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Regular readers will be aware that our long-standing chairman, Nigel Swift sadly passed away last month.
Nigel’s wish was for no formal funeral. However, his family and close friends are attending an informal celebration of his life at 1pm today. Although many will be unable to attend in person, anyone who knew him, or had any dealings with him over the years is invited to raise a glass to a life exceptionally well lived, wherever they may be.
This will be an opportunity to smile and share fond stories of Nigel, and importantly, to remember him. Wear whatever you like, Nigel would not have noticed or cared, and any colour is appropriate!
He would have sneered at cards or flowers (best left as trees or in the ground where they belong). But we’re sure that the family would appreciate any small donations in his name to St Richards Hospice where he spent his final days.
So, whatever your tipple, be it tea, coffee, fruit juice, beer, wine or something a little stronger, please feel free to take a moment to join in the celebration, and always remember him.
We are taking a short break over the Yule period, but we will be back with more heritage news, visit reports, and more in the New Year. Thanks for sticking with us!
The Heritage Journal grew out of Heritage Action, a grassroots organisation formed in 2003 by a large group of “ordinary people caring for extraordinary places“. This means that next year, 2024 will be our 21st birthday!
Our continuing focus has always been to highlight the need for conservation of prehistoric sites, through promoting greater public appreciation of them and bringing attention to the many threats they face.
Throughout 2023 we have extended this focus, largely thanks to Myghal Map Serpren who has contributed many of what he calls his ‘scribblings’ following his visits to religious and military heritage sites around his home in West Cornwall. He also kindly documented his travels around Cumbria after a summer holiday spent in the region. We look forward to more of his contributions in the future.
The Journal has grown over the years into a very widely read community resource and everyone, whether professional or amateur, is welcome to contribute. If you have visited a heritage site, either locally or whilst on holiday, why not write a few words about it for others to read? Please see our Contact Us page for details of how to submit an article. We look forward to hearing from you in 2024.
Have a great Yule!
By Nigel Swift
Heritage Action has recently had its 20th birthday so I feel this would be a good time to step back from the Chairmanship. Alan Simkins has agreed to take my place and I am sure he will carry the torch into the future very well. This is not to say I won’t be contributing, just not interfering! Many thanks for all the support I’ve received over the years and I know Alan will be equally well supported.
The last 12 months have been strange, worldwide. Certainly here at the Heritage Journal, several of us are classed as ‘vulnerable’ and our excursions have been seriously curtailed due to the pandemic. As Father Time marches on and none of us here are getting any younger, it is likely that will continue to be the case. With that in mind, next year we hope to bring some retrospectives to the Journal – looking back upon some of our past field trips as a reminder of the wide range of our prehistoric heritage.
In addition, as most readers will be aware, our self-imposed remit in the past has largely been focussed upon the pre-Roman monuments of the Uk. From the New Year, we hope to be widening our scope to include Post Roman and Early Medieval topics and even to delve (lightly) into the subject of ‘Earth Mysteries’ – but all the while keeping a scientific eye on the evidence. After all, no ancient aliens are involved in the production of the Journal!!
This is therefore an appropriate moment to thank our loyal readers, and all those who have interacted with the Journal in the past. We certainly hope that you’ll stick with us, and maybe even consider contributing an article or two in the coming months ahead.
If you’d like to write a piece for the Journal, please contact us. Even if you have no idea what to write, we have plenty of topics in our ‘ideas bank’ just waiting for someone to volunteer their time!
Happy New Year! (or Bledhen Nowyth Da! as we say here in the deep South West)
As the calendar changes, we’ve looked back and reviewed the past 12 months. Now it’s time for another beginning, looking forward and making plans for the coming year.
Our suggestions for resolutions back in 2013 still stand as admirable targets to strive for and we would commend them all to anyone interested in our past heritage. Here they are again:
- Visit new sites
- Join a local Archaeological Society
- Take a course
- Attend a conference
- Involve the family
- Contribute to the Heritage Journal
But this year, forgive me for speaking from an entirely personal viewpoint when looking forward…
A long held dream of moving to, and living in, West Cornwall looks to be coming to fruition for me in the following 12 months, and with it early (semi-)retirement! My hope is that this will allow me time to get more involved on a day-to-day basis in helping to preserve and understand our ancient heritage.
Once settled, and health allowing, I intend to volunteer for the CASPN clear-up days when I can, and will see if/how I can help the Cornwall Heritage Trust in their work too. I hope to be attending more walks and talks with both CASPN and the Cornwall Archaeological Society. And of course, writing! I have plenty of ideas for articles for the Heritage Journal, and possibly even a book or two, but these require a large commitment of time for research which I just don’t have at the moment.
So what will you be doing to preserve and understand our ancient heritage in 2017? Please let us know in the comments below.
By Alan S.
As the calendar clicks over another year, and we’ve looked back at some of the stories of the past 12 months, it’s now time to look forward and to express some of our hopes, dreams and wishes for the year ahead.
After what has passed, it can be quite difficult to be positive when looking ahead, but our primary hopes are that:
- Shropshire County Council have a change of heart, and decide to finally listen to the wishes of the majority of those whom they were elected to represent, rather than the minority of developers and landowners who stand to gain from potential housing development within the shadow of Old Oswestry hillfort.
- The government and associated interested parties also listen to reason, and decide to keep the Stonehenge World Heritage Site somewhere that is deserving of the epithet, rather than turn a frightening proportion of the area into what could turn out to be a very large extended building site for more years than we’d care to imagine. And all for a transport system that relies on a fossil fuel that we are constantly being told is itself a dwindling resource.
I’d like to think those two hopes, backed by the right campaign groups and pressure in the right place, could both be met in the coming months.
As for dreams, wouldn’t it be marvellous if:
- The Portable Antiquities Scheme were to become properly funded. With the right resources, the scheme could finally grow teeth and claws, provide proper educational outreach, and halt the depletion of a finite resource.
- The DCMS actually realised the extent of that depletion (we’ve mentioned it here enough times!) and decided to fall in line with the majority of other countries around the world and ban outright the unlicensed use of metal detectors.
And finally for wishes for the future. Well, (apart from the big lottery win that would finally allow me to retire and spend my time on leisurely pursuits) we obviously wish:
- All the best for the museums up and down the country who are struggling against the ‘austerity’ measures and cuts (that never seem to affect the well-off sections of society, funny that!) that are biting so deep.
- An improvement in prospects for:
- those affected once again by flooding (the Yorvik Centre has just been on the news as I write this) and
- all the HEROs (‘Heritage Environment Records Officers’) whose employment prospects seem to be dwindling by the day.
- all those archaeologists, graduate or otherwise, who find it so difficult to find employment at anything other than minimum wage.
We wish you all well!
Many thanks to all those who responded to our recent survey. The results were interesting, but not in the way we expected.
Firstly, by far the largest group to respond were the metal detectorists at 30% of the overall votes. However as a very large proportion of these were cast in just a 45-minute period on the Sunday evening, with no further votes after that, we’re minded to completely eliminate those votes as a deliberate attempt to subvert the results.
So discounting those votes entirely, and in round numbers: approximately 38% of respondents are involved in heritage matters in a professional capacity – either as an archaeologist (16%), historian (3%) or other heritage professional (19%). A further 19% voted as ‘antiquarian hobbyists’, which to be honest we could have done with defining a bit better. 11% considered themselves amateur historians and only 5% voted as amateur archaeologists. This leaves 8% tourists and 2% students. The remainder (17%) selected ‘None of the above’, which strongly suggests that there are other groupings of our audience that we hadn’t considered.
But what this shows is that our audience is fairly well balanced between the professional and ‘lay’ sectors, and that in turn, our balance of comment and opinion pieces alongside the factual ‘site focus’ type articles is again roughly correct. It’s encouraging that so many (often very busy) professionals consider us worth reading on a regular basis, and for that we thank you all.
Our readership numbers have remained relatively stable over the last 18 months or so, despite reducing the number of articles. We can only interpret this as a period of underlying growth in overall readership – all of which is very encouraging for the future.
So what of that future? From these results it looks very much as if it’ll be business as usual on the Heritage Journal, our mix of pointing out problems in the heritage protection world and raising awareness of the wonderful sites to be visited throughout Britain – “Pricking the Conscience of the Protectors” – continuing as at present.
But we’ll also be working to identify just who those ‘None of the above‘ voters are, and looking to reach out to them too. So if you voted ‘None of the above‘, please let us know who you are, and what you’re looking for from the Journal. And thanks once again to everyone who took part in the survey – your input is very much appreciated by us all here!
Like all good blogs, we are always looking to improve, but in order to do that, we need your help!
As originally conceived, the Heritage Journal was aimed at a readership of like minded-individuals. The kind of people that read the Modern Antiquarian, the Megalithic Portal and similar sites, but we were also hoping to pull in others who were maybe not quite so enthusiastic about tramping across desolate moors to look at ‘lumps and bumps’ in the landscape, but who were maybe curious about the ancient remains scattered around the countryside in the British Isles. The idea of raising awareness of such sites was intended to offer them some protection – after all, the more that people know and care about something then the less chance there is of it being lost to development, deliberate damage and desecration or just sheer neglect.
But as time has passed it’s become obvious to us, largely from browsing our Twitter followers list (around 7500 of you at the time of writing!) that our audience has extended far beyond our original target, to embrace many heritage protection professionals, other organisations and more than a few politicians (local and national). Whilst we take this to be a sign that we’re doing something right, it does leave us wondering how many of our readers still fit our initial intended profile. And moving on from that, whether we should change our content to either better fit (and grow!) our current audience or try to regain those we first targetted. After all, as Abraham Lincoln famously said “You can please some of the people some of the time, all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time but you can never please all of the people all of the time.”
With this in mind, it’s time for a bit of audience participation. We’d like you to peruse the categories below, simply select the most appropriate and click ‘Vote’ to let us know which category best describes you.
The poll will be open for one week only, after which we’ll assess the responses. Thanks for your help!
The prestigious Culture 24 website (a Government-funded arts and heritage charity listed as one of the Guardian’s top 100 essential websites) has just published a feature titled “Ten of the best archaeology blogs from current UK history projects” – and look what’s included!
We know very well we shouldn’t really be spoken of in the same breath as the others, which are mostly blogs by professionals who actually do something but nevertheless we’d be liars if we said we weren’t very pleased, and we’re very grateful to Ben Miller for thinking of us.
We’ve been at this for nearly 12 years on the simple basis that the best way to help preserve ancient sites is to raise awareness of them. What began as a small effort hatched by a group of likeminded friends at a picnic at the Uffington White Horse has grown bigger and involved more people every year. We’ve published more than two thousand articles from dozens of contributors and last year we were read in 154 countries. We must be addressing a need but we can only keep going if people keep coming forward with news, views and articles. (Hint hint! See here for how to do so.)
The eagle-eyed among you will notice a new item in the navigation bar above, a link to an Events Diary. This new page displays our Google Diary entries, and lists on a monthly basis the various prehistory-based events that we’ve uncovered as being of potential interest to our readership.
It is our intention to populate the calendar each month with basic details of the following types of events:
- Site Clearups
- Lectures
- Exhibitions
- Community Events
- Open Days
- Conferences
However, we cannot possibly check every archaeology or museum web site to collate information, so that’s where you come in! If you are an events organiser, or involved with a local archaeology society and would be prepared to help us by adding your own prehistory events, please contact us and let us know. We can talk through the process if necessary, and thus potentially increase the audience for your events. Similarly, if you’re a regular speaker and would like some exposure for your talks, get in touch.
If you have a Google account and would like to copy an existing event to your own calendar, just click on the event to see the details, and then click on the ‘copy to my calendar’ link provided.
The Events Diary will not totally replace our regular ‘Diary Dates’ postings, which are maintained by Sue Brooke, and will continue to highlight events such as exhibitions which may open across a range of dates (weeks or months).
The Heritage Journal 
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