Field Trip
“They always say Ritual Purposes when they haven’t a clue. Anyway we know that right through the Modern Period they kept symbols of time worship on all their major edifices. The reconstruction - look, here it is - suggests it was a tower with four Time Circles, one facing each cardinal point.. Plus the cast-iron bells. And that time capsule thing - bit like burying your ancestors under the hearthstone I suppose.”
Image created by FlowGPT as specified by Larry Winger
“You’re getting muddled. That was 4000 years earlier.”
“Oh let’s leave it, I bet the other three groups have got half their settlements done by now. Come on, this path going north was the main drag apparently. Remember we’re supposed to be thinking about Transitory Settlement Patterns. What was it? Transhumance?”
‘No, that’s moving flocks around in summer and making cheese and stuff. This was Transvacance - that means moving people around in summer.’
“I don’t see how that got them anything to eat.”
‘Well, people paid a lot of money to go to temporary summer pastures and sheep didn’t. That’s what all these houses were used for in the end so people couldn’t live in them. Let’s get this straight: first phase Early Modern Clearances: you burn people’s roofs over their heads - incendiary method - and ship them off to colonise someone else’s country so you can run sheep. Second phase, Declining Modern Clearances: make sure they don’t get any roofs over their heads in the first place - laissez faire method - and send them off to anywhere but here. Because no one cares, see?”
“I don’t think that’s exactly what she said.”
“Look, it’s all in the lecture notes she gave us - page 5 Marginal Lands, scroll down to the bottom: ‘Transvacance appears to have died out in the final decades of Declining Modern Civilisation. There is debate as to whether it ceased because fossil-fuel or mined-materials vehicles were no longer available, or because the roads had already become impassable for wheeled vehicles. Current research suggests both factors came into play.’ We were all supposed to read this stuff last night, by the way.”
“Page 1 says, ‘In this glen there were at least five churches, the most salient buildings in every settlement, also 2 to 4 hostelries of some description in each settlement.’’
“So they spent all their time praying and carousing. Could be worse.”
“No, you weren’t listening: ‘The evidence is that all public buildings had fallen into disuse several decades before the settlements were finally abandoned.’”
“That Ken Bridge we crossed this morning wasn’t abandoned. It’s still all right, though it says on page 2 it’s nearly 400 years old.”
“What about schools?”
“Didn’t you listen to any of her lecture? Of course there were no schools by the end. That big one - where they found all those concrete slabs - that’s the one she said was in an advanced state of decay even before final abandonment. Anyway the documentary evidence tells us that in the final two censuses the inhabitants were all over 70 so naturally they didn’t need any schools.”
“Life must have been pretty dismal. No wonder they all died out. I’d rather be me.”
M.N.E