It was built by Britons at a time of remarkable cultural interconnectedness. Shards of 4,500-year-old pottery excavated in Wiltshire follow a pattern originating in Orkney, a Scottish archipelago; the bones of animals slaughtered at Stonehenge carry traces of Scottish water.

Scottish nationalists should mull that. There are lessons for Eurosceptics, too. Shortly after Stonehenge’s construction—even because of it—Britain saw a rush of continental influence, including the first metal tools from what is now France and amber from the Baltic. Written in the stones, then, is this portrait: of an ingenious island country, most prosperous when most open to the world, and with a mysterious concentration of eccentrics.