Nationally funded institutions like the British Museum, often take the line that they are helping other countries protect their heritage, by “looking after” items such as the Parthenon Marbles. It seems though, that often, less attention is given to maintaining the UK’s heritage than should be. I’ve commented before on the failure to build any sort of suitable building for the Stone Henge visitor centre, despite commenting on the Greeks lack of a proper Acropolis Museum in the past – but there are many other similar cases across the country.
From:
Guardian
If Britain fails to protect its heritage we’ll have nothing left but ghosts
The Welsh mining settlement of Dylife once thrived but now it lies forgotten, like so much of our industrial past
Simon Jenkins Thursday 1 September 2011 20.29 BST
Fling off the cares of the world this autumn and climb up from the tidy mid-Welsh town of Llanidloes, north over the mountain road towards Machynlleth. Near a wild summit you enter a moonscape of old mineral workings and slag heaps. Here metals were mined in Roman times, and here the Victorians erected reputedly the largest wheel in Britain, the Martha pump, to serve what by the 1860s was the most productive lead mine in Wales’s “wild west”.
At the time the settlement of Dylife boasted three places of worship, three inns, a school and a thousand inhabitants. Then, in the 1880s, prices fell and the ore lodes were exhausted. Between the wars the place emptied and the buildings collapsed or were demolished. Today only ghosts flit the high mountain air. A lonely inn remains, the Star, amid a community of sheep.
Read the rest of this entry »