| ISSN 1357-4442 | Editor: Simon Denison |
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| COMMENT |
In England, recent losses have been appalling, writes Richard Morris
Recent years have seen a succession of official studies to examine landscape change. In result we know, for example, that each year about 2,250 miles of hedgerow are lost, and about 70 square miles of countryside vanish under development. Now, a comparable audit has been made for the historic environment.
In 1994 English Heritage commissioned research from Bournemouth University into what has been happening to England's archaeology (excluding off-shore sites). The project was called the Monuments at Risk Survey (MARS), and its results are published this month. Among them is the news that in England alone at least one monument has been destroyed every day since 1945, that two per cent of all recorded monuments (about 4,520) are in immediate peril, and that about 65,000 more - 28 per cent - are at medium risk.
To obtain such figures it was necessary to delineate a bigger picture, a picture at once complicated and in motion. Archaeological sites are being discovered and destroyed all the time, and some are lost before they are even recognised. Moreover, what counts as `a monument' is defined by what we find interesting, and this, too, changes. When MARS began, for example, the sites of fortifications built during the two World Wars were less widely appreciated than they are today.
MARS distinguishes between monuments which are already recorded on Sites and Monuments Records (SMRs), and the totality of what survives. Even the recorded figure was elusive - disparities of definition precluded simple totting up. Moreover, MARS counted only what SMRs actually held in 1995, not information awaiting entry.
The condition of England's monuments was assessed by close examination of a sample - that is, all recorded monuments within a five per cent sample of England's area. The finding, in a nutshell, is that while the known resource is rising, the inherited resource is dwindling.
To an extent, therefore, MARS is the mathematics of the ball-park where the size of the crowd is changing, there is room for debate about the readings of the turnstiles, and the capacity of the stadium is not exactly known. Given that MARS is the first quantification of its kind this was inevitable, and for the moment it does not much matter. What counts is the order of magnitude of loss, which English Heritage describes as `quite appalling'.
Loss has occurred not simply outright but through cumulative nibbling. Large single monuments and field systems have suffered worst. Property development, natural erosion and agriculture emerge as archaeology's main adversaries. Development is being moderated by the government planning guidance PPG16, and our influence on erosion is limited. Agriculture is the main challenge. Over a quarter of all known monuments are in arable cultivation, which, the report states, `is one of the major destructive factors . . . It is also one of the activities least controlled by current effective measures or legislation.'
There are some who caricature conservation as a cryonic ambition to turn Britain into cultural permafrost. In fact, change is landscape's natural condition. The issue is not whether change should take place, because it will, but whether the daily forfeiture of 32 acres of archaeologically sensitive land - and hence of answers to historical questions which only certain yards of soil enable us to ask - should be so indiscriminate. This is no esoteric complaint. Mingled with the vanishing sites are the ingredients of local personality, mystery, opportunity and beauty.
English Heritage proposes an ambitious programme to counter the haphazard, unnecessary sterilisation of local surroundings which MARS reveals. Among the proposed measures are reinforcement of archaeological provision in local government, support for the purchase of sensitive land by appropriate bodies to ensure long-term management, closer integration of archaeological needs in agri-environment strategy, the appointment of Countryside Archaeological Advisers to guide land-owners, and a package of measures aimed at public benefit and local involvement.
Immensely welcome is English Heritage's determination, stated in the report, to examine `the need to revoke the class consent for ploughing on Scheduled Monuments [which allows landowners to continue agricultural work on monuments without applying each time for permission], and the possibility of including certain agricultural land-use changes within the planning system.'
MARS is but a first step: indeed, part of its work involved setting bench-marks to assist more accurate measurement of future change. Monitoring, and revised strategies will follow. Another census is promised for the year 2015. On that occasion perhaps it will cover Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well.
Richard Morris is the Director of the CBA
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© Council for British Archaeology, 1998