Stonehenge: reverence abandoned?

Here’s one of Turner’s views of Stonehenge from his sketchbook of 1815. It shows a catastrophic scene in which a shepherd and his sheep had been struck down by lightning. It has been suggested that he depicted this scene of destruction to echo the ruins of a dead religion.

But in modern terms it could now be taken as representing the abandonment by one country of it’s long-established sense of reverence and decency towards it’s own and the world’s past.