For all the outrage they provoke, the targets of Just Stop Oil’s vandalism up until now have at least made a certain kind of sense. Art galleries can (almost) plausibly be seen to represent Western decadence; the Chelsea Flower Show a display of bourgeois excess; and historic monuments symbols of imperialism and colonialism. All of these, however tenuously, fit within a stock narrative of the West and modern capitalism as drivers of environmental destruction.

The same cannot be said of an ancient pagan site in the middle of the verdant Salisbury Plain. And yet this was to be the victim of their latest publicity stunt. Yesterday a group of protesters stormed Stonehenge, spraying the 5,000-year-old megaliths with their signature orange coating (in this case cornflour). This came just one day ahead of the summer solstice, when thousands will gather around the site to watch the sunrise on the longest day of the year.

Such a sacrilegious gesture seems to wholly contradict the ethos of the environmental movement. Far from being complicit in the sins of modern industrial society, the prehistoric pilgrims of Stonehenge quite literally idolised the natural world — as do many of those who will come bearing druidic robes and ceremonial drums this evening. If anything, they represent the embodiment of that which environmentalists claim to support.

The earliest advocates of the green movement thought as much. In fact, most protests against the destruction of nature have historically been accompanied by a reverence for pagan spirituality. One immediately thinks of the counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies, but their notions of “returning to nature” can be traced back to the 18th-century Romantics. Just as the hippies venerated the divine feminine and sought to get back to lost forms of worship, the Romantics aspired towards a spiritual communion with the landscape.

Running through both movements was the notion of a clear distinction between the Enlightenment paradigm of man’s domination over nature — associated either with Protestant Christianity or scientific rationalism — and an ideal, pre-modern paradigm of harmony with the environment. This was the contrast described by the German sociologist Max Weber as the “iron cage” of modernity versus the “great enchanted garden” of antiquity, and which has long influenced the ideals of environmentalist thought.

Surely, Stonehenge is the perfect symbol of such a “great enchanted garden”. Indeed, this was how the ancient monument was presented by William Wordsworth himself, perhaps the pinnacle of the romantic return to nature. In his poem “Salisbury Plain”, he contrasted the disillusionment of his own time — symbolised by the main character turning away from Salisbury Cathedral — with the primordial sight of Stonehenge at sunset:

For Wordsworth, Stonehenge was the perfect representation of pre-modern idyll, standing in direct opposition to disenchantment. Faced with such potent symbolism, one would think Just Stop Oil — seemingly the inheritors of the Romantic reaction — would take a similar view. And yet they have chosen to desecrate it.

Little could be more revealing of an environmental movement which has not only lost touch with its historical origins, but any real philosophy of what an alternative relationship to nature might look like. For better or for worse, the Romantics at least had such a philosophy — but as garish neon paint pollutes the ancient stone, it seems their vision has been gravely obscured.