Historic battlefields and sites of conflict are part of our heritage. They can be promoted as amenities, as teaching aids and as memorials. However, they are too important to be ignored. By allowing the evidence from them to be destroyed or to be removed unrecorded, promotes the assumption that such evidence is not important, and furthermore, that it will not be important in the future. This is a very bold and dangerous assumption to be made considering the nature of historic information this evidence represents. The ignorance of details relating to historical conflict can lead to the falsification of the historical record by those who wish to promote a false history. Such considerations are so strong that promoting such false views, for example holocaust denial, are illegal in certain countries.
In centuries to come, future generations might find it difficult to believe that millions of people were systematically executed by government decree simply because of the hatred of them by those in control. In the distant future will the mass graves of Second World War Europe exist to provide physical evidence of the holocaust or will they be wiped away prior to the development of a shopping precinct or a new motorway?
Will we remember the sites of conflict and the thoughts they invoke, which now appear to be so unforgettable? Or will we feel that the past should simply remain a curiosity to be recounted like folk tales that have no valid provenance? Will we record the location of every arrowhead and musket ball found on a field of conflict so that a larger picture will eventually emerge of this violent part of our past or will we erase that past bit by bit by chipping away at our common heritage?
Will we teach our younger generation that historical conflict was glorious and noble or that it was bloody, dirty, brutal and mentally and physically traumatic? Will we be able to prove how our ancestors defended themselves against Romans, Saxons, Vikings, political opponents, or antiparliamentary Royalists and the manner in which they influenced the diversity of our common heritage? And most importantly, will we be able to demonstrate the consequences of the immortal words carved on so many war memorials …
‘Less we forget’.