Resonox wrote:
You can get up close and personal by arrangement to the roped off alignments at Carnac and around...the climbing is often done...more in the town itself where there is no signage...but usually viligant elderly residents with extremely sharp tongues and scant regard for the Geneva Convention when it comes to walloping trangressors about the ears protect their heritage...I have witnessed more than one chasing away aided by shouting and brandished rolling pin....I was actually in the process of berating a "climber" and his dopey friends in Carnac town for this...the party involved claimed to be Belgian and unable to understand my reproach...but scarpered when this tweed skirt & twin-set clad grande dame chased them off(putting my restrained approach very much to shame). I also should make it clear..it is the drunken "look at me" mobs who clamber and destroy for no other reason than self-gratification, I was aiming my reply to your post about....however I still think if they were to see any of us even innocently recording and creating records, even silently sitting and touching nothing taking in the atmosphere they would probably use the monkey see-monkey do excuse for their own behaviour.
Fair do's, thanks for the clarification.
Regarding Carnac (or probably more so Stonehenge, as posts above indicate Carnac isn't quite as closed-off as I previously perceived), the main thing that will still kill it for me is the fact that there is a need to apply to see it and that the visit will be under the scrutiny of the locals/EH. It doesn't make for much of an atmosphere in which to really appreciate the place, at least not to my mind. I think I like solitude and unfenced open space too much to really enjoy that. It's one of the reasons I much prefer Wales visits to England, because the constant barrage of "keep off the grass/no right of way/private" etc signs lessens the enjoyment - just reading the signs is dispiriting and rather soul-destroying. I experienced this feeling on Saturday while walking (along pavements) through the suburbs of Bourton on the Water. Everything was covered in notices and signs.
On the "monkey see, monkey do" point, I know what you mean but still can't really see that climbing on top of a trashed mountain top cairn is going to do any harm to it, unless you start messing about with the stones. So if they copy me doing that, I'll live with it. It won't cause any more harm to the ancient monument itself than climbing a set of stone stairs in a medieval castle will, or walking round the ramparts of a hillfort or banks of a henge (in fact, probably considerably less than those last two).
Oddly, I remember getting very annoyed (in a silently disapproving way, inevitably) when I saw someone climbing on top of a trig pillar on one Welsh hilltop. Although only half a century old, these crumbling concrete pillars are much more vulnerable to damage than the granite blocks of a cairn. I can't really explain why I was so irritated by it, it just seemed "wrong".
