“A Part of England’s Story”
Visiting ancient monuments can help us feel connected to the past, often an imagined or mythical past. This can be positive, creating a sense of belonging and of a shared past. However, this sense of belonging in the landscape also allows for exploitation of the past, in which places such as Stonehenge become integral parts of national identity.
The role of organisations such as English Heritage is not only to preserve historic monuments for future generations, but also to interpret these monuments for visitors from hugely diverse backgrounds in an accessible manner. At times this has led to an over simplification of the narrative, with a tendency pass by earlier historical interactions with these sites. This paper suggests that in some cases this has allowed for a false perception of sites as monuments to English-ness or British-ness, fixed points in the landscape connected directly to a deep past and unchanged by subsequent conquests or immigrations. Recent reports of far right activities at Waylands Smithy and Avebury show how easily these sites can be subsumed into a nationalist agenda. The aim of this paper is to explore options for countering this, within heritage interpretation, suggesting that by moving narratives away from an unknown or mysterious past, as well as by demonstrating how later societies interpreted and interacted with the monuments, we can create a open dialogue about the use monuments in the creation of national identity and explore the diverse pasts of these ancient monuments and the landscape they sit within.
LILY HAWKER-YATES, CANTERBURY CHRIST CHURCH UNIVERSITY