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Rhiannon
5290 posts

Edited Sep 04, 2012, 12:19
Re: feelings vs facts
Sep 04, 2012, 12:12
Of course you're not the enemy, I mean all this brilliant stuff "fills my thoughts every day" too as you must realise.

And as I said, nothing would make me happier than to sit in Skara Brae in a deerskin and try to grasp that ineffable thing that draws us all to these sites.

But what I'm saying is, we shouldn't do that at the sites that are in danger like Skara Brae, Silbury, Stonehenge. We have to respect them because we are the ones that really love them and we have to set an example to other people. How can we demand that other people respect them and look after them, if we then decide we're so Special that we can bend the rules? We love them So Much that we're allowed special dispensation? It won't wash. It's like those vermin politicians telling the country how to live (Back To Basics) and then having affairs and claiming for duck houses for their moats. If you've truly got principles then you have to stick by them, surely?

I'm sure we all have sites that are local to us, where nobody else seems to go, where you might meet another person occasionally, but often you wonder if it's just you and the partridges that even know it exists. And you can get that special tma connect-with-the-ancestors vibe at those places perfectly well = perhaps better than at a big half-spoiled show site like Avebury or wherever. There's no interpretation boards, no pavement, no mown grass, just you and whatever's left to snatch out of the landscape to try and imagine what it would have been like there 5000 years ago.

I'm not saying we shouldn't visit places like those and walk there, sit amongst them, picnic, chat, paint, whatever. That's the very thing we all love doing. And there's minimal harm because there aren't 70,000 visitors a year doing the same thing, maybe not even 70. But some places require us to put our personal whims aside and behave in the long term interests of the site and the people in the future that might want to see their inheritance too. I don't see that's so much to ask.

You seem to imply you just wouldn't be able to help yourself at Skara Brae. It's not a matter of huge willpower though? Erm shall I shan't I? Oh I simply must, I can't hold myself back, it's beyond my control? Surely not.

Also you seem to imply I'm being dishonest to myself for claiming I wouldn't do it. But I'm far from perfect and I really don't think I would. I think I could bear to hold myself back. It wouldn't be too much of a dilemma.
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