Volume 26, Number 18 · November 22, 1979
Never-Never-Land
By Geoffrey Grigson
Prehistoric Avebury
by Aubrey Burl
Yale University Press, 275 pp., $19.95
Writing this review in France engenders some thought about English and French attitudes toward antiquity. If Avebury or Stonehenge had been French—had they stood in France (outside Brittany)—I suspect that a past tense would be entirely appropriate to them. They would have been pulled down (though Stonehenge might have been useful for multiple hanging in the Wars of Religion). In Saumur I go down one of the streets to drink beer or white wine inside a dolmen which was too enormous to destroy. There are other dolmens which shelter farm implements or which serve, or have served till lately, as baker's ovens. Many more have disappeared because they were in the way, or because they interrupted, or contradicted the normal. One might say that the French care too little for the past, their English neighbors care too much for it; that the French value things of the past only if they are gothic and grand, and very evidently French or Gallo-Roman, redounding to French glory; that on the whole ruins don't go with the French sense of what Sydney Smith once called 'the aujourd'hui' of life, which he preferred so much to his wife's gusto for seeing 'where Sigbert the Fat slew Fiddlefid the Bold.'
Review, 2454 words
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