We haven't got a running order because we've been disorganised. That's my fault.
Andrew, do you strongly want to go first? Do you mind if I do? What are your thoughts?
I am very happy for you to kick it off. Diane and I know nothing to.
I said. That's perfect. Right. So many things to discuss.
But this is what I want to see in the first instance. I think what we've really shown in the past few days is that we can do this.
We can talk to each other. We can understand one another. We can communicate.
And this is no small thing. I have run many interdisciplinary events across my career.
And quite often you find that there's actually no common questions, no common language, no common set of ideas.
That hasn't been the experience here. My sense is that what's really striking is that actually in separate ways,
we've all been working on similar kinds of questions and similar kinds of concerns and problems.
And one of those that really spring to mind was beautifully highlighted by today's extraordinary papers is the extent to which this whole area of
I'm just going to condense it in the word magic has been occluded and forgotten and deeply buried in every sense and even deliberately excluded.
It was striking that the National Trust deliberately wanted not to do witchcraft,
deliberately wanted not to record the history of people who are collecting, which has bottles and magical artefacts and so on,
and wanted to give that job to somebody else, as if saying that the nation excluded it,
as if saying that it was antithetical to proper truth telling history.
And yet, whatever those also been preoccupied with, again, in a diversity of ways, is that if we don't attend to these issues,
then it seems that the very act of trying to suppress or repress them produces as a natural
phenomenon the bubbling up of pretty scary forces of who the invasive right wing is at.
Well, in Smithey were probably the most frequently cited example,
but we could also talk about the way academic historians working on witchcraft
have often not wanted to talk about the possibility of belief on either side.
The word belief is quite distant, saying if we talk about beliefs, we imply we don't have that.
Other people have this idea. If we don't do that work, if we don't discuss ORed, which is strange witches,
the result is actually that many people who are less responsible will create histories
that are less factual and in a way less authentic than those we could co create with them.
And that might be OK if those histories were flagged as fiction.
But it becomes problematic when they're not flagged as fiction.
It becomes problematic when there's, for example, in my own work a naive insistence that in the past God, as worshipping witches,
exercised a wonderful matriarchy consisting entirely of benevolent midwife midwifery and were persecuted by their male Christian neighbours.
And that's a lovely story, but it's not fact. And there's a simple sort of way in which we need to contest some of the nonfactual in order to
establish that complexity and the intractability and the difficulty of the facts with which we work.
And I think that that work has clearly been done by all of us in a huge variety of ways.
And it's really striking to see people wrestling with another overall issue.
And this is really the second big theme that I drew from the presentations that I've so enjoyed over the past two days.
And that is, how do people connect with the past?
What kinds of connexions can be formed? It could be by vast human universals like birth and death.
And we've heard a variety of ways in which those connexions can happen.
It could be through the movement of those large universals, through story.
And the story is can be quite particular. We can talk about the fact that some constants move through those stories.
The figure of the which the figure of the fairy or otherworldly being the figure of various
artefacts like stones which have recurred constantly throughout the presentations and tombs,
ditto. And there are also some really huge variables, and all of us are trying to take account of those.
And I've heard many of you talk about regional variations, identifying as a northerner.
National variations. What difference does it make if your Welsh or from Northern Ireland or from the Republic?
What is Englishness in the norm? The dominant is always less visible.
What other kinds of ethnicities may up the multicultural layer that people now identify as part of English?
What difference does class make? What difference do educational levels make?
And we could also talk about the many theoretical differences between us.
The distinction between the fashion for syncretism that dominated this kind of work basically in the late 19th century with you,
with Fraser and then Europe, and persisted really through the late 1950s with people like Robert Graves and even the poet Ted Hughes
vs. the much more careful you could even say scrupulous kind of work that people want to do now.
And additionally, the very active curating, whether you're curating objects or stories, words or things,
can itself be highly problematic for some identities in relation to a narrative about imperialism,
a narrative about an authenticity that insists loudly and vehemently that things belong to us because we paid for them.
And this kind of visible problem, which I think is dogging most museum collections now,
I know it's a big deal at the Pet Rivers in Oxford and then the politics within the British Isles.
The possible English repudiation of magic has something that people in the Celtic fringes believe in or do,
and the extent to which all those kinds of problems coalesce around questions that dominate our own research.
What are we allowed to look into? What can we get the money to look into?
What can we get published when we're finished? Those kinds of access issues and how those relate.
So you will have gathered that?
I have more questions than answers, and I think that's actually the perfect outcome from a fantastic event like this one.
I'm going to take those questions away. I'm going to get in touch with all of you.
And I'm really excited to converse more with every single person here.
Thank you. I think I'd just like to to echo what Dan said.
I think it's been a real sort of meeting of minds between, you know, that the heritage participants, those from academia.
I think it really has shown that there is more than just a dialogue.
It's actually a meeting of minds in terms of the way that we we take this forward.
I think from a perspective, we've been coming up this in terms of thinking how do we energise and engage more of our visitors with our sites?
How do we how to how do we get there?
Their interest in coming to visit us. And, you know, we want to we want to be authentic.
We pride ourselves on authenticity. But what is the what is authentic is, you know, waves making us think again about what's authentic.
And as Susan was saying about her, how she would rethink a panel that she said 15 years, 13, 14 years ago.
And, you know, our ideas about what what we value, the different perspectives that we value and how we,
you know, is do we prioritise one mode of thought over another?
I think that's changing. And I don't think particularly links with one of our ideas with which we use for our conservation funds.
We talk about the different types of value that things have. So things have historical value.
But we also talk about fights having communal value. That's their value to the people who live around them and how they react or respond
to those sites and in what ways that they do that courses through the myths,
legends and folklore that I associate with those sites. And I think for too long,
we may be not been valuing that community value enough and not not really thinking about how local people we relate to
the sites being having never sanity in the stories that they tell about them and the meanings that they have for them.
So I think, you know, this idea of bringing in these people and thinking about it in the same way that we now think
about oral history a lot and the sort of connexions that individuals have with the fight.
And I think, you know, something that Mary said about the the myths and legends map and natural,
the engagement that we had with that and the fact that you're going from something that
was seen initially possibly as something just to help promote this and legends theme,
it's become something which is valued as a resource by academics and by community researchers, as well as being something which is participatory.
And I'm sure that we would be very glad to be allowed to continue having that as that,
because those people could argue if it wasn't for the fact that the logistics of actually maintaining that, but it's still being left out.
Right. So I just think this is something that we want to continue the a conversation and see how we can use this opportunity to bring some
of these stories from the academic spear to bear on our site so that we can actually help tell more interesting stories of them.
I think those are locally the floor now for anyone who's got things to contribute.
Thanks, Andrea. I'm going to go straight to Mary, if that's if that's if that's possible.
Well, I think it's a really meaty and interesting question. OK, I hope this isn't too problematic the question,
but I think it's always good to ask ourselves about these things frequently, especially in some heritage people.
Whenever. And that's in response to Diane's excellent comments.
And I think this roundtable might be historic. Suppression of magic heritage sites,
the way it's been suppressed maybe suggests a kind of moral moral guardianship role that heritage organisations and academics
as well have kind of imagined themselves as taking when it comes to managing stories associated with significant sites.
And then, I guess, like more problematically,
potentially all the questions that we are actually asking about managing folklore at certain sites such as Whalen's Smithee,
in order to avoid problematic iterations of folklore cropping up in the gaps.
Are those kinds of questions.
Also maybe falling into the same tendencies that we identify in those historic kind of suppression of magical narratives that science?
Really interesting. I think I should probably leave someone from the heritage side to answer the first part of your question, Mary.
I think there there. There is no clean or neat way to avoid that large questions that you raise.
It's true that. It's impossible to engage with folklore and particularly the folklore of the past without risking sounding.
Problematic in a huge range of ways. One way is that the sort of intrinsic post enlightenment way that we talk about
the past and I spoke briefly in my comments about the use of the word belief,
and I'm thinking now of that fantastic thing, Neal Pryce says in his new book about the Vikings.
Actually, the Vikings didn't have beliefs. They had knowledge. You don't think of your own beliefs as beliefs like that.
You think of them as knowledge.
And so the very fact that we sort of distance ourselves from you, which believes terribly sad all over here, that we're here, rational, sensible.
There's always a creepily superior aspect that intrinsically places the researcher above the things studied.
And it's sort of difficult to escape it. I totally see the.
Andrew, did you want to comment on the other half of Mary's question? Just because it was about heritage and yeah,
about the idea of moral guardianship and the idea of sort of being the superior
sort of guardian overseeing what's acceptable and what's not acceptable,
I suppose, in the sense that we always have to be mindful when we're writing our panels in terms of trying to calm down people's assumable.
But writing is the official narrative of the site, because it's where we're with we're telling it as it is.
There's always different perspectives, aren't there?
One in five when you've got 400 or so a 200 words or a 100 words or whatever it is to write something,
then actually we to convey the complexity and nuances of an argument is often quite difficult.
And you have to hedge your bets with words like probably and things like that.
But in terms I think we are changing in the way that we.
The way that we would view. I mean, I think traditionally we have had this very much this this concept of giving the rational archaeological,
you know, sort of narrative which doesn't have space for or for these sort of more sort of folklorist beliefs or whatever.
I think that's changing. But it is extensive.
The way that we we deal with our interpretation is that things move slowly because we only we only install solar panels in a given year.
So it may be that when when you visit a particular site, you don't notice the change takes away.
But I have no idea whether whether we would as Susan suggested, we tend to wait for the review panel.
I mean, it would seem something that may well be appropriate, but when we when we get that site come up for having a new panel put onto it.
So I think we can. Yeah. I mean, things like the legends map now,
which is the other thing in a way that we have started adding things to Pevar online content to reflect things like the impact on
Babri and where we were going through to sort of our site panels to make sure that they do reflect the current thoughts in that area,
which may be different than when that when that text was originally written. I think similarly in this area,
there'd be no reason why we shouldn't edit some of our final text or online content
to it to reflect these different perspectives that are not currently present. It's just a jump in it.
I mean, I think, you know, panels are important, but I suspect most people don't really read them anyway.
So I wonder whether there's a there's a there's probably a lot more we can be done there can be done through our education programmes,
but also through kind of projects that could create and involve other people in what is important about this site.
You know, whether that's local people, whether that's particular interest groups,
whether that's a particular communities that we want to reach out to.
I think co creation is is something we have to really take seriously, particularly when we're thinking about large projects.
I'm sure Sally's thinking about lots of ways of engaging people in states help.
Yet, to my mind, I think in the past, a lot of heritage interpretation of management has been done in a very closed, insular way.
And that's got to change. And we have to look out a lot more. Yeah, it's going to come in as well.
Also, if you think I mean, some are just going back to the original question,
I think there's something here about the history of the concept of a notion of
heritage itself and how it's formulated in the 19th century and conservation as well.
And now the National Trust was actually set up to provide open spaces for people not to buy Tavia,
Helen and her co-founders not really thinking about sort of house and collections.
And some of that was quite ad hoc, how that came to be.
And I suppose that then the kind of idea about preserving things in aspic, you know,
some of that came from some of them it as 19th century sort of heritage ideas.
So, you know, this is kind of bringing in if belief and and so is it more intangible ideas?
Is is something that was I think there is something around kind of ideas about morality and guardianship of what you know,
what heritage is and can be. But also because it's very it can be very problematic, as we know.
And, you know, Andrew was just alluding to this, you know.
I mean, you can mazur's the National Trust knows quite well at the moment.
If you start adding multiple layers to interpretation, you do get backlash.
And it can be really, really difficult to engage with. Say something very practical about this and how an organisation weathers those attacks.
But I think that there's certainly lots of opportunities for multiple narratives such as these in the digital space
and perhaps thinking about moving away from site interpretation where you just can't present everything all at once.
It's impossible. And thinking about how we use digital space, both in terms of access, in terms of what Susan was talking about,
co creation, co curation, crowdsourcing, which clearly English heritage done brilliantly well with this map.
And it's something we really want to look at is something we're doing at the moment.
We've been doing it Catalyst and Hall and the Easton Museum there, and not so much crowd sourcing, but going out to source communities.
That's really important, especially when you're dealing with non Western areas, collections and places,
but also that can be really important for local collections and local places that night.
The nature of landscapes. So I miss all sorts of different approaches, but I definitely think that we need to inhabit digital spaces more effectively.
Fantastic. And, Jack, you were about to come in.
It's a related question, and that is the institutions that look after these these things and the communication on non communication between them.
I think Jenny noted something that when we talk about the British Isles,
it kind of includes Ireland and includes Ireland as if somehow it's part of something,
a geographical unity or part of a cultural unity that it isn't Celts is is a similar is a similar sort of thing.
And again, it's just something that I think and Diane mentioned that, you know,
the different perspectives from Wales, for example, Kartu does things very, very, very differently.
And as we have been recorded, I think I will just leave it at that. You know, what kind of.
Of all there possibilities for the different institutions to communicate with with with one another.
And clearly, I think English Heritage and the National Trust seem to be doing so.
And unfortunately, hopefully Scotland, Scotland will as well, even though Stefan won't be able to sort of join us literally or virtually.
So it's just kind of throwing something out.
I'm afraid to kind of another possible problem in that with all of the problems of interpretation, there's also a problem of communication as well.
Very much so. And any any colleagues like to like to respond to that immediate, immediate point.
Susan, know unmuted yourself, which is a good sign that she's going to bring in Andrea's point in the chat,
which is about the sites that are not looked after by heritage organisations.
And I met this morning mentioned about acquisition of properties. But it's actually something happens very rarely,
at least for our organisation and about how we we kind of map and record the hidden sites as they were.
And that was only on my screen. And I thought it was really interesting point about how how any funding can be found for that and any kind of,
you know, any of the skills of all of the people in the room can be brought to kind of highlight those places as well.
But just to say that, I mean, obviously, heritage organisations do talk to each other an awful lot,
but we are also really small and really underfunded and really pressed for time.
So in a way, for a like this where we can actually get together with people across different
organisations and boards is exactly what the purpose of that that sort of went.
Say you're sorry. Well, this is not easy. Right?
And the feedback in big capital letters, our funders would be delighted to have had that.
I am a diehard. You're about to say come in.
I just wanted to say indeed, it's actually really intriguing that yesterday we heard from Liza Tallas about some sites that I would adore to visit.
I would have bitten the hand off anyone who wanted to take me to an unknown Welsh witch's cottage, but I didn't even know it was there.
So, I mean, in a way, they're all so close to our ability to get to know one another, to assimilate one another's work,
to discover and rediscover all kinds of aspects of what we collectively do
that we haven't fully known about or fully integrated into our own approaches.
And I think in that sense, it's really important that events like this continue to happen,
because it's in this way that we can make progress with those knotty, difficult questions that all of us are trying to address.
So that's my last word. I was going to Ardino, in a sense,
the way that the sites in the English Heritage Collection were were assembled very much as Asani to seeing with the National Trust sites.
It was by people who were not thinking about these sort of things and these sort of ideas.
They were they were very much thinking long lines of classical categories of archaeological sites and and arts,
artistic and architectural features that they valued.
And that was why those sites were selected. Possibly why some of these other sites, such as those that Lisa mentioned,
are not in the historic collect in the English heritage or the National Trust collection because those things were not valued at that time.
And maybe it isn't a reason for what Matt said this morning.
We need to sort of barium widen the range of sites we consider part of our national collection.
And it's a good marker for that, as well as some of the industrial or whatever sites that he mentioned, those these types of sites as well.
Lit. Well, I think after two days of really, really wide ranging, intense, exciting,
intriguing and thoroughly rewarding conversation, I think we should draw it to a close there in terms of what happens next.
I'll pass Diane in a second in terms of the immediate things that happened next.
We have recorded the presentation so they will be added to down into a podcast form.
All of the contributors,
you will have a series of exciting pieces of paperwork to fill in to ensure that we can release these and these items and the chats.
We will. We will make sure that we save the chat, say that there is a record of our conversations today.
But, Diane, I just pass to you for sort of closing words. Well, I'd like to close by thanking everybody involved, particularly the presenters,
because I think we've had an absolutely brilliant series of presentations that were
clearly both thought through and were worked out for presentation to the zoo.
It was just terrific when I sent out that first e-mail. And you all agreed to be involved.
Still really, really grateful to all of you for that.
Second thing to say is I will be getting in touch with all of you about the probability of publishing your work in this special issue of a journal.
I just need to liaise with the journal editor about the timetable on that so that
I can communicate with you in a more informed way than I may be able to present.
But I hope that I'm sorry if you've already said that you were willing to make a pieces available.
I'm very grateful for that. If anyone would, we can discuss it every now Sidonie call go on and on about it now.
I'll just say it's happening. And in the meantime, I would love to be in touch with all of you individually because I've so many follow up questions
for everybody regarding the fantastic and incredibly exciting material you will present.
So thank you once more. It's been in every way a blast.
Thank you.