And so, each December 10th, for no apparent reason, the bells of St. Barnabos ring, at my behest..
For those that died, building that dam, on my Fathers’ birthday.

My bias..so that you should know:-

My Grandfather, was the Attendant-in-Charge of the Dynamo House.
My Great Uncle, was Blacksmith.
My Father, learned his trade there.
My proposal of marriage took place in Burnbanks.
My wife and I married, to the sounds of Holy Trinity church bells.
My daughters were Christened to those same bells.
My Fathers’ funereal cortege paused, as those bells pauled.
Do you get the idea that some of us, a few, have great affinity, to that place?
The Burnbanks Project is easily found online, with oral history, from my Uncle Tom and others, where you will hear, from people whom were there and not some other, with an agenda I cannot discern.
When asked asked to participate, my Father said, ‘Rightly or wrongly, it stands testament, to many a man, that was friend to me and died, yet no mention is made to them…therefore, in good conscience, I won’t be part of a ‘whitewashed’ history of my life.’
Ever the immutable object during my early years, even in later life, he would not allow me to record his days at Burnbanks.
My Mother has told me more but since this is ’second-hand’, it would not be fair to relate it.

However, I do hold, in safe-keeping, some money, to erect a deer, not white-washed, in the valley of the dammed, as a final fotenote, to those whom lived and died there..
In the drought of ‘76, the lanes of Mardale were exposed and my Father had this idea, how nice it would be, if that deer would appear, like a Loch Ness Monster and make people curious about us, the dam builders, long after we have gone.
And if you do not know the mysterious tale of the deer, then you do not know, Haweswater.
As Horace wrote, ‘the sins of the Father’..et cetera, Europides too, I will, within my lifetime, whether illegal or not, place upon the lanes of Mardale, a statue of a deer, as my Father bid me.
My youngest daughter, given the larger funds that I have, will do the same…
It is easy to think that dam was built by wholly local labour, not true. I am a polyglot, by virtue of that dam.
When you speak of that dam, choose you words with care, as some of us, owe our very existance to it, me for one.

pete_moore@myway.com

Why do they use sterile needles for lethal injections?

On the sustainability question, Derrick Jensen has some very sensible words, some of which you can see in this short video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8199834239551312732#

The key point he makes, to my mind: evolutionarily, the creatures that have survived in the long run have done so by enhancing their immediate environment to benefit the other communities living there. They give back more than they take. Think of an oak tree as an example: how much it gives in the way of shade, moisture, food, fertiliser, shelter. A supremely generous being – what can we learn from it?

Also, his critique of cities big enough to ‘require the importation of resources’ speaks to this topic of ‘plundering the hinterlands’ (as vera put it). It can’t last. It cannot be sustained.

best,
Ian

People in cities need water (not that I am condoning the flooding of villages), they need food, it is unreasonable to expect a city to produce all of the commodities it needs within its own boundaries. It would also be unreasonable – and potentially very destructive, to expect city people to move to the country. Cities are actually quite efficient in a lot of ways – people don’t need to travel as much, higher density housing tends to be more energy efficient, and in some cities people can produce a lot of their own food on allotments and city farms.

Anyway its all very well saying we are rural and therefore part of the solution, and you are urban, and therefore part of the problem, but where does that get you? We all need to live on this small, crowded island / planet.

The scrapping of the Sustainable Development Commission has led me to think about what sustainability actually means. The answer is not very much anymore. As you say, no-one is willing to pay the price, or even think about it as something that has meaning beyond platitudes.

There’s a similar case in North Yorkshire where the village of West End was swallowed up by Thruscross reservoir, originally planned in the 1890s but not finally created until 1966. Most of the buildings were demolished but old photos show that the church was initially left standing, with the water up to its eaves. It was later flattened, although apparently the stone bridge in the centre of the village still survives beneath the water.

There are a few ruins still visible – roofless farm buildings and houses just above the waterline, a fragment of a mill, drystone walls vanishing into the water. Recently the water level has been fairly low, and walking around the reservoir with a map I identified what I am fairly sure is the rear wall of the churchyard, temporarily visible.

Thruscross is the uppermost of the four reservoirs in the Washburn Valley, and is still much more raw than the Victorian three lower down the valley. These have now largely blended into the landscape; Thruscross, with its concrete dam and field boundaries disappearing into the dark, peat-laden water, has yet to do so.

“The drowning of the village of Capel Celyn in the Tryweryn valley was one of the most important political events in Wales in the twentieth century,” said BBC Wales Welsh affairs editor Vaughan Roderick.

http://www.llgc.org.uk/ymgyrchu/Dwr/Diwydiant/index-e.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4332312.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4331812.stm

“Percy Shelley – the idealist, revolutionary and great romantic poet
– first visited his uncle’s estate in the Elan when he was 18, walking
there from Sussex over the course of a week. Already having a
reputation as a strange but fun-filled young man, he used to bathe
in the mountain streams and sail toy boats down the currents,
sometimes with a cat on board. He fell in love in the valley and tried
to make a life there with his first wife but when they failed to acquire a
house the marriage collapsed. She drowned herself in the Serpentine
in London two years later. He lost his life at sea in Italy aged 29.
The Elan stream in which Shelley used to bathe and both the
valley homes he loved so much – Cwm Elan and the manor house
Nangwyllt – were also drowned by a series of Victorian reservoirs
in the late nineteenth century.”

http://www.wildswimming.co.uk/wales1.html

“Mr. Davies told me, ‘The drowning of the valley is a tragedy. It is as valuable as an Old Master.
This is an act of vandalism. A precious piece of Welsh heritage is being destroyed.”
Mr. Louis Hurley, an Abergavenny architect who owns a holiday cottage near the valley, said “One can never fight an authority on amenity grounds in this country, only on economic grounds.
“If economic values are the only values, everything will go. For detailed river scenery you will never find another valley like it in the country,”

“Before the area is flooded, wildlife and botanical surveys will be carried out and the valley will be photographed in detail.
Mr. Davies told me, “It will be a record for future generations to show what this generation has destroyed.”

http://www.rhandirmwyn.net/eng/resnewspaper2.htm

I think it’s probably impossible for city folk, or folk whose idea of a house is as a commodity, a temporary investment, to adequately comprehend what a farmhouse, a farm, a remote rural village, meant to people who had lived there for many, many generations, so that the surnames are as much a part of the landscape as ancient trees, tracks, stone walls… to have all that annihilated by force, for the benefit of industrial urban people speaking a faraway foreign language, is something more than sad…