steepholm

I remember having a similar discussion with my Dad years ago, when I was about 14. We'd visited a stately home, and he said that he was incapable of seeing it as interesting or beautiful, due to his awareness that it only existed because of an unjust social system. One of my counter arguments was that virtually the entire British environment reflects social systems that we no longer support. Castles were built to suppress populaces. Money went on building cathedrals while peasants starved. On a more local scale, millers were notorious for fleecing their fellow villagers. Victorian mills abused child labourers. Forests only exist because of oppressive Forest Law, and wild uplands are the ramblers' paradise that they now are because landowners evicted cottagers and fenced the land in to breed game. Yes, we could go through life despising forests and moorlands and windmills and castles and cathedrals... but that would make life quite unbearably depressing, so I'd rather see the beauty in the things around me, even if they had unpleasant origins long ago. Perhaps not the most morally-sound reasoning, but, still…