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.
