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thesweetcheat T
thesweetcheat Aug 31, 2012 22:46:13
Replying to Sanctuary

Sanctuary wrote:
GLADMAN wrote:
...But for my money Silbury's plight fades into insignifcance compared with that of many of our less well known sites. .....
I've just returned from an early evening tramp up Ridge Hill, East Moor to take a few photographs of the once beautiful ring cairn on the eastern end. Words fail you when you see how the bastards have ripped this sacred cairn apart to make what appears to be a sheep pen out of it. As the following pix show this nigh on 70ft diameter ring cairn with a central standing stone which partial excavation has revealed a cremation burial under a granite slab has been violated to a degree that brings shame to all who have contributed to its demise (not that they care a toss!).
I really don't know what the answer is. Education doesn't seem to get you anywhere because in the main the overwhelming population today appear to
have their own problems to deal with and simply turn a blind eye to what they see as no big deal. A landworker I spoke to on the moorland road beneath the hill saw it as 'Just a heap of stones'.
https://picasaweb.google.com/100525707086862773355/RidgeHillRingCairn?authkey=Gv1sRgCOK3jZnhuoq-zgE#
This is exactly the problem. If it was an isolated incident, maybe it would be less hard to bear, but it's widespread and continual, all over the country. These are the sites that need to be protected, awareness raised and the state of preservation recorded and monitored. All over the country. Not just one mound in Wiltshire (I know, I sound like a broken record).

Unless you're out there seeing the damage, every trip, week-in, week-out, it might be easy to dismiss the ongoing damage to these obscure sites as unimportant, as minor, especially when compared with the threat to the Really Important Sites, which need round the clock monitoring or they will turn to dust before our eyes. But I refuse to see it that way.

These obscure sites all represent this country's heritage and are vital in understanding the full scope of what was going on here in prehistoric times. The interrelationship with each other and with landscape forms, all of that is being lost, rapidly.

But no-one raises a whimper, because they're not in a World Heritage Site, they're not visible to the coachloads of tourists. So no-one minds if another little cairn is trashed, another little barrow is ploughed out, another little stone is toppled and broken, because they're not important enough. Well I bloody well think they are. These are the sites we should be most concerned about, the ones not on the guardian bodies' radar.

B bladup
bladup Sep 1, 2012 00:25:33
Replying to thesweetcheat

thesweetcheat wrote:
Sanctuary wrote:
GLADMAN wrote:
...But for my money Silbury's plight fades into insignifcance compared with that of many of our less well known sites. .....
I've just returned from an early evening tramp up Ridge Hill, East Moor to take a few photographs of the once beautiful ring cairn on the eastern end. Words fail you when you see how the bastards have ripped this sacred cairn apart to make what appears to be a sheep pen out of it. As the following pix show this nigh on 70ft diameter ring cairn with a central standing stone which partial excavation has revealed a cremation burial under a granite slab has been violated to a degree that brings shame to all who have contributed to its demise (not that they care a toss!).
I really don't know what the answer is. Education doesn't seem to get you anywhere because in the main the overwhelming population today appear to
have their own problems to deal with and simply turn a blind eye to what they see as no big deal. A landworker I spoke to on the moorland road beneath the hill saw it as 'Just a heap of stones'.
https://picasaweb.google.com/100525707086862773355/RidgeHillRingCairn?authkey=Gv1sRgCOK3jZnhuoq-zgE#
This is exactly the problem. If it was an isolated incident, maybe it would be less hard to bear, but it's widespread and continual, all over the country. These are the sites that need to be protected, awareness raised and the state of preservation recorded and monitored. All over the country. Not just one mound in Wiltshire (I know, I sound like a broken record).

Unless you're out there seeing the damage, every trip, week-in, week-out, it might be easy to dismiss the ongoing damage to these obscure sites as unimportant, as minor, especially when compared with the threat to the Really Important Sites, which need round the clock monitoring or they will turn to dust before our eyes. But I refuse to see it that way.

These obscure sites all represent this country's heritage and are vital in understanding the full scope of what was going on here in prehistoric times. The interrelationship with each other and with landscape forms, all of that is being lost, rapidly.

But no-one raises a whimper, because they're not in a World Heritage Site, they're not visible to the coachloads of tourists. So no-one minds if another little cairn is trashed, another little barrow is ploughed out, another little stone is toppled and broken, because they're not important enough. Well I bloody well think they are. These are the sites we should be most concerned about, the ones not on the guardian bodies' radar.

It always makes me wonder how we've ended up like this, seeing knobheads just destroy everything before our very eyes feels like some form of torture, it's the same with the raping of the earth and pollution, these monuments have been here so long and to see this happening now feels like we are letting down the ancestor's, you would have hoped that those sort of things were in the past, but no such luck, things now are worse than ever and probably only going to get worse with the population of the planet growing and growing, i just hope that when they die they get fucked up just like the things they have fucked up, at least we can rest in the fact that we are better than those fuckwits, i hope you can feel my anger and pain, i am someone who has to hold back the tears when i see a big quarry, and the fact that people pay to go in some mines and are proud of the things we've done to the earth makes me sick, talk about different worlds.

M moss
moss Sep 1, 2012 09:57:37
Replying to thesweetcheat

Of course everyone here has the opportunity on TMA to register in a logical and rational manner the destruction of sites. Here we have all the sites to hand, it maybe an idea to categorise them to a simple format. Upland cairns risk destruction at the hands of walkers and farmers, this is ongoing. Big sites such as stone circles have a different set of problems, mostly to do with people's perception of them and their own subjective beliefs. Beautifully restored long barrows also suffer from this as well.
How do you draw up historical destruction, ongoing farming destruction and modern day destruction lists? I am sure it can be done, or even separately on another site. But it is the recording which is so needed, not everyone giving vent in the forum which then slips away into the unfathomable depths of the internet.
In the end recording is the most important thing we can do for posterity, for the sites themselves, and for those who go to visit them.
Like you TSC I think the fate of Avebury and Stonehenge rests with their guardians and will be addressed in time, it is those smaller places slipping away with time and destructive ignorance that needs to be spelt out.
Watching over the years the slow destruction of a barrow cemetery under the heavy tread of large tractors taught me one thing, there is an inevitability about it and no matter how many emails I sent to the county archaeologist, it would still go on.....