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 Head To Head The Modern Antiquarian Wittenham Clumps and Castle Hill Forum | Start a topic | Search |
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| June, I think you must have deleted your news item about the didcot cooling towers being demolished, and people viewing from wittenham clumps? (or someone did). But i was thinking about it this morning, in fact they were talking about it on (imo the wretched) Thought For The Day. I think it's quite interesting to compare the two places. The TFTD person was saying how the towers had been a clear landscape feature on their route to visit their grandparents. And how the towers would have meant a lot of similar things to a lot of people. (Albeit they would have meant 'outrageous blot on the landscape' to a lot of people as well). So I was pondering the monumentality of such huge structures and musing that they weren't so different from the very striking Wittenham Clumps in a way. When I first saw WC from the train many years ago i could not believe my eyes, I thought they were amazing. And ok, when WC were a fort, they weren't covered in the trees that help them stand out in the landscape today. But they'd have maybe had a palisade fence, or smoke rising up, they'd still have looked distinctive. Anyway, that's just a bit of half-baked waffle. But I thought it was interesting in that it highlighted ideas about the landscape and what its features mean to us, and maybe meant to people in the past. Often on this website, people report the sites they go to in quite a scientifically detached way. And yet the sites are not often natural places, they are usually man-made and therefore maybe it's not the scientific x metres by y that are so important, it's they're bound up with cultural meanings. And even if we don't know what those meanings were when the sites were created, the sites have new meanings today. Perhaps the heat's getting to me :) Reply | with quote |  29th July 2014ce 14:11 4 replies: Re: wittenham clumps and didcot towers (tiompan) Re: wittenham clumps and didcot towers (nigelswift) Re: wittenham clumps and didcot towers (tjj) Re: wittenham clumps and didcot towers (Evergreen Dazed) |
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