I ’m not sure what the Just Stop Oil protesters think they’re achieving by vandalising Stonehenge , but upsetting the very people they need to support their cause seems perverse, to say the least. In many ways, they could scarcely have chosen a less suitable target for the vandalism. It’s obviously a world heritage site (I didn’t even need to look that up on Google), it’s a monument where people have communed in a mystical fashion with nature for millennia, a magical place that entrances New Age types that you’d imagine would be naturally sympathetic to the environmental cause.
..and yet they go and, literally, desecrate it.
It’s owned and curated by a kindly charity, English Heritage, and it isn’t, last time I checked, sponsored by Saudi Aramco or Shell International. I didn’t know, and I suspect no neither did they, that these old stones also play host to precious living things – rare lichens . The protesters may have thought they were being very clever by using soluble coloured cornflower, so that the monument wouldn’t be permanently vandalised.
The lichen only survived thanks to the protest happening during a rare break in this summer’s downpours. If wet, the orange dust would not have been removed by experts quite so easily. Had the protesters got their chemistry or weather forecast wrong, these previously unspoiled stones would forever have had a faint, faded tangerine hue to them, as if they’d once been used for an Orange mobile phone marketing.