25th September 2013, 01:15 PM
Dinosaur Wrote:Plenty of Scheduled sites suffer regular and on-going destruction, there's one near here which was partially excavated using government cash in the late 80s due to river erosion, but with all the exciting weather over the last few years it'll soon be back into the unexcavated bit, unrecorded human remains were seen eroding out as long ago as 2006! EH no longer has the cash to deal with such problems, so why not let someone else (e.g. societies) excavate and recover something (anything!) before such resources are lost?
Sounds like a classic case of a site transitting from "Preserved" status to "Under threat" - put together a proposal & hit up the local Inspector for some SMC! The trouble is the cash - even a local society dig will generate costs in terms of infrastructure, specialist work, conservation of finds, etc.
And John is right - there is no real harm involved in non-intrusive aerial surveys or geophysics on "preserved" sites as long as they don't require clear-cutting or other prep work, so again the main limit on this sort of work is cash. SMC is put in place to force a reasonable consideration of proposals that will benefit the preservation of a site - if you want to work on one you need to demonstrate to the Inspector that your project a) won't unduly erode the site, and b) will bring research benefits. Sure, it means trenching is probably out of bounds on anything that isn't already under imminent threat of erosion, but there are plenty of threatened Scheduled sites out there for which intrusive works can be justified.
Pity EH no longer has the resources to do the work, or even to fund others to do it...