Simon Denison talks to Penny Stokes
Some miles east of Glastonbury, where the Somerset landscape begins to fold up into the Mendip Hills, a deserted medieval hamlet lies preserved under pasture, at a place still known by its old name of Withial.
I am here with Penny Stokes, a part-time countryside officer for Mendip District Council, whose job is to raise public awareness of such historic features of the landscape. (She is also, as it happens, the wife of the dairy farmer who owns this stretch of land.) She points out the various humps and bumps - the raised earth platforms for vanished houses; a `holloway' or sunken track winding between them; and beyond, an older, perhaps Roman, cambered road, stretching out across the next field.
Explaining this sort of field is typical of Penny's work - she leads walks around the area, organises community-based historic landscape surveys, and so on. Not world-changing stuff, you might think? But look again at Withial, and you see how important this work really is. `It wouldn t have taken much to flatten this for a field of turnips,' she says. `It is just by the merest chance that it has survived.'
Most farmers, she says, are `extremely unaware' of the historic features on their land which are rarely protected in any way - comparatively few are scheduled - or even marked on Ordnance Survey maps. For many farmers, a site such as Withial might seem just an irritatingly bumpy field. So far as the law is concerned, it could be bulldozed tomorrow with impunity.
Yet farmers' ignorance is generally not their own fault, she insists - and this is where her work begins to count. How, she asks, can we expect farmers to protect historic features unless we tell them what's there? The results of her community surveys are published locally; and the effect? `It is so much more difficult to lose sites or features, either deliberately or by accident, if local people value them.'
For all the success she has made of her job (she has recently persuaded the council to agree to a Historic Environment Conservation Strategy - a rare thing), archaeology is a relatively new interest for her, something that has evolved only over the past decade. Remarkably enough, considering her vivid enthusiasm now - her eagerness to point things out, to explain, to communicate her enthusiasm - for most of her life she had little or no concern for the past at all.
An extremely young-looking 44, Penny Stokes was born in Bristol in 1951, the daughter of a businessman. She went through grammar school, and a business studies course at the local tech, but throughout this period academic work took a very low place behind social life, boyfriends, and a partying spirit that saw her through her 20s in various financial jobs in London advertising agencies. She had no ambitions, then, beyond marriage and children; and this is duly what she achieved, moving back to the West Country at the end of the 1970s, where she married, and produced three daughters, now aged 14, 12 and 10.
Something dissatisfied her about domestic life, however. She had never taken a close interest in the farm; and, almost on a whim, she joined a local evening class in archaeology. It quickly became an all-consuming hobby. She began to field-walk, first in her own fields, then around her parish, eventually adding 24 sites of all periods to the county Sites and Monuments Record. She studied and read more; joined the regional CBA group, even became involved nationally, now sitting on the CBA's Executive Committee to provide an amateur voice.
Penny is gentle, very feminine and charming, but there is a powerful streak of determination in her. She took the Mendip Council job, originally, to finance a part-time degree in English Local History at Leicester, where she still travels once a week for an onerous day of lectures. After that, she is thinking of tackling a research degree. She is throwing herself into her new life with the energy of a 20-year- old straight out of college, and brooking no opposition - `you have to do what you want to do, don't you?' - though she does admit to some housewifely guilt over the neglected state of her 17th century farmhouse, and over the time she allows for her `latchkey' daughters.
Pursuing archaeology as an amateur is hard, she says - professionals often look down on you, and exclude you; `and you have to make yourself take part, for the experience, even when they are mean to you'. But Penny's success in finding local sites, and in building a career, shows just what can be achieved. The more amateurs there are with her enthusiasm and commitment, the richer British archaeological life will be.
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