Hi Firstfox - nice to have you on-board!
This 'ere 12 Apostles lark goes way back. Before the 'ban' on Stonehenge, we only ever really had a few people up here for solstice, but after that lovely woman Thatcher had everyone ransacked down the Henge (Battle o't' Beanfield - I was there & won't ever forget it) people all over the British Isles started finding out if they had their own little circle nearby. Within a few years the trouble started.
I was there with about 150 people a couple of years after the Beanfield event, when a small bunch of big, aggressive pentagram-wearing dickheads turned up with as much cider as they could carry. They did the usual piss-head crap, pulled up a stone or two & carried one of them into t' middle o't' circle, next to the fire & used it as a seat!!! They were waffling the usual witchy diatribe - "my pentagram's bigger than your pentagram" & similar bollox, until a few of us simultaneously screamed "Wot the fuck d'y' think yer doing!!!???" (or summat like that) and the staggering morons put the stone back where it originally stood.
As for stones being "snapped": another solstice saw some other dickheads start a fire up against one of the sunrise stones on the east side. The stone subsequently snapped off! 'Fraid I wasn't there when this happened, cos I found that each year more & more pagan-pissheads gathered here & I got fed up & now do my own thing in my own spaces. But if another stone's been damaged it's bloody ridiculous.
More damage is happening to this & other sites up here simply cos more & more people are walking over the moors. There's been a couple of cases of christian fruitcakes pushing the stones over aswell, trying to kill the demons which live here! (no lie) Thirty years back you could sit at the Apostles in the middle of a nice summers day for an hour or 2 & you'd probably only see one or two people in that time (if at all). Now you can't stay there for more than 5 mins without someone turning up. As a result, the damage continues...
If you end up getting any decent responses from Ilkley or Bratf'd Council, lemme know. It's truly about time we gorrof our arses & made a stink about it all. Who's for joining in?
