Ever since i realised that I was ‘actually’ going to Stonehenge I tried to reconcile myself to the possibility that it could be a disappointment. I had dreamed of visiting the place from the time I first read Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles almost six years ago and I’ve read it five times since. In the novel, Tess becomes a fugitive and sets off along the Wessex countryside with her husband. The long pursuit ends when the police finally track the tragic heroine and find her sleeping, barely concealed behind the now famous boulder-like stones.

This world heritage site is not easily accessible to visitors and I had been warned that driving there solo was not a good idea. Friends grumbled that all they had managed was a stop on the A 303 trunk road and a somewhat foggy, distant view of what looked like a pile of stones which they blamed on the preservation efforts. Equipped with this knowledge I decided that if I was going to spend a wad of pounds, I would have to gain some sort of special access. I wanted to walk inside Stonehenge and touch the stones even. So I set off on a quest to the Information Centre at Leicester Square (London) and discovered Premium Tours, one of the very few groups that actually take you all the way up to the stones.

My pick-up arrived at the Kensington Hotel at six in the morning bringing with it a busload of sleepy vacationers. James, our dapper guide, looked like he had stepped straight out of a Victorian novel with his topcoat, billycock (bowler hat) and spiffy walking cane. The drive there was long even with minimal traffic, and James’ trivial bytes didn’t have quite the rise-and-shine effect he was hoping for.

While I knew that Stonehenge as Hardy saw it in 1891 would be significantly different from what I was about to see, in the minutes leading up to it, I actually dreaded every decision that had got me here. I tried to distract myself by focusing on the Wiltshire countryside with its black faced, woolly mammoth-like sheep that were lazing in the sun and chuckled inwardly remembering the scene in Shanghai Knights where Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson’s characters drive into Stonehenge mumbling about ‘the nuts that left piles of stones in the middle of a field.’ Despite my wandering imagination, I felt antsy knowing I couldn’t rid myself of the images I had conjured in my head of a mystical, maze-like, pagan site.

To get there, I walked through an underground tunnel, marked by illustrations suggestive of the route the stones were carried through and how the formation appeared when it was first constructed. On stepping out, I was confronted by a fitting, understated climax. The vast, undulating plains with their hazel and pine trees that once surrounded this historic site were gone. Instead, they had been overlaid with connecting trunk roads but the serene stone circle at the centre compensated for the encroaching dregs of industrialization that surrounded it. Sure, I couldn’t mask my chagrin when I found some of the monoliths missing, keeled over or defaced by graffiti; but the site was enveloped in an air of solemnity which had even the noisiest tourists keeping their decibel levels in check.

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