The Wansdyke & District Forums

I have been turning something over and I want to set it down, because I think it is bigger than our own patch. We all know some firm has been quietly buying the odd ground round here for years, the cottages, the land out by the old ruin, the corners with a stone or a barrow on them. What I have come to understand, from the society side, is that English Heritage and the Trust know it too, and can do nothing. They simply cannot find the funds to fight that kind of money for a field with a tumbledown chapel in it. They are stretched to breaking defending the famous sites. The small special ones, precious precisely because nobody has heard of them, go to the quiet buyer unopposed, every time. And it is not only here. I sit on a committee or two, and the same story comes up from all over.

This rings a horrible bell. Before we moved out here there was a scrubby field near us, Reading way, with a single old standing stone in it the kids called the witch stone, nothing much to look at. Sold off to some company, fenced, gone, no notice, no fuss. I thought nothing of it at the time. Now you say it Janet, it is the exact same shape of thing. They never seem to want the good farmland. They want the odd corner with the old something in it.

I have walked a great deal of this country and I will tell you, once you see it you cannot unsee it. It is always the special bit. Never the ordinary field. A holy well in the next county locked behind a new gate. A barrow up north with the path off it diverted the very same way ours were. I used to think I was joining up dots that werent joined, as Nan would say. But it only ever reaches for the strange ground, and it reaches everywhere.

or its just that the odd corners are cheap and the good farmlands not for sale. nobody sells prime arable, course they dont, so the money goes where it can, the scrubby bits with a planning protection that keeps em going for a song. and heritage being skint aint a conspiracy, heritages been skint my whole life. depressing, common, and about money, same as everything else.

I will only say that the places being bought are the places that were held sacred, in the old way, and that whoever is buying knows exactly what they are buying, whatever the reason they give. You do not gather up the holy ground of a whole country by accident. I do not know what it is for. But it is not nothing, and I do not believe it is only money.

Bran, I am usually the first to roll my eyes, and I find I cannot this time. Whether it is one hand, or a hundred separate buyers who all happen to want the same odd thing, the result is the same: the small sacred places of this country are passing, quietly and lawfully, into the keeping of people who answer no letters and put no name on the gate. And the bodies whose job it is to prevent that cannot afford to. I have no tidy ending for it. I only did not want it to go unsaid.