Spare the plough plea (From Gazette & Herald)

Spare the plough plea

ENGLISH Heritage (EH) has launched a campaign to encourage farmers to protect archaeological sites.

At present, nearly 3,000 "nationally important scheduled monuments" are being cultivated, said a spokesman for EH, who added: "Although legislation gives protection to these monuments from most threats, in many cases it permits them to be ploughed."

Powerful farm machinery is in part to blame for damage to sites. "Modern intensive ploughing has arguably done more damage in six decades than traditional agriculture did in the preceding six centuries," said EH chief executive Dr Simon Thurley.

The EH man for Ryedale, Neil Redfern, says that potato farming, with its need for deep ploughing and de-stoning, can be especially destructive.

He and others working with EH say it's important to work co-operatively with farmers. Stewardship schemes and the shift away from payments for production to benefit the environment, including heritage, are especially helpful.

Farmers heading in that direction will be looking to preserve hedges, ponds and open access to the public. But also to preserve heritage. DEFRA hopes by 2005 to have as many as 70pc of farmers on stewardship programmes.

"No one is blaming farmers and they can carry on farming," said Mr Redfern. "In the greater scheme of things, far more sites are lost to building schemes than to farming."

He said farmers should be looking to convert land with an archaeological site to grass.

The NFU has called on DEFRA, and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to work with local authorities and archaeologists to ensure farmers are told about the location and importance of remains.

"In the majority of cases, damage caused to these sites has been the result of farmers not being informed about the sites rather than as a result of any malicious intent. Ploughing itself has uncovered many sites that were previously unknown, and farmers have volunteered the information to local archaeologists," said National Farmers' Union environment chairman John Seymour.

However, a spokesman for EH said that most landowners would know about archaeological sites on their land because they would be flagged up in pre-purchase searches.

Updated: 11:29 Wednesday, July 30, 2003