Foreword
It does not often happen that a calamity is reversed,
especially in the fields of archaeology and the environment . A barrow ploughed
flat by a careless or rapacious farmer can never be reconstituted ; a country
house demolished for redevelopment cannot be restored to what it once was, even
if it is lovingly rebuilt according to its ancient form ; a countryside ruined by
an industrial complex or a motorway can never be quite the same again . Yet a
distinction can be made between the destruction of the man-made and the
devastation of a landscape ; the former may be thought irrevocable, the latter
a change which time will repair . Nature will not restore precisely, but she
has the power to rehabilitate, to wipe out the rapacities of man, to replace
what has been lost with something perhaps even better .