The transport secretary’s decision to allow a road tunnel to be built near Stonehenge was unlawful because it did not properly consider damage that would be done to a string of prehistoric sites and many thousands of ancient artefacts, the high court has been told. Campaigners including archaeologists, environmental groups and the druids who regard the great Wiltshire stone circle as a sacred site have launched a judicial review calling for the decision by Grant Shapps to allow the £1.7bn road scheme, including the two-mile tunnel, to be quashed. Shapps gave the go-ahead for the scheme to be built despite advice from a panel of planning inspectors who concluded the scheme would cause “permanent, irreversible harm” to Stonehenge. One archaeologist who works in the landscape called the decision “head-bangingly stupid” and hundreds of thousands of people from around the world signed a petition against the scheme, with many donating money for the legal fight against it, claiming the government was sacrificing a historic site to cut road users’ journey times by a few minutes. A group called Save Stonehenge World Heritage Site (SSWHS) brought the judicial review, which is due to last three days. One of its arguments is that Shapps’ decision was unlawful because he allegedly did not examine the impact of the scheme on each “heritage asset” – for example, barrows and remains of ancient enclosures that would be affected. SSWHS argues that instead of taking this individual approach, Shapps looked at the impact the road scheme would have on the site as a whole – and decided that because the tunnel would take the sights and sounds of traffic away from the stone circle, it merited pressing ahead with. Speaking ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, one of the world’s leading Stonehenge experts, Mike Parker Pearson, a professor of British later prehistory, said more than 10 hectares of the world heritage site would be “completely destroyed”. He said at the western end of the tunnel the road would cut through a “dense scatter” of prehistoric artefacts and buried features likely to be the remains of a copper age to early bronze age settlement (c 2,450-1,800BC) – potentially a campsite for the builders of Stonehenge. Parker Pearson claimed at the other end the remains of a settlement from before the time of Stonehenge could be lost. He also argued the Mesolithic site of Blick Mead could be affected by changes to the water table, potentially destroying organic material in waterlogged deposits. Experts at Blick Mead have made finds that help to tell the story of how ancient humans lived at the Stonehenge site since the ice age. Finds have included perfectly preserved hoof-prints of wild cattle, known as aurochs. In his skeleton argument, David Wolfe QC for SSWHS said: “The only heritage asset which the secretary of state actually addressed was the WHS [world heritage site] overall … he simply failed to identify and assess the heritage significance of each asset.” The skeleton also flags up a claim from a consortium of archaeologists claiming that Highways England “dramatically underestimated” the harm that would be caused and that about half a million artefacts would be lost by the proposal. Among those who headed to London from Wiltshire for the hearing was Arthur Pendragon, a druid who claims to be the once and future king. He has vowed to lie in front of the bulldozers to stop the scheme. The judge, Mr Justice Holgate stressed that the court will not be considering the merits of the project. He said: “We will not be looking at whether it is a good project or a bad project. We are here only, we are concerned only, with the questions of law and whether the secretary of state has acted unlawfully.” The Department for Transport said: “We are confident the decision taken by the secretary of state to proceed with the A303 Stonehenge project was correct, lawful and well-informed. The reasons. … are set out in the https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/projects/south-west/a303-stonehenge/ decision letter. We cannot comment further as this is a live litigation case.”