14 NOVEMBER 1992, Page 58

Long life

Up the wall

Nigel Nicolson

English Heritage can take some credit, but Mr Stevens goes too far in claiming that 'if it had existed in the 1950s and 1960s it is inconceivable that the desecration of so much of England's countryside and so

many towns, cities and villages could have taken place'. English Heritage didn't come into existence till 1984, but it did have pre- decessors which cared for these things as much as it does. Although it dispenses much good advice and a fortune in public money, it does not own an acre of the countryside and very few buildings in towns. Its main properties are archaeologi- cal sites like Stonehenge and castles and abbeys, mostly in ruin. Now it proposes to transfer responsibility for the less impor- tant of them to other authorities. Its inten- tions are stated most inelegantly. It is called 'focusing our resources' and 'relocat- ing management'.

And listen to this:

We will institute efficiency improvements including market-testing across the organisa- tion. We will introduce standards of service improvements and publish our performance against them.

How can a former editor of quality jour- nals pass such gobbledegook in his first policy statement? Is not language also part of our heritage, capable of service improve- ment?

If English Heritage is weak on prose, it is expert on masonry, perhaps too expert. Let me give one example of its sanitisation of ruins, the Roman Wall. There are only three walls in the world which deserve the capital W — Berlin's, China's and Hadri- an's. Berlin's has gone for ever, and the Great Wall of China has been restored or allowed to decay to a point where it has lit- tle in common with the original. But Hadri- an's Wall is still unadulterated and in part unexcavated, its finest sections shared between English Heritage and the National Trust. In the mid-19th century, a long stretch each side of Housesteads was restored by re-setting the tumbled stones neatly on each side of the Roman core and levelling the top to form a footpath. This section, now owned by the National Trust, pleases the public because it looks like a wall, though not every visitor may realise that he is walking ten foot below the level of the imagined Roman sentry. But when the Ministry of Works took over unexcavat- ed sections after the last war, they adopted a different method of preservation which English Heritage has followed, by weather- proofing with mortar the core of unshaped stones and pointing the surviving facing- stones on each side.

The core, which was never visible in Roman days, now dominates these sec- tions, rising to a central ridge that gives the effect more of a rock-garden than of a wall. While archaeologically more correct, aes- thetically the result is unpleasing. Now that the National Trust and English Heritage are about to discuss joint management of the Wall, could they not compromise, by giving the Heritage's jagged bits of sculp- ture a covering of decent National Trust turf, not to walk upon, but to shield their nakedness?