Ilkley Council says its OK to Carve the Stones on Moors

Some of us will know about this from a few years ago when some southern-type arty idiot, obviously with cash to hand out & bribe those locally elected political types, was gonna do some carvings on the Cow & Calf rocks, reckoning it was 'cultural' or other modern contrivances. But everyone in Ilkley was against it and the stupid self-obsessed idiot had his ideas rejected. But the egomaniac and a couple of others have kept quiet and now come back with this:

http://www.parishcouncil.ilkley.org/minutes/49-minutes/145-minutes-of-the-full-council-meeting-held-on-4th-april.html

What the hell and who are on this newly-formed 'Pennine Heritage Task Force'? What credentials or right do these fuckwits have to go onto the moor and start their own modern art bollocks!? The idea in this new project is that Simon Armitage is gonna do his own carvings, in the tradition of local prehistoric rock art (which somehow the local council's allowed!!! - how much were they paid?) and carve 'em further up the moor, around Backstone Beck somewhere. However, he aint gonna tell us exactly where they'r to be done until they're completed.

If this dood is allowed to get away with this - and it seems the local council have taken the money (sack the bastards, or let's go carving their houses!) - I assume anyone else can do the same. How the hell has this been allowed??? What do Natural England think? Or EH? Or those Friends of Ilkley Moor? This is fucking disgusting quite frankly. Where does this dood, Tom Lonsdale and Pip Hall live? Who the fuck do they think they are!!??

Could we set up our own Yorkshire Local People's Heritage Society (someone come up with a better name) and, to make sure our countryside is kept free of arty bollox carved in the hills when some halfwit wants his name preserved, start carving and spray-painting the windows and walls of architect's & artist's homes, cos we like it and wanna develop a tradition of peasant art on the homes of dickheads? Let's have a meeting, discuss it, make minutes of the meeting, and agree to something along these lines.

Does anyone second this motion? And who knows the addresses of these fucking idiots who wanna turn our coutnryside into their little arty studios so they can show their arsehole friends the arty bollox they've done? I'm pissed off and disgusted at this. Someone lemme know where Armitage's carvings are and let's go up and give 'em our own facelifts.

Paul. I have put the following post on The Druid Network.
I suggest that all members be encouraged to seek to engage other pagan groups, they may be involved with; along with antiquarians and concerned personages and bodies, to join in the protest. I suggest that all members be individually contacted if possible and alerted to this impending disaster.

Posted: 30 Aug 2011 11:52 Post subject: Ilkley Moor threatened again!

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A couple of years ago, Druids from all over the country and other interested parties, were successful in stopping an ‘Arts’ project on Ilkley moor, which involved the poet Simon Armitage, carving ‘poems’ on Ilkley moor. The project hoped to encourage ‘youngsters’ to express themselves by doing carvings in rocks all over Yorkshire! All in the name of art of course. We protested successfully, pointing out that there was already extensive graffiti vandalism, carved on the moor, and the last thing that was needed was to encourage even more.
However, as can be seen below, the grant grabbers have crept another similar project in under the radar. Ilkley moor has the largest collection of neolithic rock carvings in Europe. Few of these invaluable ancient works have any protection, other than the swastika stone. I can understand why the butchers wanted THAT taking care of above all others, as they probably have a natural affection for the design. All of the other neolithic works, are thankfully open to public scrutiny, and currently can be viewed in their unspoilt wilderness settings. But it seems that nowhere is safe from the greed driven serpents, who are determined to exploit every ancient monument in the world and turn our planet into a gash gaudy theme park. As is evident in the Parish Council Minutes, they intend to do a half dozen other carvings on boulders around Yorkshire. Including sites that are rich in historical content and of considerable interest to antiquarians.
I am quite shocked by this mindlessness, and I will be again following the route of protest appropriate to the case, contacting Councillors who retain human brain cells, and other interested parties, in hopes of kyboshing this calumny. But as is evident, this sack of serpents will not desist from their intended despoilments easily. Even if the campaign to stop this is successful, they are likely to come slithering forth again with other ideas to swell their bank balances at the expense of our cherished natural landscape and the jeopardy of our ancient sites. So I am appealing for resonant energy from all who can spare it, to focus on the enlightenment of these benighted individuals in order to quell their greed driven destructiveness. Direct appeals to Mr Armitage, may be effective. So if he is giving a poetry reading near you, you might take the opportunity to pop along and have a chat with him. Or you can contact him on his website http://www.simonarmitage.com/

Minutes of the Full Council meeting 4th April 2011 Friday, 08 April 2011 7.0 7.30pm before the Council Meeting Mr Tom, Lonsdale Landscape Consultant, gave a presentation to councillors and members of the public on the Stanza Stones project. Mr Lonsdale is a self employed landscape architect working in the voluntary sector for local communities and he chairs the Pennine Heritage Task Force. He placed the Stanza Stones project in the context of the tradition of stone carving on the Moor pre-historic cup and ring stones, nineteenth century apprentice stone masons carvings, twentieth / twenty-first century informal unauthorised carving. In continuing this tradition, Ilkley Literature Festival had commissioned sculptor, Pip Hall, to carve a series of stanzas written by internationally renowned poet Simon Armitage into boulders in six locations (Marsden quarry, Blackstone Edge quarry, Nab Hill Oxenhope, St Ives Estate Bingley, Ilkley Moor causeway, Backstone Beck) forming an arc between Marsden and Ilkley. The project will celebrate the link between water and place with of the day high quality carving into natural stone. It was envisaged that the Backstone Beck stanza would be carved into a boulder just off from the main path and a spur would be made to the boulder so that walkers could get close enough to read the stanza. The completion of the project is geared to coincide with the 2012 Olympics. Mr Lonsdale assured those present that in a similar project in Cumbria there had been no copy cat carving and no vandalism. In response to questions, Mr Lonsdale confirmed that the Backstone Beck stanza would not be revealed until it had been carved; it would be metaphorical but not high brow; the spur path would be horizontal and safety issues had been taken into account.

Simon Armitage is the North's finest living poet, highly respected throughout the North - and is more than likely to be the next Poet Laureate, well deserving in my and others opinion. His recent BBC TV 4's prog' on the 'Pendle Witches' was superb and deservedly well recieved in Lancashire. His BBC Radio 4 prog' on the poor girl from Bacup who was murdered by local thugs for the way she looked was a wonderful testimonial that touched the depths of all who heard it.

The rocks that his fine words have been inscribed upon are just outcrops of rocks of Pennine stone, common rocks found throughout the Northern landscape.

No 'sacred' or SMR sited rocks have, or are to be touched during the undertaking of this worthy public project.

I suggest you look to the aims and objectives of this well supported project before you act in a rash manner.

Best regards,

john - Lancastrian, papist & seditionist

lowergate wrote:Simon Armitage is the North's finest living poet, highly respected throughout the North - and is more than likely to be the next Poet Laureate, well deserving in my and others opinion. His recent BBC TV 4's prog' on the 'Pendle Witches' was superb and deservidely well recieved in Lancashire. His BBC Radio 4 prog' on the poor girl from Bacup who was murdered by local thugs for the way she looked was a wonderful testimonial that touched the depths of all who heard it.

The rocks that his fine words have been inscribed upon are just outcrops of rocks of Pennine stone, common rocks found throughout the north.

No 'sacred' or SMR sited rocks have, or are to be touched during the undertaking of this worthy public project.

I suggest you look to the aims and objectives of this well supported project before you act in a rash manner.

Best regards,

john - Lancastrian, papist & seditionist

Thanks for that John!!!

Right Dave! Get thee hammer & Chisel's Out - There's some etching to be done on some rocks. I'm sure that natural England won't mind you carving Helicobacter Pylori somewhere that is an SSRI - Might take you a while though!

Mikki xx

Hi John -

lowergate wrote:Simon Armitage is the North's finest living poet, highly respected throughout the North - and is more than likely to be the next Poet Laureate, well deserving in my and others opinion.

He may well be - and I have no problems with his works, if they're kept on paper, or perhaps etched onto rocks in the towns and cities, parks and playing fields, where the detatched consumers live and breathe their ill dreams of Nature's ways. But what they're slowly, gradually doing to Ilkley Moor - and other regions of our landscape - is touristifying it, stealing the vestiges of wilderness and open quietude that Wordsworth, Shakespeare and the mystics speak of with such simple raw clarity. Ilkley Moor is now being 'run' by a bunch of wankers called the Friends of Ilkley Moor who, it seems, are slowly edging their city-mind ways onto the heaths: laying huge stones to pave our once wet boogy paths, enabling 'greater access' (i.e., bringing pollution, more litter, etc), smiling sweetly at children and those lost middle-class types, gradually edging the heaths into some sort of theme park, Disneyfying it with their half-baked notions of what countryside should be like! You know the sorts, John...

This Theme Park nicey-nice carving onto our land needs keeping off our hills and ways. Most of us who've walked wilderness lands since childhood know how the cancer of their ways eventually sterilizes once magical landscapes - and this is just one more of those shallow viral ingredients, gradually creeping onto the moors above Ilkley, allowing more and more and more and more...till they've got their Twelve Apostle burger-van on the tops, with nice stones along the way, with little poems and puzzles en route to entertain those without minds.

The councillors with their Capitalist religion and these middle-class arty types might wanna see their little names in lights, but most of us who've always just loved the moors and hills the way Nature keeps it want it left that way. In allowing the System to creep further into Nature's loneliness, we kill more of Her spirit each day. We cannot allow this. And if the poet Mr Armitage is sincere in his abilities, he will breathe from the same sheet as I, and the countless other quiet poets who know our Source. Why would he profane a landscape with the need for his words on any rock, to affect - nay, intrude - the voice of the wind to give inspiration...?

If Mr Armitage is a sincere man and poet, he will agree to keep his words in the places where words are read - and not on those places where such words are not needed for solitude to do its work...

Or are titbits here, titbits there, the way our landscape is gonna now speak to us...?

Paul.
The old bugger is winding you up.
He want's Armitage, to carve poems on the Wailing Wall the Pyramids and Stonehenge, if it will rattle somebody's cage.

deadagaindave wrote:The old bugger is winding you up. He want's Armitage, to carve poems on the Wailing Wall the Pyramids and Stonehenge, if it will rattle somebody's cage.

A-ha! The swine!!! Well at least it got mi energies raised! And curiously they fell into one resonant with a healthy Earth... I suppose if they do end up carving their shit on the hills, there's gonna be plenty of people able and willing to smash the shit up and be rid of such tacky nonsense, good and quick! What an utter waste of money aswell...

I’ve decided not to fight this. Last time they tried it I spent hours and hours trying to engage people to oppose it with some success. But in the end it was the failure to get the funding money; fuelled by protest to some extent, which stopped it. Now, what is pretty much the same deal has re –emerged fully funded. It’s beyond me as to why anyone would want to see Armitage’s kitchen sink, Vogon poetry, anywhere? But I suppose on a constructed spur over Backstone Beck, isn’t so bad. It won’t be seen by all that many people, and the chances that it will be embellished are rather high. All of the modern art sculptures that have been lashed out large for, on the moortops around here have been targeted by the graffiti gangs. So it could prove amusing. Earlier this year, I found a brand new carving on the old neolithic cairn up on top of the moor, which can be interpreted that Manchester United is a football club. And not too long before that bit of information was painstakingly carved; persons named Lee, Kev, and Andy, left their marks nearby. Andy has some problems spelling his name, but I hope he gets the help he needs from somewhere. I have looked again at Armitage’s poetry and he is a uniquely paradoxical figure, in that he clearly has a passion for the inane. All in all, I can think of no more appropriate place to display his mundane drivel, than up there with MUFC, LEE, KEV, and ANIDY!

THE FRACTURED VESSEL

The Earth was kneaded;
And everything started in that instant...

Firm ground arose from the one Ocean,
Life forms evolved and developed within that sea.
Structural features shaped by motion;
Rivers, rifts, massifs, debris and lea.

Forces, metamorphic, deformation, zoning;
Split and movement, thrust and break: a voyage apart.
Separation, distance, continents forming
In turn to be fractured, each its own heart.

Minerals, plants and creatures lost to time.
Vast seas open and close, cretaceous subduction.
Aeons pass, mountains rise then dissolve as lime;
Thrusting, layering, configuration, reduction.

Human forms evolve to follow Earth’s kneading.
Ice, tundra, steppe, desert, forest and swamp,
Folk clans herding, seeding, reaping, gathering,
Sea ape and land ape, species mix in the romp.

The kneading never ceasing,

The kneading never easing.

*
john - Lancastrian, papist & seditionist

.

I did change my mind, Yes. I'm fighting it avidly. There are loopholes which suggest that application for permission and other matters may be flawed. So Paulus and I are are hammer and tongs in the fray. A lot of support from other members, which is most welcome and much needed.