Sincere congratulations to Historic England, joint winners of the recent Current Archaeology award for Rescue Project of the Year!
They’ve been recording rare Roman graffiti in Gelt Forest, Cumbria. It couldn’t be a more exciting project: the inscriptions were carved by soldiers quarrying stone for Hadrian’s Wall and previously lost ones have now been rediscovered. Nor could it be a more worthy project: the soft sandstone into which they are carved is gradually eroding away and eventually they’ll be lost..
Which prompts the question: how can an organisation which rightly earns great praise for preserving irreplaceable Roman graffiti at the Hadrian’s Wall quarry be supporting the construction of a mile of new dual carriageway across the Stonehenge World Heritage landscape which will needlessly destroy massive quantities of irreplaceable archaeology?
The Heritage Journal 
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16/03/2020 at 13:44
paulintheswimhotmailcom
All credit to Historic England for preserving this ancient graffiti……..or perhaps I should call it ‘writing on the wall’. But there is now lots of new ‘writing on the wall’ from ordinary people like myself, archaeologists and even UNESCO. It says that Historic England, English Heritage and National Trust’s support for the Stonehenge tunnel is an absolute disgrace and a far cry from their sanctimonious and hypocritical claims on their websites about how much they care for history and landscapes. More ‘writing on the wall’ says that the tunnel will seriously damage the WIDER Stonehenge landscape. In particular, Blick Mead, the western burial grounds and any unknown archaeology that is in the way of this ignorant and brutally ruthless tunnel project.