Nigel, yes you personally have been courteous and if your explanation of last night's very brief reply (which you made on behalf of Heritage Action)was in way of an apology then I accept it.

June, just to clarify, no it wasn't on behalf of Heritage Action and no it wasn't an apology (for what?). I agree you've been courteous and respectful apart from last night and since I suffer from a short term memory problem I have forgotten what happened last night.

Heritage Action lays out its remit as 'ordinary people caring for extraordinary places' and yet there there doesn't seem to be much inclusiveness in that statement.

I'm not sure how much more inclusive HA could be. We post loads of stuff on various forums, we ask people to contact relevant bodies and sign petitions, we have a permanent invitation on our site asking people to submit details of endangered sites, we offer people help in building their own campaigns and every single one of our hundreds of Heritage Journal articles has a facility for people to make comments on what has been written.

Against that, as "ordinary people" we suffer a lot of stick, and not just here (but a lot here). If you care to you will be able to find really horrible, hurtful things said about us on two other megalithic sites just in the past week or two - Stone Pages and Megalithic Portal. Personally, I don't give a stuff, having the hide of a rhino - part original and part reactive - but I do feel upset on behalf of others who most definitely don't deserve to have their sincere efforts constantly trashed. Like you, they may sometimes wish they "hadn't bothered."

I fully appreciate we aren't perfect, which is befitting "ordinary people" but we ARE on the right side and trying to make a difference to a heritage situation that isn't good - see our Review of the Year for just how not good it is. In fact, that article contains a relevant passage about us -

"No doubt we shall continue to complain and continue to be criticised and dismissed by officialdom and others as amateur trouble making know-nowts. Perhaps we are but we ask only to be judged by events. Either these places ARE being destroyed as those set up to protect them stand by, or they aren't.

So either our "ordinary people" imperfections can be judged in that context or we can be thought of, as it currently says on Stone Pages as a small handfull of fundamentalist heritage activists with a personal axe to grind. Please bear in mind I'm not personally looking for a vote of confidence here as I truly don't give a flying stuff and shall carry on trying, sometimes very badly, to do something I believe in. 'Twould be nice if the others were cut a bit of slack sometimes though.