A monumental tragedy unfolds

Submitted by vicky on Tuesday, 09 March 2004 Page Views: 4464

In the low winter sunlight, a Wiltshire hillside fills with the long shadows of an ancient settlement. Twenty years ago these banks and hollows were prominent landmarks; next year or the year after and the last faint echo of this numinous place will have gone, writes David Lovibond of the Financial Times.

England is an old country, built on bones, a vast archaeological site with more than a million recorded features that could be anything from an interesting smudge in a cornfield to a Saxon shore fort. Resonant with local attachment and deep continuities, it is the historic landscape that gives the English countryside its power, the sense of belonging and identity. In the past 50 years, intensive farming has brought these irreplaceable landscapes to the edge of extinction, so that much of our archaeology survives only on paper. In Dorset and Wiltshire, the Wessex heartland, nearly 75 per cent of sites has been heavily damaged or destroyed; in the Midlands more than 90 per cent of the medieval ridge and furrow is lost; in Essex only a handful of the 1,200 recorded prehistoric burial mounds remain; in Hampshire more than two-thirds of the Neolithic long barrows have gone under the plough and on the Lincolnshire Wolds almost 80 per cent have disappeared. On the Cornish moorland, in the Thames flood plain, in the Cotswolds and on the North Yorkshire moors, the effects of deep ploughing are described as "absolutely devastating".

Only about 2 per cent, or 19,000 archaeological sites, are regarded as scheduled ancient monuments by English Heritage, thus meriting legal protection. This list has been under review for decades and, so far, very few monuments have been deleted from it - despite their utter eradication from the landscape. In a white paper due this Spring, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is likely to recommend that the venerable designation "scheduled monument" be subsumed into a single, unified list creating what the officials call "an inventory of all types of heritage" (listed buildings, conservation areas, historic parks and gardens, wrecks, battlefields, world heritage sites and scheduled monuments) and covered by one legislative system. But all this clerical fiddling, whether a site is scheduled or included on the new Statutory List, will not guarantee its protection. During the 1990s about 50 scheduled monuments a year suffered significant damage, including Roman towns and villas, Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and Celtic fields. In most cases the owners of these uniquely valuable sites reduced or destroyed them perfectly legally, if unwittingly. Class Consent means that provided an archaeological site was under cultivation for at least five years prior to scheduling, then the farmer can continue to plough it. There are 3,000 or so scheduled monuments in arable land, exposed to machines capable of ripping up in an afternoon features that may have survived for millennia. "Thirty years ago substantial archaeology could still be found under the plough. Now, when we look at sites and deposits in arable land they are almost totally obliterated," says Roy Canham, Wiltshire county archaeologist.

In theory, farmers must seek consent before undertaking work likely to affect a scheduled monument, or face prosecution. Bizarrely, the relevant Act allows the plea of ignorance as a defence, which is at least consistent with the policy of appeasement and general buttering-up that successive governments have decided is their best hope of persuading landowners to behave properly. English Heritage can offer management agreements to farmers prepared to soften the farming regime on their protected monuments, but these agreements are relatively scarce (Wiltshire has 91 out of 2,400 scheduled sites) and chiefly found in pasture land where there is little threat to the archaeology. Farmers who are both eligible and willing to sign up for Defra's (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) "agri-environment" schemes, Countryside Stewardship and the Environmentally Sensitive Areas, are contractually obliged to farm in ways that do not damage historic sites - which refer to farm buildings as well as tumuli. Between them the schemes cover about 10 per cent of England's farmland but this is necessarily the least spoilt countryside and the schemes do not help archaeological sites in intensively farmed areas. Potentially better news is the government's planned introduction of two new strategies that are expected to pay more attention to archaeological protection. Chiming with reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy, which "de-couple" subsidies from production and allows support to be given instead to environmental work, the two schemes should start in 2005 and eventually cover about 80 per cent of English farmland. The Entry Level scheme (which the NFU thinks will cost about £320m, half from the CAP and half from the national exchequer) will let a farmer choose from a menu of good works and pay him according to a points system. But he is not obliged to pick archaeology or take the very basic advice available to him. The much smaller Higher Tier scheme (estimated cost £20m) will involve a more precise audit of the archaeology, targeted advice and a requirement that important features are managed more closely. "CAP reforms open up a new way of rewarding farmers, so that the countryside becomes the crop not the wheat," says the NFU's Dr Andrew Clark.

The new agri-environment schemes may simply be a wheeze to stuff cash into farmers' back pockets while CAP reform snaffles it from the front. Which wouldn't stop them being worthwhile but there are unaddressed practical difficulties with the archaeology component. The schemes will depend on the Sites and Monuments Records (SMR) compiled by the counties and on the National Monuments Record (NMR) held by English Heritage, for the archaeological details of individual farms. But though some counties have accurate and comprehensive SMRs others are patchy to the point of invisibility, and there are serious disparities between the county records and the NMR. And how are farmers, particularly at Entry Level, to find out about their archaeological sites? Will they be expected to research their own farms, will the county archaeologist put his records on the web, will Defra send him a leaflet or a man from the ministry? And how are the agreed farming activities to be monitored? "The heritage lobby has to make sure there is information available in an intelligible way to farmers" says Clark.

At last, England's archaeology is recognised as having the same importance to cherished countryside as wildlife and landscape. In this spirit, no further consents to plough scheduled monuments should be given, and those currently in cultivation should be removed from it. Every legally protected site should have a management agreement. Finally, it should be an absolute offence to damage a monument, and damage should simply mean the disturbance of ground.

Perhaps it is all too late. If so, something more than a few inconveniences to the plough will have been lost. England's ancient landmarks are the connection that binds us to our national home. Without them we will be less: not a people but a gathering, occupiers, a mere confusion of tongues.

Source: FT.com 08/03/2004

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Contributor Bio for vicky: Ex Megalithic Portal Editor, Co-author of 'Rock Around the Peak - Megalithic Monuments of the Peak District' and... More

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