Was anyone watching the Culture Show last night? Specifically the section about Ian Nairn and his railing against the ruination of the British landscape. There was a bit where he visited the Rollright Stones and was fairly apalled by the amount of signs and fences (I had to consider at this point whether the Rollrights was the worst offender. I think not). Anyway he was particularly upset by the Victorian fence around the king stone.<blockquote>At one point near Chipping Norton, Nairn came upon the Rollright stones.These pre-Roman monuments are situated in open countryside high on a hillside overlooking south Warwickshire. The location had a primitive grandeur but the Kings Stone, the principal monument, had beenfenced in with spiked railings by the Ministry of Works which had also erected one of its familiar, unlovely and unhelpful cast plaques. The public had worn a muddy earthtrack up to it from the road. It could havebeen a monument to the Unknown Bureaucratic Prisoner, Nairn said.</blockquote>
http://www.ihbc.org.uk/context_archive/27/outraged_dir/outraged_s.htm
The reporter on the Culture Show added that the railings are actually part of the scheduled monument now. Can this be true? It's pretty hilarious if it is. He seemed to think they had some role to play in protecting the nibbled stone from any more attacks with a chisel. But I dont' know about the validity of that.