Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

He fetched me a slender leaflet giving the bus times between Salisbury and points west and helped me locate the modest section dealing with journeys to Stonehenge. I had hoped to catch an earlymorning bus to Stonehenge with a view to proceeding on to Avebury for the afternoon, but this, I instantly apprehended, was an impossibility. The first bus to Stonehenge didn't leave until almost eleven in the morning. I gave a snort of disbelief.

'I believe you'll find the local taxi services will take you to Stonehenge, wait for you there, and bring you back for about twenty pounds. A lot of our American visitors find this very satisfactory.'

I explained to him that though I was technically an American, I had lived in Britain long enough to be careful with my money, and, though I had not yet reached the point where I extracted coins one at a time from a little plastic squeeze pouch, I would not willingly part with .20 for any good or service that I couldn't take home with me and get years of faithful use out of afterwards. I retired to a nearby coffee shop with a sheaf of bus timetables and, extracting from my rucksack a weighty Great Britain Railway Passenger Timetable purchased specially for this trip, began a lengthy crossstudy of the various modes of public travel available through Wessex.

I was mildly astounded to discover that many substantial communities had no rail services at all Marlborough, Devizes and Amesbury to name but three. None of the bus timetables appeared to interconnect in any meaningful way. Buses to places like Lacock were woefully infrequent and generally made the return journey more or less immediately, leaving you the choice of staying for fourteen minutes or seven hours. It was all most discouraging.

Frowning darkly, I went off to the offices of the local newspaper to find the desk of one Peter Blacklock, an old friend from The Times now working in Salisbury, who had once carelessly mentioned that he and his wife Joan would be delighted to put me up if I was ever passing through Salisbury. I had dropped him a line a few days before telling him that I would call at his office at 4.30 on whatever day it was, but the note must never have reached him because when I arrived at 4.29 he was just easing himself out of a back window. I'm joking, of course! He was waiting for me with twinkling eyes and gave every impression that he and the saintly Joan couldn't wait for me to eat their food, drink their liquor, muss the guest bed and help them pass the night with a robust sevenhour version of my famous Nasal Symphony. They were kindness itself. In the morning, I walked with Peter into town while he pointed out local landmarks the spot where As You Like It was first performed, a bridge used by Trollope in the Barchester Chronicles and parted outside the newspaper offices. With two hours to kill, I pootled about aimlessly, peering in shops and drinking cups of coffee, before finally calling at the bus station, where a crowd of people were already waiting for the 10.55 to Stonehenge. The bus didn't arrive until after eleven and then it took nearly twenty minutes for the driver to dispense tickets since there were many tourists from foreign lands and few of them seemed able, poor souls, to grasp the idea that they needed to hand over money and acquire a little slip of paper before they could take a seat. I paid .3.95 for a return ticket on the bus, then a further .2.80 for admission at Stonehenge itself. 'Can I interest you in a guidebook at two pounds sixtyfive?' the ticket lady asked me and received in reply a hollow laugh.

Things had changed at Stonehenge since I was last there in the early Seventies. They've built a smart new gift shop and coffee bar, though there is still no interpretation centre, which is entirely understandable. This is, after all, merely the most important prehistoric monument in Europe and one of the dozen most visited tourist attractions in England, so clearly there is no point in spending foolish sums making it interesting and instructive. The big change is that you can no longer go right up to the stones and "scratch 'I LOVE DENISE' or whatever on them, as you formerly were able. Now you are held back by a discreet rope a considerable distance from the mighty henge. This had actually effected a significant improvement. It means that the brooding stones aren't lost among crowds of daytrippers, but left in an undisturbed and singular glory.

Impressive as Stonehenge is, there comes a moment somewhere about eleven minutes after your arrival when you realize you've seen pretty well as much as you care to, and you spend another forty minutes walking around the perimeter rope looking at it out of a combination of politeness, embarrassment at being the first from your bus to leave and a keen desire to extract .2.80 worth of exposure from the experience. Eventually I wandered back to the gift shop and looked at the books and souvenirs, had a cup of coffee in a styrofoam cup, then wandered back to the busstop to wait for the 13.10 to Salisbury, and divided my time between wondering why they couldn't provide benches and where on earth I might go next.

AMONG THE MANY THOUSANDS OF THINGS THAT I HAVE NEVER BEEN able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, 'You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass.' Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows.

Much as I admire sand's miraculous ability to be transformed into useful objects like glass and concrete, I am not a great fan of it in its natural state. To me, it is primarily a hostile barrier that stands between a car park and water. It blows in your face, gets in your sandwiches, swallows vital objects like car keys and coins. In hot countries, it burns your feet and makes you go 'Ooh! Ah!' and hop to the water in a fashion that people with better bodies find amusing. When you are wet, it adheres to you like stucco, and cannot be shifted with a fireman's hose. But and here's the strange thing the moment you step on a beach towel, climb into a car or walk across a recently vacuumed carpet it all falls off.

For days afterwards, you tip astounding, mysteriously undiminishing piles of it onto the floor every time you take off your shoes, and spray the vicinity with quantities more when you peel off your socks. Sand stays with you for longer than many contagious diseases. And dogs use it as a lavatory. No, you may keep sand as far as I am concerned.

But I am prepared to make an exception for Studland Beach, where I found myself now, having had a nifty brainstorm the previous day on the Salisbury bus. I had dredged my memory banks and remembered a small promise I'd made to myself many years before: that one day I would walk the Dorset coast path, and now here I was on this sunny autumnal morn, fresh off the Sandbanks ferry, clutching a knobby walkingstick that I had treated myself to in a moment of impetuosity in Poole, and making my way around the regal sweep of this most fetching of beaches.

It was a glorious day to be abroad. The sea was blue and covered with dancing spangles, the sky was full of drifting clouds white as bedsheets, and the houses and hotels of Sandbanks behind me looked radiant, almost Mediterranean, in the clear air. I turned with a light heart and made my way along the moist, packed sand at the water's edge towards the village of Studland and beckoning green hills beyond.

The Studland peninsula is well known as the only place where you can see all seven British reptiles the grass snake, smooth snake, adder, slow worm, common lizard, sand lizard and Michael Portillo. For much of its length, the beach is reserved for naturists, which always adds a measure of interest to any walk along it, though today, in fact, there wasn't a soul to be seen along its three fetching miles; nothing before me but virgin sand and behind only my own footprints.