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By Myghal Map Serpren
Sir Philip Rutnam, who was the Civil Service Permanent Secretary at the Home Office until 2020, currently serves as Chair of the National Churches Trust, which works to keep Britain’s church buildings open and in use by awarding grants, promoting churches as community hubs and places to visit and by advocacy and lobbying.
Churches not only constitute the largest collection of listed buildings in Britain, but are also home to countless historic artefacts and priceless art.
Writing recently, Sir Phillip launched a five-point plan for keeping these historic buildings open and accessible. In his wide-ranging article, he pointed out that there are 39,000 buildings used for Christian worship across the country of which almost 20,000 have been listed.
Mostly all of these are parish churches and chapels and those churches and chapels include nearly half of Britain’s most important historic buildings being Grade I listed or equivalent.
It is true to say that church buildings are an important base for voluntary and community activities and continue to reduce social isolation and build community spirit.
At this time and perhaps a comment on the times in which we find ourselves, earlier are now more food banks than branches of MacDonalds and a great number of these charitable resources are found in church buildings.
In ‘The House of Good’, a recent independent evaluation for the National Churches Trust using the same methodology for appraising projects as that found in the Treasury’s so-called ‘Green Book’, it has been conservatively estimated that the economic and social value of the activity in church buildings amounts to around £55bn a year.
However, there is a real crisis facing church heritage.
Wales
In Wales, at least two-thirds of the chapels that were once open have now closed.
In the last two decades, the Church in Wales has closed 15 per cent of its churches and expects the rate of closure to increase in coming years.
At the time of writing, nine can be found for sale on the Church in Wales website, from Monmouthshire to the Menai Strait.
Scotland
The Church of Scotland, guardian of many of the country’s most important buildings, is bracing for the closure of perhaps 30 to 40 per cent of its churches.
Some have already appeared on its website for sale, including Old High Kirk, the oldest church in Inverness.
Others are still going through the process of closure such as Saint Monans in Fife, endowed in the 14th century by David II, King of Scots, which served as a Dominican oratory by the sea and stands as one of Scotland’s most important mediaeval buildings.
England
Across England, the current model of maintaining these buildings is under obvious strain, above all in places that are poor, isolated, or both.
The Church of England says its backlog for repairs is at least £1bn, and one estimate says it is growing at £75m a year.
The causes of this crisis are many; falling congregations, a fall in the volunteering ethos, impoverished communities burdened with building maintenance amongst them.
Compared with most other European countries, funding for churches and chapels in Britain is rather different.
As Sir Philip points out, although the church and state are closely and constitutionally linked, church buildings receive no regular public funding.
Elsewhere
In France, a more secular state, cathedrals are maintained by the national government and churches by local authorities. As an example, President Macron appointed a former chief of the French defence staff to oversee the reconstruction of Notre Dame.
In other countries, the most common form of financial support is by way of a church tax covering anyone who is a member of the church, whether or not they attend.
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and most of Scandinavia operate systems like this, and in each case ‘membership’ is somewhere between common and near-universal.
Italy, Spain and Portugal offer more choice but still have millions of people voluntarily paying to support churches.
Italy has the ‘otto per mille’ system which allows taxpayers to choose where 0.8 per cent of their income tax is spent among a list of causes resulting in more than 80 per cent selecting churches.
Compare all this with the arrangement in Britain where the burden of keeping up these buildings rests almost entirely on the congregation, the people who actually attend services.
A community which is modest in numbers or income can find itself facing an enormous repair bill for a significant building.
Five ideas
So what can be done to address Britain’s greatest heritage challenge?
No single actor can fix this: action is needed by churches locally, denominations nationally, and by the government itself.
Sir Philip lists five ideas:
- First, the government needs to recognise that these buildings are a public good for both heritage and community, and that it is not realistic for the whole burden to rest on local shoulders. In fact, successive governments used to recognise this: from the 1970s until 2017 there was dedicated grant funding for listed places of worship, running at up to £40m a year. This ringfenced pot was abolished by the Heritage Lottery Fund, and since then the Lottery funding for churches and chapels has fallen from £46m in 2018–2019 to £11m in 2022–2023. The Fund is now changing tack in a way that is welcome, but the scale and urgency of the problem demand further action by both government and the Fund.
- Second, the national denominations need to provide much more practical support to congregations, not least offering more specialist advice on building maintenance and widening the range of uses, as well as collecting much better information on the condition of their assets. The Roman Catholic Church has done excellent work on this in recent years. Churches themselves should be more strongly encouraged to be open and accessible.
- Third, we should do more to realise the unexploited potential of these buildings for visitors and tourism, including for pilgrimage. In Northern France and Belgium, 56 belfries are grouped together as one World Heritage Site. Why not promote the wool churches of Norfolk and Suffolk as something similar? Or the towers of Somerset, or the Christian conversion sites of Wales and northern Britain, associated with the Irish saints who arrived in the 5th–7th centuries?
- Fourth, public bodies need to stop being afraid of engaging with faith groups, Christian or otherwise. A wealth of evidence shows the positive social impacts and the reach that they can have. There are some good tools available, not least the Faith Covenant produced by the Faith and Society All-Party Parliamentary Group, which takes the form of a set of principles to promote practical collaboration between religious groups and local authorities.
- Finally, we do need to start exploring new models of keeping some of our most rural and isolated buildings alive, while recognising that this is a long-term task and no substitute for fixing the roof and supporting heroic volunteers.
The National Churches Trust has an impressive record assisting to keep up to 2,000 churches and chapels open and available to their communities, making grants which have removed 14 buildings from the heritage at risk register during 2021 alone and paying out in excess of £5 million to needy church structures during 2021.
As Sir Philip points out, “Britain’s churches are a huge national asset, available for all to visit, use and benefit from. It’s time to ensure that as many as possible are properly supported so that these wonderful historic buildings can thrive today and tomorrow.”
Links:
The race to record the historic archaeology of Seaford Head, East Sussex in the face of ongoing coastal erosion
The Iron Age hillfort at Seaford Head has stood watch over the English Channel from its clifftop location for two-and-a-half millennia.
Sadly, it is now doomed to collapse into the sea with parts of the site already lost and climate change accelerating its downfall.
Archaeologists are now in a race against time to unlock its secrets.
A team from University College London have spent recent weeks surveying the ancient monument with drones and producing 3D models of it in the hope of not only learning more about Seaford Head but producing a template for the hundreds of other historic monuments along the British coastline set to disappear beneath the waves.
Seaford Head fort, which also contains a Bronze Age burial site and dates to around 600 to 400 BC, perches atop the Seven Sisters headland of the same name between Brighton and Eastbourne.
Despite being known to archaeologists for centuries, it has only had investigative work done on it twice, in the late 19th century by Augustus Pitt Rivers and again in the 1980s. These surveys have done little more than date the fort and barrow.
This latest survey is not designed to reveal those mysteries, so much as identify them and decide what further archaeological work should be done and can be justified with constrained resources.
A key plank of the survey work is drone photogrammetry, which involves taking multiple aerial photographs of the site, merging them using advanced software and georectifying them so that they are to scale and measurable. This allows archaeologists to create a 3D model of the site and identify sites of potential interest.
The drones are also used to survey the cliff face itself which, due to previous collapses, already provides a cross-section of the fort. Whatever the results, time and tide are working against his team. On average, the coast at Seaford is retreating by 20 inches a year.
That figure, however, masks a pattern of cliff falls followed by months or even years of stasis. The UCL team cannot predict when the chalk might next give way but it could take with it another large section of the fort.
In March 2021, a large section of the Seaford Head cliff face collapsed following heavy rain, leaving behind an enormous mound of debris reaching into the seawater. Elsewhere on the clifftop, large cracks have appeared, portending further losses.
The site has now been placed on the Heritage at Risk register.
Climate change is likely to accelerate this process. Increasingly rough weather conditions and rising sea levels are all expected to eat away at Britain’s coastline and the ancient monuments dotted around it.
Because of the precarious nature of coastal heritage, the study undertaken by Archaeology South-East at Seaford Head is designed to produce results quickly and cost-effectively.
The pilot project is also intended to spark a discussion among a general public perhaps unaware of how much of its heritage is about to plunge off a cliff face.
With sea defences potentially costing millions of pounds, as well as sometimes being disfiguring, few at-risk sites realistically can be saved from disappearing.
The project will produce a podcast series, bringing in institutions such as the National Trust, as well as films discussing the protection of heritage.
Links:
University College London Seaford Head website news: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology-south-east/seaford-head
Phys Org website and Seaford Head article: https://phys.org/news/2021-12-drones-capture-coastal-heritage-lost.html
Alice Farnsworth is back, to answer another reader’s archaeological query. Don’t forget to send in your questions, and you may be lucky enough to get your own answer from Alice!
Q. As the old adage goes: ‘Take only photographs, leave only footprints‘, but don’t footprints cause erosion to delicate sites? How can I minimise my interactions with our ancient sites, given that I feel visiting a site in person is the only way for me to truly experience it?
A. Ha! Yes, it’s true that footfall is a major cause of erosion at our ancient sites, especially at the more popular sites. For instance, the banks at Avebury have often been fenced off to allow the soil to recover from visitors.
There is no simple answer to this question. one way to minimise impact would be to only view sites from a distance (as enforced at Stonehenge), but I can see that this is unsatisfactory in many ways. Limiting your visits to sites that are much less popular with tourists would allow you to gain the interaction you seek. But remember that many of the lesser known sites are on private land where permission may be needed to visit them, or may be off the beaten track with the safety issues that that implies.
Ensuring that you only visit in periods of suitable weather will also reduce the impact of your visit, as fragile sub-surface archaeology can be unwittingly damaged when the ground is sodden. But beware if the weather has been too dry, as the ground underfoot may then crumble and erode, and again, archaeological evidence could be destroyed.
Of course, when visiting any ancient or historical site, you should always attempt to remove any rubbish left behind by others less considerate than yourself, and of course, ensure you do not leave any detritus of your own.
In short, enjoy your visit, and leave the site as you would hope to find it – in its natural state.
Rain is forecast that will significantly add to the standing water on Byway 12 at Stonehenge today – the stretch south of the A303 can be seen in the accompanying photographs taken during April.
It may dry off soon enough but everything the Wiltshire Council cabinet member for highways, transport, and waste, Bridget Wayman, stated about the Ridgeway at Avebury, when closing the route to motorised traffic for a further 21 days, also applies to Byway 12 south of the A303 at Stonehenge:
“The weather in recent weeks has left the surface of the byway severely rutted, and it is still holding water in numerous locations. There are globally important archaeological features on and immediately below the surface and they need to be protected from further damage.”
We might then recall that Highways England adopted Byway 12 in September 2016 as an access route for digging machinery in connection with the now abandoned western portal location for the Stonehenge tunnel, and in the coming weeks a repeat performance is expected, in the name of the Stonehenge tunnel scheme now totally discredited by ICOMOS UK.
Standing water on byway 12
Why then is Wiltshire Council rightly protecting the Ridgeway at Avebury, but failing to extend protection to Byway 12 in the Stonehenge half of the WHS (World Heritage Site)? Keep the diggers off Byway 12 please!
Like many places, the Ridgeway as it passes through Wiltshire has suffered from the intense periods of snow and ice in 2018 that has left precious archaeology vulnerable in the wet conditions. A section of this route near Avebury has though a knight in shining armour: Wiltshire Council has extended the annual prohibition of public motor vehicles which usually runs from 1 October to 30 April, for a further 21 days to protect the surface and archaeology from further damage. It has even been stated that if need be this prohibition of motorised vehicles could be extended further for another 21 days whilst remaining open for walkers, horses, and cyclists.
Bridget Wayman, Wiltshire Council cabinet member for highways, transport, and waste said:
“The weather in recent weeks has left the surface of the byway severely rutted, and it is still holding water in numerous locations.
“There are globally important archaeological features on and immediately below the surface and they need to be protected from further damage.
“We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and would like to thank the public for their understanding and co-operation.”
Credit: Wilts CC
Well done Wiltshire Council, credit where due and all that.
Source: http://www.wiltshire.gov.uk/news/articles/byway-closed-to-aid-ridgeway-recovery
Like many places Cockfield Fell, near Bishop Auckland, has suffered from the intense periods of snow and ice in 2018 that has left precious archaeology vulnerable in the wet conditions. This Scheduled Monument has though a knight in shining armour. Lee McFarlane, an Inspector of Ancient Monuments at Historic England, has been quoted as saying that:
“Cockfield Fell contains archaeological remains from the prehistoric period through to the 19th century and is a very important scheduled monument, which is protected by law.
“We are very concerned about the damage by 4×4 vehicles to the archaeology on the site and will be working with the landowner and the police to restrict vehicle access to ensure Cockfield Fell can be enjoyed by future generations.”
Image credit: Sarah Caldecott
Well done Historic England, credit where due and all that.
Here are a couple of before and after images of Boslow Inscribed Stone, St Just, Cornwall.
Boslow Stone previously. [Image © C. Weatherhill]
Boslow Stone currently [Image © C. Weatherhill]
Fortunately the Boslow site is being monitored by CASPN (Cornish Ancient Sites Protection Network) in conjunction with Cornwall Council’s Historic Environment Service Officer who has already spoken to the farmer.
However, there are many thousands of ancient sites elsewhere which don’t have protection networks and are far more vulnerable. Budgetary constraints can mean that unless they are alerted to a problem Historic England inspectors may not be able to visit more than once in several years, if at all. (The parlous financial reality surrounding all heritage guardianship is something which those who complain about having to pay to go to Stonehenge should perhaps take on board!)
So it’s pretty clear that conservation is often in the hands of the general public who are in a position to alert official guardians to problems as soon as they arise.
by Jimit
Further to my previous report 3 months ago I have just been back to West Kennet Long Barrow and my previous fears are beginning to be realised…..
The stupid ‘Portholes’ are completely mudded over and a torch is now essential. The top is still fenced off so the new steps cannot be used so people are now eroding a new path to the top. The grass on the concrete is showing signs of stunted growth and browning already. Goodness knows what it will be like at the end of the summer.
Rant over….for now…
English Heritage (EH) have recently made a big splash in the media on the release of their latest ‘Heritage at Risk‘ register, which lists heritage assets deemed to be in danger from deterioration, damage, development or other threats.
When I contacted EH some years ago to enquire, I was told that the vast majority of Scheduled Ancient Monuments (SAMs) in England are lucky if they are officially inspected once a decade. Some are never visited officially, and many can go 20 years or more without any official inspection. Frequently the responsible body will rely upon reports from landowners, the public or police regarding any damage that occurs to a site. The response given to a Freedom of Information request to EH earlier this year shows that what I was told nearly a decade ago still holds true today (check some of the ‘Last Visited Dates in any random spreadsheet in the reply).
But now we’d like to change all that, with your help.
We know that many of our readers visit SAMs and other heritage sites on a regular basis, be it a local site that they’re familiar with, or a site that has been selected as the target of a day trip, or holiday visit to an unfamiliar area. All we ask is that when on such visits, you keep your eyes open for any evidence of Heritage Crime. What is heritage crime? Quite simply, as stated on the EH web page on the subject, it is “any offence which harms the value of England’s heritage assets and their settings to this and future generations”.
So how can you help? Firstly by taking note of any evidence. Pictures are always helpful. If you actually witness a crime being committed, the EH web page on reporting crime suggests phoning 999, but we’d say only do this if you will not be endangering your own personal safety by doing so. The first port of call for any crime will be the police, whether via 999 if a crime is in progress, or 101 if not (see the previous EH link above). If this all sounds familiar, we’ve previously highlighted these steps, here on the Journal.
But in addition, the relevant authority should also be informed, whether that be English Heritage or the National Trust in England, Cadw in Wales or Historic Scotland north of the border – see the contact links below.
It might also be worth recording your visit and any actions taken on one of the hobbyist web sites so that others can see what has already been reported – the Megalithic Portal has a useful Visit Log facility for registered users in addition to its site comments facility.
With your help, the integrity of many of these forgotten and threatened sites can hopefully be maintained, and any damage brought to the attention of the relevant people.
Useful Contact Links:
- English Heritage: What is Heritage Crime?
- English Heritage: Reporting Heritage Crime
- English Heritage: Contact Us
- National Trust: Contact Us
- Historic Scotland: Contact Us
- Cadw: Contact Us
It’s a bit like the farmer with the fox, the hen and the bag of grain. Which are safe together? Conservation is sometimes about choices ….. rabbits do massive damage to bronze age barrows and Iron Age hill forts, trees have often meant they have survived, but often the reverse…
Recently though, English Heritage has had to make an unusual choice: the removal of a beautiful stand of trees to protect a rabbit warren. The beech trees, on Cothelstone Hill in the Quantocks are to be felled over a four-year period due to concerns their roots could start to damage an underground medieval rabbit warren. A spokesman for English Heritage said they were working with the Quantock Hills AONB Service to manage the land, adding: “We agreed that the needs of this scheduled monument, which is at high risk, take precedence over the beautiful but relatively young trees.”
A local walker disagrees, saying he is “gobsmacked” and that it would leave the skyline bare for the next 20 years. He said: “I understand we need to preserve archaeological heritage but we should be thinking about protecting the areas millions of people recognise.” EH and the AONB Service feel differently and say they intend to replace the trees. To add a final complication EH mention that “Unfortunately damage is already being caused due to erosion of the surface layers of the scheduled monument due to the herd of Exmoor ponies, which use the location for shelter.”
So should the ponies be shot?! ** Or the beautiful trees be cut down? Or the present-day rabbits be culled? Or should the fort and the warren be left to further deteriorate?
.
** No.
The Heritage Journal 
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