Making Sense

Stonehenge: National Disgrace?

 

With American relatives visiting as part of a family gathering in West Sussex last October a trip to Stonehenge was bound to be high on the list. My daughter Victoria had been before, many years ago, but her husband Jay had not. Neither of them is the sort who would look uncritically at what must rank as close to the top of every American-to-the-UK visitor's list. They knew of the problems of the nearby main road, the cramped and worn parking and entrance facilities. Jay, especially, having heard stories of the monument and pictures in books and films based on it, was keen to see for himself. 

It must be quite a few years since I went to Stonehenge. It looked then virtually as it does now and my memories of it were fairly negative. This time I could see all the usual problems but felt a bit more positive. That's not to say that it needs the road moving, the entrance shifting and making much better with a proper visitor centre and so on. I do like the fact that people are kept off the stones. Having visitors clamber round and over them would destroy them visually and also physically. The chain link fence doesn't do anything for the place except make it look like a defence establishment. 

Very noticeable by one part of the car park is the grey-bearded figure calling himself King Arthur Pendragon. He operates outside the car park by standing in an adjacent field but has banners are posters fixed to the wooden fence. ‘King Arthur’ chats to anyone with an inclination to talk to him. I can’t say I had much interest myself as I tend to avoid anyone seriously presenting themselves as characters from history: re-enactment societies are a very different kind of thing. This gent’s message – his campaigning point – was that artefacts had been removed from Stonehenge for research or show elsewhere and they should be returned as they were sacred to the people who used them around the monument. 

 

A landmark site like Stonehenge gets claimed as being ‘sacred’ in one sense or another to all kinds of people – druids, pagans, history geeks, environmentalists, astrologers and several shades of politicians with axes to grind or flint arrowheads to chip. Most of them are numbingly didactic about their beliefs and impose them on the rest of us whenever they can. It does not respect a site like Stonehenge to treat it in this way, nor help to unlock what are still the great secrets of this prehistoric landscape.

A Curious Case of Heritage

 Somebody in a university heritage management class once day started a discussion about heritage and how important it was in tourism. I asked if anyone had heard of Robert Hewison’s book “The Heritage Industry”. Not one of them had. Perhaps it wasn’t all that surprising as they were only toddlers when the work appeared in 1987, and it faded from sight after a huge amount of initial publicity in which every columnist and commentator seemed to jump onto a journalistic bandwagon, usually siding with Hewison. I suggested to the students that they should read the book, and also look for Patrick Wright’s “On Living in an Old Country”, published two years earlier, and to my mind a much better book, and David Lowenthal’s “The Past is a Foreign Country”, also from 1985, and a work of great scope. It reminded me of some curiosities about the discussions in the mid-nineteen eighties about ‘heritage’, especially since I recently acquired a copy of Frank Atkinson’s autobiography “The Man Who Made Beamish”. 

At the time Hewison’s book appeared I was Public Relations and Marketing Officer for the Calderdale Inheritance Project in West Yorkshire, some notes about which appear on another page in this web site. It was a regeneration project which achieved a great deal, alongside other, longer established work by local Civic Trusts, an organisation called Pennine Heritage, and, indeed, other departments of Calderdale Council, which led the Inheritance Project, and for which I had been Tourism Officer from 1978. Many, many people from voluntary bodies, the Council and what was up to 1986 West Yorkshire County Council, plus some commercial companies, had since the late 1960s been slowly building up a wide range of initiatives to re-use derelict mills, shops and houses, to clean up eyesores in open spaces long abandoned, and to remove some of the highly inappropriate ‘redevelopments’ which had butchered elements in a remarkable industrial landscape. I had quickly come to the conclusion, along with others, I’m sure, that the Calder Valley was an area above most others where the changing effects of the industrial system on human communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could be seen. 

Making Sense of the World: Tourism

This blog is about discovering the world and making sense of it. What a challenge that can be!  But I’m not going to try writing a global encyclopaedia or anything like that. What interests me is the ways in which people find out about their world and their place in it.

I might broaden out later to explore the connected fields of the media and education. At the moment its tourism that is my focus. And particularly Tourism As Education. I don't mean 'education to work in tourism' and I don't mean school or university trips, although they certainly come into it. What interests me is tourism as it was in its early days in the Grand Tour and in the nineteenth century with its excursions and early tourism packages. Tourism is a way of discovering the world, not just with a school party or adult education weekend, but using any kind of travel whatsoever. As children we explore our surroundings - homes, gardens, back yards - then walk or get driven to see new places: first shopping centres, community centres, schools, days out in the countryside or on the coast. As we get older our travelling becomes more sophisticated. We use guide books, visitor centres, leaflets and guided tours to discover new places and people. We learn to identify what is different about them and what is similar to our own homes and selves. Different climates, environments and cultures make themselves known to us. If we like travelling we start making deliberate trips to explore new destinations, or to find out more about familiar ones. We travel to understand. It's fun. We learn more. And we are better equipped to contribute to making the world a little bit better. That’s what this set of pages is going to be about.