10 replies to this topic

[senua]

Might be of interest:

  http://www.rturner.c...n_head_farm.pdf

[Amberle]

No one should be allowed to own a stone circle!

The one at Duloe is on land that the farm owns, but visitors are still allowed to be there. They don't try to say the circle is theirs because it isn't. They didn't build it, so why should they say it's theirs? Stone circles belong to the ancestors, not to the modern day people such as ourselves. Only if you built the circle, then it is yours, like the one we have built in our back garden. But ancient stone circles belong to no one.

[kevin.b]

Senua,
        great link, found it on flashearth.com at lat 54 28 3 n
                                                                long 2 33 25 w
The hill it is below, and right at the tip of the hill looks mighty powerfull to me ?
Kevin

[Stone Lover]

I wasn't able to get the link to work, so tried to follow the lat/long from flashearth.com.  Found the site, but coudln't really get in close enough to see it.  I agree with Kevin.b that the hill looks to be pretty commanding.

[kevin.b]

Apparently it sold for 430,000 pounds at auction.
Kevin

[Nigel]

Amberle, on 3 August 2006, 17:01, said:

No one should be allowed to own a stone circle!

I agree entirely, but please bear in mind that stone circles are only a tiny proportion of our prehistoric legacy. Most of it is buried, or spread across fields in the form of artefact scatters and very little of it is protected by scheduling. In England and Wales all of it belongs to the landowner alone (unlike in most countries where the state also has a legal right to it) and he is entirely free to dig it up, destroy it or let metal detectorists harvest it without the least legal obligation to ask the rest of us for permission or even tell us about it. About 3,000 ancient sites a year are destroyed by deep ploughing and who knows how many others by other means. In this respect I'd like to say we were a Third World country but the truth is most of them provide better heritage protection legislation than we do.

[kevin.b]

This will seem , even by my standerds a strange reply Nigel, but ,
if we work out why, their importance will be recognised?
Nuclear is a great threat to all, encoded in the megaliths is a free energy,
Some annoying people are in touch with gyrons, so are the stones.
http://www.aetherpress.com/
Kevin

[Nigel]

Thank you Kevin but you'll appreciate my immediate interest is in gathering people willing to help protect ancient places, not in taking advice about the structure of galaxies from a white tiger playing ragtime.

Whilst he may have the ultimate solution to conservation it may take some time for it to emerge and in the meantime, in a situation in which we're losing 8 sites a day in Britain alone, some more immediate and down-to-earth efforts are required.

[Diego]

Nigel, on 19 August 2006, 13:18, said:

About 3,000 ancient sites a year are destroyed by deep ploughing and who knows how many others by other means.

Can you please let us know from where did you get this figure? The only reference I found is that over the last decade, about 50 scheduled monuments a year suffered significant damage in England only. Maybe you made an interpolation between the number of scheduled monuments damaged each year and the theoretical number of those monuments (about 900,000).
I know no one can pretend to protect almost a million monuments in England alone, but it would be great to have a full protection on the 19,000 already scheduled.

And thanks for the work you are doing with Heritage Action.

[kevin.b]

Nigel,
      I will in every way I can , try and demonstrate the value and debt owed to the megalithic sites and their builders.
By working out WHY and PROVING WHY, we could halt and reverse the destruction of the sites?
At the moment you are like King canute telling the tide to turn?
Without a percieved use or value we are a tiny minority , and all that will be left is a few tourist sites where some system will increase admittance charges and put on megalithic club throwing shows .
I believe that very close at hand is an understanding of a lost knowledge , this is encoded in the very position and composition of the megaliths, all the forums are embracing google earth, and I have been so looking forward to when this happened, once everyone realises how in line so many places will be proven to be, then a better understanding of what I waffle on about will begin.
My aim is to prove why these rods move in my hands, this has led me to the megalithic sites, which I now feel a great love for.
I applaud your ceaseless efforts to preserve them and apologise if my seemingly flippant jumping on a stone offended.
I would no more damage any site than I would chop off my nose.
I am on your side Nigel far more than you realise.
Kevin

[Nigel]

Diego, I can’t find the specific reference at present, maybe i dreamed it, it wouldn't be the first time but I think the figures are likely to be realistic. This gives a flavour –
http://www.english-h.../conWebDoc.3932
and the “Schedule of Loss” here –
http://www.english-h...ughDamamge2.pdf
It mentions 3,000 “nationally important” scheduled sites currently under the plough but as you know that’s a tiny number compared with the number of non-scheduled sites there are under the plough – as the crop marks on Google Earth show. The country is stuffed with them, Italy too, and they have zero protection. Each time a farmer decides to plough 3 inches deeper that’s another ten thousand cubic feet of potential undisturbed archaeology destroyed for each acre of his farm, even though it’s existence may be well known, and no-one says a word. Had he taken a bulldozer to surface features everyone would have shouted, but this is a case of out of site so out of mind.

Your interpolation of 900,000 sites may well be right (though what's a site?) but it might even be low. There are said to be a thousand destroyed or degraded monuments in the Stonehenge-Avebury World Heritage Site alone (and that's before our government, with UNESCO's full blessing announces next month it intends to go ahead with a short bored tunnel that involves digging huge entrance cuttings across one third of the surface of the World Heritage Area! But that's a different rant!)

Thanks for your kind words about Heritage Action. But it isn't a vehicle for what WE can do, it was conceived as a means whereby anyone who saw a problem had an umbrella under which they could do something about it themselves. A sort of public soapbox where local concerns could get magnified effectively. We have people that are professionally skilled in web design, Public relations, graphic art, lobbying, you name it, but we also need lots more people to come forward with grievances, energy or skills. Which is why I was hoping to get a bit of co-ordination going between the various megalithic sites. We're all on the same side, we all know what the problem is, we just need to unify our efforts.

Kevin, yes I do realise you want to help but we've found we have to play this game with a very straight, practical bat. Those who have a vested interest in exploiting sites that we want to protect aren't above trying to badmouth us as a means of destroying our case and, no offense to your dowsing skills they'd have a field day if they thought Heritage Action was actually Heritage Dowsing!
By all means try to find out what the sites were for though, and let us know when you do. If there's a simple way of stopping Tarmac digging up Thornborough's landscape I definitely would want to know about it.

Sorry to ramble on Diego. Hows the nippolina? (Is that a word?!)