Landscapes of Power

In Wales’ 1000 Best Heritage Sites, Terry Breverton records that, in the 1980’s, the so-called ‘Roman Well’ at Barry Island was built over without proper excavation and then, in the 1990’s, the site of St Baruc’s Holy Well also disappeared under a modern housing estate. Wales has more castles per square mile than anywhere else in the world, he tells us. In the 19th century it also had the largest number of places of worship in the world, per head of population. And on the basis of Barry and Newport, I think Wales today can claim the highest proportion of philistines too.

It was rather different in the years around the First World War. Major Edgar Jones, the headmaster of Barry County School from 1899 to 1933, was an enthusiastic antiquarian with a special interest in the Tinkinswood Burial Chamber, which stands at the top of a field to the north of Barry and west of Cardiff. Excavated in 1914, Tinkinswood is a Neolithic burial chamber of the ‘Cotswold-Severn’ type, surrounded by other features of the period. The excavators found the remains of at least 50 people within. The massive capstone weighs around 40 tons and may be the largest in Europe. And it pre-dates Stonehenge by 1,000 years.

Major Jones passed on his enthusiasm for Tinkinswood to my father, one of his pupils. (Professor Glyn Daniel was another; so too was Plaid Cymru’s Gwynfor Evans.) As a youngster I was taken to see the site and this month I was back for a second glance. My mother could never remember the name and would refer to it as ‘Tinkerbell’s Tomb’. (The real origin of the name appears to be ‘Tinker’s Wood’, which is how it was known until the 1940’s.)

Graffiti show that the site is popular with ‘pagans’. Or, to put it bluntly, silly children who sit around making up stories about the prehistoric and getting angry with those who prefer a less lazy approach, like looking logically at the data. I can’t forget the picture I once saw, done in psychedelic colours, of a flying saucer arriving at the Rollright Stones. At least the ‘pagans’ can learn. Others appear incapable. Officialdom could maybe win more friends by not placing a pylon in the very next field. Is it meant to be a dramatic contrast? Post-modern irony? Or just sheer incompetence?

On down the road is Duffryn House, built in the 1890’s for the Cory family (coal and shipping, when such things were at their height). Vale of Glamorgan Council owns it now, and prefers to spell it ‘Dyffryn’. The house features a vast entrance hall with a stained glass window showing Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury. It is also famous for its gigantic chimneypieces, antiques that maybe came from the continent. First impressions demand a caption. Something like ‘Trains for Budapest depart from Platform…’? The gardens are open to the public but the house is used for conferences and there is no other way inside. The gardens are magnificent, but Hamlet without the prince.

The gardens were more magnificent still but maintenance has been neglected and lottery money is only now restoring their former glory. Dyffryn Gardens have a little of everything: an arboretum, a rockery, a croquet lawn, fountains, and a series of outdoor ‘rooms’, which pre-date the better-known examples at Hidcote and Sissinghurst. It all cost money and it all costs money. So what to do about that?

The Right will tell you not to bother yourself over the destruction of heritage; the next generation of robber barons will always produce something better. Or fool itself that that is what it’s doing, as long as the architect says so. The Left will defend heritage only if it is drained of authentic meaning and smothered in politically correct goo instead, and will also insist on adding to it, pointless palaces of culture and the like that create work for work’s sake. The East of England Regional Development Agency provided us with a prime example of such architectural exhibitionism in its completely freeform competition to find “a visionary plan for a landmark, or series of landmarks”, “an icon that will foster a sense of identity for the region as a whole”, which would be “a fantastic opportunity for us to come together as a region and decide how to present ourselves to the rest of the world”. Ozymandias no doubt thought the same. How’s that £2 million giant horse in Kent coming along? Maybe some giant droppings could be included?

A resource-constrained future will have to make choices. My guess is that it will continue to make the wrong ones. It will be keeping the tepid bathwater and throwing out the treasured baby, because nothing gives greater offence to the untalented than the persistent evidence of unapproachable genius. What is really needed is a moratorium on the new, or more especially on the outrageously, expensively new, on gesture art. ‘Progress’ was meant to rid us of spoilt egos casting their power and wealth in all directions in a riot of supremely detached uselessness. The conservation world has more than enough to be getting on with, without the 21st century adding its own grands projets to the burden. Tread lightly on the earth, and think responsibly, not least of the grandchildren’s fast-emptying pockets.