Standing on stones

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moss M
moss Aug 19, 2006 15:27:42
Replying to BuckyE

BuckyE wrote:
And there's the rub. There's no such thing as permanence and yearning for it just leads to unhappiness. And to people believing they can do damaging things without there being bad consequences. We need to foster, however it could be done, the realization the monuments have endured *in spite* of the ineluctable forces tearing them down: that they are fragile remainders of a once much more complete whole.
Nigel represents a long tradition BuckyE, that is perhaps emphasised by the following article;=

http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1877/spabman.htm

William Morris was a socialist and craftsman who believed passionately in the preservation of creative hand work, he founded the anti-restoration society, which argued against the victorians need to "restore" churches, so that when you look up at a church embellished and pinnacled to within an inch of its life, you will know that Morris failed to save it!
He also argued against capitalism as the ruling force of an economy because it ultimately destroyed anything of beauty - and here I note, that selling paintings for millions of pounds is not a particurlarly good way to go about it..
The problem comes in a small country like Britain with so much history to save and so many people needing to live cheek by jowl with all these monuments how much are we going to realistically save.. Stukeley in the 18th c was bemoaning the fact that such a lot was going under the plough, and you have only to look at the plates (Littlestone gives the link) to see how many more barrows there were around Stonehenge.. in the end it is always a battle, who wins is in the lap of the gods.

N nigelswift
nigelswift Aug 19, 2006 16:22:51
Replying to moss

Have you seen the William Morris rooms at Broadway Tower Moss? Well worth a visit.

Of course, there's loads of people interested in his sort of stuff now and britain does a better job of preserving it than most. But when you look at the prehistoric stuff, and most of all the shallow lumps and the buried stuff, it's on a monumental scale of destruction, pun intended. We can rationalise that all things must pass and take the valium, but what are we to think when English Heritage says 3,000 sites are destroyed by deep ploughing each year? 8 just today. OK, I know farmers are slowly being incentivised not to though EU money, but how many will be lost before that's all in place in ten years?

The other thing is, how many people in the country actually know enough and care enough to be trying to do anything about the process? Twenty? Thirty? One in two million? I know you've stood and seen a tumulus being nibbled away by a plough and been pretty upset but you're as rare as hen's teeth in the general population. So given the scale of the problem and the tiny number of people that care we're going to have to take Bucky's "lie back and smile" advice, minus the smile, and let it happen in the vast number of cases. Except for occasionally. What George has done at Thornborough in preserving a bit at least of "a world heritage class landscape" (EH's words) against all the odds is superb. When I'm finally crowned i'll see him all right for it.