Join English Heritage through Tesco club card points for £30 or so, bit of a bargain for a years use.
I appreciate that it's not nothing, but GBP15 per head for entry to a major attraction isn't insane.
An adult ticket to visit the SS Great Britain in Bristol is GBP14.
Imperial War Museum Duxford is GBP16
Cheddar Gorge is GBP16
Beamish open air museum is GBP18
Ironbridge Gorge is GBP28 (which is an annual pass, if you need to go repeatedly for some reason)
A pint of beer is GBP4.
A Santa Cruz Nomad C is GBP4,600, etc.
🙂
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Another way of getting close without paying. Taken from a baby Cessna in 1999 🙂 The whit object is the wing.
Unfortunately I have to travel the A303 quite often. The longbarrow roundabout is a disaster. Lane discipline is none existent.
the NT/EH don't care about Avebury, because it's entirely made up, the stones were re-arranged as you see them today by the first groups of archaeologists 😀
£17.50 is one week budget for my food.
Anything more than £10 is expensive for looking at few bricks or stones ...
Me mate has joined the English Heritage membership by paying online at a price of less than £50 (think that's the amount) for free entry to all sites, so started dragging me around to visit historical sites ... so far I have paid £6.50 and £9 for entry.
He wants to maximise his investment in the membership ... but I drove him around, paid for my fuel, paid for my food and not even a coffee in return. But I don't mind so long as the place is interesting. 😮
Mixed feelings on this.
That’s an awful lot of money (how much would a family end out paying?), and I’m naturally inclined agin EH since they did away with free entry for locals at Chysauster iron-age village, my local antiquity of interest. At the same time, it is a seriously impressive site (as epitomized by Jerry’s pic), and if it generates the income to preserve some less popular sites then I can see the benefit.
As for the National Trust, I’m warming to them, especially since they’ve started to be more mountain bike friendly round here. They’ve put in a graded run at their Lanhydrock estate as well as upgrading a load of footpaths to new bridleways at Penrose (near Helston), so I find myself wavering, in spite of their hunting / Countryside Alliance connotations.
But as other posters have suggested, there’s loads of free-to-access sites around the country. Have a look [url= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stone_circles ]here[/url]. It’s just a shame for most people (and a benefit for those of us on the fringes) that the various owners tend to exploit their location if there’s a chance of some income generation.
I should add that the only time I’ve visited Stonehenge was back in the day and I remember leaning up against and trying to climb onto the stones.
esselgruntfuttock - MemberA bit like York Minster then. £10 a head. I always thought places of worship didn't charge an entry fee? We didnt bother. Might've made a donation if we'd got in without a fee. I'm sure Durham cathedral doesn't charge & its MILES better!
I am sympathetic with places of worship asking for a fee under [i]certain[/i] circumstances, but if you are religious at all, you could always just ask if you can go in to pray. That tends to be seen as a reasonable ground on which to gain free entry. That said, it is nice that Durham only asks for a donation. It is, as you say, better than the Minster.
@Ambrose: are you not back in term? Or have you got out of the business? 😕
Yup- still teaching and TBH feeling pretty chuffed with my results this year. The trip out to that there scary Englandshire was at the behest of my brother in law.
nickc - Member
the NT/EH don't care about Avebury, because it's entirely made up, the stones were re-arranged as you see them today by the first groups of archaeologists
Really? Do you have facts to back this statement up? The first 'reconstruction' was carried out by Alexander Keiller, and he put the stones, or at least the ones that hadn't been destroyed over the previous three or so centuries, back as close as possible to their original position, in the original socket.
There has been very little actual archeological investigation carried out, and as far as I understand, from talking to NT people, those stones still upright after all the previous vandalism have been there from the beginning, like the second biggest stone in the henge which hasn't moved in 5000 years. There are still a whole bunch of stones in the south-eastern quadrant which are still buried, the NT refuses to touch them for fear of spoiling the archeology, but if they don't investigate what has only been where it is for three hundred years, how can they know what lies underneath.
There is a deliberate policy of leaving Avebury as uncontaminated by commercialism as possible, which is clearly not the same as not caring, the continuing and ongoing erosion control shows that.
There are only two shops in the whole village, one is the NT shop near the Tythe Barn, the other is the Henge Shop, both do the typical stuff, craft/New Age tourist things, but keep just the right side of the sort of tat you see elsewhere.
Speaking as someone who is in Avebury probably a dozen or more times a year, including this Sunday just gone, I think NT/EH have the balance spot-on, visitors can go pretty much where they please, touch the stones, in one instance slide down it, very popular with kids, that particular stone.
It's as original as any monument can be after 5000 years of human interference, particularly during the last four hundred, and if those remaining stones raised back into place by Keiller aren't exactly as first raised, they're pretty damned close; claiming it's all made up shows a degree of ignorance of the history of the whole site.
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