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"achievABLE STONEHENGE"
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Littlestone
Littlestone
5386 posts

Re: The Shop
Feb 11, 2006, 19:14
Bet you'd have preferred to have left Sutton Hoo still in 'earth's grip' Peter ;-)

But yes, I'd forgotten about Sutton Hoo - actually, it's the one place that springs to mind where the visitor centre <i>surpasses</i> the actual site.

I trekked out to see the Sutton Hoo barrows one scorching hot day a couple of years ago - it's about half an hour there and back and there's no shade and no cover and I nearly fainted from the heat! Other than a few mounds in a field that's it. The visitor centre by comparison has an audio-video room where you can hear Old English being spoken; see a reconstruction of part of the boat and its interior; see both replicas and some of the original objects found within the barrow; take in various displays (a great one that I remember went into some detail on the superb quality of Anglo-Saxon steel - they'd developed the folded steel technique some six hundred years before Japanese swordsmiths managed it) and after all that I went for a nice cold drink in the adjacent NT restaurant.

Sutton Hoo is not the Valley of the Kings (which is still worthwhile slogging out to see with or without a visitor centre). I'd say Stonehenge falls somewhere between the two. Every site is different and probably requires a different approach :-)
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