THE legal challenge against plans for a tunnel past Stonehenge is "likely to be heard sometime in December", according to campaigners. 

Save Stonehenge World Heritage Site, the group behind the challenge, has said that three days have been allocated for a ‘rolled up’ hearing.

 This means permission to be heard and the full case are held at the same time.

SSWHS says that the construction of the tunnel would cut into a prehistoric trackway and result in the loss of archaeological remains and campaigners have remained steadfast against plans for a dual carriageway tunnel on the A303.

It adds on its website: "It is now clear that both National Highways and the Government are trying to rush through as many road schemes as they can before the Government gets thrown out at the next General Election.

"This is not about doing what is best for the country, but trying to buy votes and imposing an ideology on us all with little basis in facts or reality."

Chair of Stonehenge Alliance, and campaigner within the 'Save Stonehenge World Heritage Site' John Adams said: "We are completely ready for the legal case and are 110 per cent committed to this. We will see it through come what may. It is only us stopping the construction work right now."

After decades of discussions about how to improve traffic in the area with proposals submitted in 1991, the Transport Secretary approved the tunnel project near to Stonehenge this year which would cost around £1.7billion.

Read more: Update after UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee meeting

Stonehenge Alliance president Tom Holland said previously: “A supposedly Conservative government plans to blow upwards of £2 billion, at a time when the country’s finances are in a shocking state, on a monstrous white elephant of a road development that will permanently disfigure Britain’s most significant and sacred prehistoric landscape.

“The decision of Mark Harper to green-light the building of a tunnel through a stretch of the World Heritage Site that surrounds Stonehenge is as inexplicable as it is disgraceful.

"Certainly, no one can be in any doubt that the scheme will inflict ‘permanent, irreversible harm’ on a landscape that is the supreme icon of British archaeology.”

Read more: Sites that could be affected by the Stonehenge Tunnel

UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee (WHC) sent a strong message to the UK Government about its concern for the Stonehenge World Heritage Site remaining opposed to the project which will ‘cause permanent and irreversible harm.’

Stonehenge Alliance reported the update about the court on its Facebook page stating: 'National Highways and Government are rushing to sacrifice Stonehenge World Heritage Site, buy votes and impose a motorists' illusion on the country.' 

£56,385 out of a proposed £80,000 crowdfunder has already been realised.