Dense mists drift in from the sea, cold and clinging, blanketing all before them; softening the multifarious, multicoloured, cliffs which rise up from a boulder strewn beach mauled by powerful white breakers which thundered ashore relentlessly. Hengistbury Head, a long finger of low heathland and grassland leading to a prominent headland over looking both bays, has always been a site of human activity from the Mesolithic hunters camp on the top of the head to a World War 2 gun battery and training ground. As the head rises from the broad low promontory, of which it is the culmination, some shallow depressions near the cliff edge have been filled with concrete fragments of World War 2 features; this section of the cliff is eroding revealing the fill, the number of fragments and the angles of the visible faces, appears to suggest the fill represents more than one feature. The concrete fragments now lay tumbled down the cliff side, coming to rest at the base. I've often wondered why we show so little care and consideration to World War 2 monuments and features; and yet we rave on about older monuments, frequently describing them as defining some aspect of being 'British', when surely the war period, it's monuments, it's make do in the face of adversity attitudes is so definitively 'British'.
At the beginning of the "Time Team" episode in which they unearthed the remnants of a blitzed London street Tony Robinson said to one of the experts, "Come on, this isn't really archaeology is it?" People in a position to preserve the relics of one of the most defining periods in world history, and one which directly influenced all our subsequent lives, seem only to consider these relics of historical importance when most have vanished along with the witnesses to their use. We then have to rely on the supposition of archaeologists.
ReplyDelete