Croeso - welcome - to my new blog, Welsh Archaeology.
Whilst archaeology is in the title, I certainly won't be limiting the blog to matters archaeological. Heritage, history, anything remotely linked to the story of Wales, is fair game for coverage here.
Why start the blog? Mainly, I've grown increasingly alarmed by the state of the professional heritage and archaeological industry within Wales and think it's time this insular community faced some public scrutiny.
Rather than sounding like a conspiracy theory nutter, I'm starting the blog off with an example of how low Cadw has become, arising from a Freedom of Information Act request disclosure which was made just a few days ago. Only this morning did I have the opportunity for the unpleasant experience of reading the documents.
Back in 2022, prompted by the annual International Marconi Day amateur radio event at the site, I took up in earnest my earlier passing interest in what happened at the Marconi 'Carnarvon' very low frequency (VLF) wireless site at Cefn Du. This was a site of prime importance to the United Kingdom in the WW1 era and was an important commercial VLF site for much of its 25 year-long life. On September 22, 1918, Carnarvon sent the first ever direct, non-relayed wireless message to Australia (though tests achieving the same had been conducted up to a year earlier).
When I say 'earnest interest', I mean a year's worth of trudging across a huge early wireless site located on a wet, windy and sometimes blisteringly hot north Wales mountainside plus exhaustive examination of Oxford Bodleian's extensive Marconi archive. None of this had any financial or other support from anyone, except for my own pocket which took quite a hit, all told.
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| Marconi's Carnarvon station, ca. 1918. Original author unknown. |
Roll on to September 2022, and my very early draft text, still very much a work in progress, had to be released to Cadw because I had resurrected earlier abortive calls for scheduling (legal protection) and it was clear the existing official records left an awful lot to be desired. Much of it was simply wrong. Though I was reluctant and indeed embarrassed to release a work-in-progress document, I did so to ensure Cadw were acting on the best information then available.
By late September of 2022, the first edition of my work was published. It quickly advanced to the third edition by early 2023, mainly because the first edition had to go out earlier than I would have wanted, as I believed Cadw may well try to publish something of their own, having been caught rather lacking in their own work on the site. My work was simultaneously added to the official Historical Environment Record.
Roll on to October 2023 - 17 months after I asked Cadw to schedule the Marconi site, nothing had been announced.
I started thinking something wasn't quite right here. Cadw's guide to scheduling says that it can take "weeks or sometimes months" to complete the process. Why the delay? I decided that they had rather been having me on, and so I made a FoIA request on what had been happening for all that time.
The disclosure revealed, firstly, that Cadw are severely under-resourced, as most public services in the UK these days, and for a long time, had ceased scheduling sites in Wales. Indeed, for some time, they seem not to have actually had a Scheduling Officer. Nothing in the legislation permits Cadw to cease scheduling and their no-scheduling 'policy' went without any public announcement. In short, it was a certain improper ignoring of the law to meet financial ends. It is not clear whether any formal requests to schedule - which anyone, including single members of the public can make - were actually ignored during this period.
Secondly, the disclosure showed that the 'Historical Background' to Cadw's 'desk study' (a review of studies on the site) had highlighted my "extensive" (as they put it) "private research" and that it formed "part of" (actually, the definitive part) of the official record for the site.
Despite, therefore, clearly knowing about my text and having found it to be a large amount of work, Cadw simply ignored all of it, and went on to write a summary history of the site based on assertions that I had already proven, with copious referencing and input from world-class VLF and other engineers, were wholly incorrect.
Cadw repeated the incorrect claim that the inverted-L antenna used by Marconi "gave a better signal" in certain directions - i.e. that the antenna was directional. This is just plain wrong. My text highlights a journal article by Bucher - a Marconi engineer- from...wait for it...1920 - that accepted the inverted-L "was not directional in the manner believed". Even earlier than this - around the 1910s - German engineers had clearly said they did not accept the antenna was directional. Cadw simply keep repeating this false claim, despite my work to comprehensively show it was never true. Why?
Cadw claim the Carnarvon site was "complete by 1924". This is again wrong and also covered in depth in my text. A new antenna - GLJ (previously given, wrongly, by Vyvyan in his 1933 work as 'GLT') - was erected in 1925. It wasn't satisfactorily finished until around early 1927, having presented significant adverse interactions with the other transmitting circuits.
Cadw also claim, as they have done for a very long time, that the station was known as "Caernarfon", this being the modern Welsh name of the world-famous town. This simply isn't true. Throughout the station's life, it was known by the Marconi WT company as 'Carnarvon' - the anglicised version of the placename, which was commonly used at the time. Cadw claim that the station was, moreover "more commonly" known by other names such as "Cefn Du" and "Waunfawr". The press used these names, but Marconi never did and the archive letters and other documents prove this.
Why does Cadw keep making these false claims? Is it to avoid upsetting the more rabid Welsh-speakers (I am one, and don't find a historical account remotely upsetting - it's a fact of the time and one that tells us about the England-Wales relationship)? Or was Cadw just lazy and couldn't be bothered to read any of my text and stop copying and pasting what has been written before? Either is just as likely as the other and both may have in fact been at play.
Beyond this, their new Scheduling Officer - evidently inundated by "over 100 sites" needing consideration for protection - writes to a colleague to consider the boundary for the site's scheduling, a very important aspect of the process (not least because it affects landowners), even though I had prepared a complete plot of the site, including relating remains to function - something that has always been way beyond the skillset of anyone at Cadw and other official heritage bodies and the first time anyone had ever done this.
Other documents show other staff finding difficulty in accessing my Google Earth plot of the site. They also claim, again because they say they "don't have the software" to open any of these files (funny - Google Earth is freely available as a purely online service!), couldn't access a 'Shapefile' prepared by the local archaeological trust, and seem to have simply given up at this point, not asking anyone for help to examine the plots that took a year to prepare.
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| This is my plot of Carnarvon, down to the level, in some cases, of small bolts on the ground. Why would Cadw simply not bother trying to make use of this? |
The Scheduling Officer also wonders what remains may be found following a survey he believes may take place - either unaware of or else completely ignoring my work again, I cannot say which - some nine months after my work was published!
This may appear to be a storm in a teacup and, in the greater scheme of things, may well be. But Cadw are the official advisors to Welsh ministers on heritage matters and they have a duty to the public and, I would argue, to the legal scheduling process, to ensure the historical details they provide in their assessment and, later, formal desciption of the scheduled site, includes the latest and most reliable information that is possible for any given historical location.
It is not for Cadw to adopt an antagonistic attitude towards the author of a carefully-conducted piece of work. And it is not for them, either, to adopt a 'not invented here' response to someone other than themselves doing this kind of work.
Very unacceptably Cadw, as an agency (and no comment is made on individual staff), in this case, are readily shown to be, I would argue, negligent in these duties and, moreover, seemingly deliberately not making any effort to update their understanding and account of the site. This cannot be to the benefit of this or any other site it may apply to. The heritage of Wales deserves better.
For what it's worth, I've protested to the Director of Cadw and asked him to ensure these false details are never again published by this agency.
The seemingly-positive news is that Cadw appear to agree that Marconi's Carnarvon site does meet the criteria for scheduling, but it has yet to conclude the process.
[UPDATE, 2023 November 16]
Cadw has responded positively to the criticisms made above and agreed to cease publishing incorrect information about the station. There was no explanation as to why such information kept being published. The map showing the intended protection boundary, now supplied when it had earlier been left out of a FoIA release, shows Cadw had managed to access my plots and used these as the basis for the boundary. They hadn't acknowledged the plots' source however.
