Is that it?

By B.R.

MANY of you will have been asked by foreign friends, on a visit to your country, to recommend some tourist attractions worth visiting. In Britain, the inventories visitors draw up understandably tend to contain many of the same places; for someone not familiar with the country there are only a handful of sites that nearly everyone will have heard of. Some are worth a visit, such as the National Gallery or British Museum. Others are just as well ignored, like Buckingham Palace—an uninspiring, even ugly piece of architecture.

Stonehenge also often gets included on visitors′ would-like-to-see lists. But it is one of those places for which the reality is much more disappointing than the myth. Certainly one cannot help but be impressed by the feats of neolithic humans 5,000 years ago, lugging monumental stones from Wales to Wiltshire. And there is the folklore and the spiritualism to take in. But all that is rather spoiled by a sight you never see in the spooky films or picture postcards: a major road runs right alongside it. All those backed-up articulated lorries and camper vans belching exhaust fumes somewhat spoil the mood.

And they are almost always backed-up. The South West of England, with its underdeveloped infrastructure, is famed for its traffic jams. That may change; the government this week proposed to tunnel the main road under the henge. But until it does, Stonehenge can stay on the list of world-famous tourist attractions that are underwhelming up close.

In that regard, it sits alongside the pyramids at Giza which, while unquestionably awe-inspiring viewed from one side, are a let down for those expecting to find themselves in the middle of a vast expanse of desert. What the postcards don’t reveal is that they are really in the suburbs of Cairo, and one of the best views of them is from the local Pizza Hut. Other nominations for most disappointing must-sees, garnered from around the office, include the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen (“it does say little, but it really is tiny”), the Mona Lisa (“small, behind glass and a long way away”) and Checkpoint Charlie (“since the Wall came down, just a small shed in the middle of the road”).

Still, there is no pleasing some people. The Telegraph has just published a list of the grumpiest TripAdvisor reviews. They include pithy assessments of the Grand Canyon (“nothing special”), Machu Picchu (“the food here sucks”) and the Taj Mahal (“you are better off watching it on the net”). If you are the sort of person left unimpressed by a 2 billion year-old canyon, a 15th-century Inca town 2,430m above sea level, or the jewel of Muslim architecture, Gulliver suggests Stonehenge is definitely not for you. Even if they do build a tunnel.