FALLING INTO RUIN...6,000 OF OUR MAJOR HERITAGE SITES

OUR national heritage is under serious threat with one in 12 protected historic sites now at high risk.

English Heritage looked at 70,000 buildings, archaeological sites, battlefields, parks and shipwrecks – and nearly 6,000 were found to be in danger. 

But protecting the buildings alone would cost at least £400million, it estimated – nearly 100 times the group’s entire budget. 

The warning yesterday came as English Heritage published a modern “Domesday book” of sites across the country that are under severe threat. 

Listed sites include Martello towers – such as the one in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex – built as coastal defences against a Napoleonic invasion. 

Even Hadrian’s Wall needs shoring up in parts. Also listed is Tynemouth station in Tyne and Wear, built in 1882 and still used, but parts of which are now in disrepair. 

The biggest danger is from housing development, the report found. This is already engulfing the battlefields of Stamford Bridge near York – where King Harold defeated a Viking invasion in 1066 – and Newbury in Berks, where Charles I had his best chance of winning the Civil War in 1643.

The bloodiest battlefield on English soil – Towton near Tadcaster in North Yorks – is being damaged by illegal metal detecting. Yet, archaeologists need the arrowheads and buckles found there to discover how up to 28,000 were slaughtered in 1461 in the brutal Wars of the Roses battle. 

Launching the Heritage At Risk register yesterday, chief executive Simon Thurley said: “England’s battlefields are, as Sir Winston Churchill said, ‘the punctuation marks of history’ and very many of us will have ancestors who fell on them and whose bones still lie beneath.” 

Some sites have had a happier fate – such as the Gothic Lowther Castle near Penrith, Cumbria, which has been partly repaired with more work planned. And the famous Cutty Sark in Greenwich, south-east London, which is being repaired after a fire. 

But the 45 protected wrecks off the English coast are not so lucky – threatened by tides and shifting sands as well as illegal attempts to plunder them. 

They include HMS Colossus, which was bringing wounded back from Nelson’s victory at the battle of the Nile when it sank off the Scillies in 1798. Lord Hamilton, husband of Nelson’s mistress Emma Hamilton, lost his fortune in the disaster. 

English Heritage – along with local authority and private owners of these sites – faces a tough battle to raise money to protect them, as its budget has been cut from £6.6million a decade ago to £4.4million now. continues here

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