Silbury Hill forum 180 room
Image by kgd
Silbury Hill

EH to hold public meeting about Silbury in Avebury

close
more_vert
Ishmael I
Ishmael Sep 24, 2005 00:12:59
Replying to Littlestone

well Paul, I disagree.
Many of the locals who have lived in the shadow of Silbury all their lives won't come to a meeting if it is outside of Avebury.
Maybe its time to listen to people like the Greenaway family who have looked after the up keep of Silbury for generations.
All these Blow Ins with their grand ideas of what is right and wrong could do with listening to a bit of commen sense once in a while, not that the powers that be would take much note at the end of the day.
The social club can hold enough people for a meeting, anywhere else bigger is more suited to a lecture from EH.

M moss
moss Sep 24, 2005 15:53:58
Replying to Ishmael

It seems to me that perhaps we should all step back from "owning" Silbury and concentrate on it as an entirety in its own right. It was built by people 4500 years ago, as a part of their lifestyle. In our lifetime we have recognised it as World Heritage Site and part of an ancestoral landscape that needs to be protected. Its wellbeing therefore comes under all our guardianship, we should be taking the right course of action to repair damage that has been done in the past and not further damaging it to extract some more archaeological information that may titillate a few more books. I don't know how it should be repaired, and I expect there will a lot of people who will have views one way or the other, but its inherent qualities - its centrality in the landscape, its wholeness as a slightly battered but still upstanding beautiful symbol of a peoples desire to create a monument that has lasted all these thousands of years should be respected.
Guardianship is just that, it is the protection of that which is weak and vulnerable, EH or the National Trust, archaeologists, or even the people of Avebury, do not have rights to Silbury, it just needs to be passed on in as good condition as can be expected of something that has lived through the rigours of thousands of years of history, to other generations.
Not on a soapbox, but if everyone put their own interests on one side and just did what was best for Silbury I am sure we would arrive at a SIMPLE solution on which everyone agreed.... of course you could always have a meeting on top of the hill..
Moss

L Littlestone
Littlestone Sep 24, 2005 17:34:00
Replying to Ishmael

>Many of the locals who have lived in the shadow of Silbury all their lives won't come to a meeting if it is outside of Avebury.<

Why not? Are they so locked into their 'local' mentality that all major decisions regarding a World Heritage Site must be made in their little social club over tea and biscuits? I have about as much respect for the (Avebury) locals (past and present) as I do for the policy makers at English Heritage. Frankly, a conservation strategy for Silbury should be just that - a strategy based on accepted standards of conservation - nothing more, nothing less. Reputation building by 'experts' and the petty considerations of those who live in and around Avebury are secondary, and I can do no better than quote Stukeley's opinion of them -

"And this stupendous fabric, which for some thousands of years, had brav'd the continual assaults of weather, and by the nature
of it, when left to itself, like the pyramids of Egypt, would have lasted as long as the globe, hath fallen a sacrifice to the wretched
ignorance and avarice of a little village unluckily plac'd within it."

Having said that, now is the time for those of us who are <i>genuinely</i> concerned about the future of Silbury to put aside our differences and pull together - making sure our arguments are uniform, sound and concise. Nigel pretty much summed it up when he said, "Focus is all." and moss when he said, "Its wellbeing therefore comes under all our guardianship..."

Littlestone