Great Asby Scar
21st November 2008
There is a memorial stone on Great Asby Scar commemorating the lighting of a beacon in the reign of Queen Victoria. Nobody lives now of the people that saw that fire and the inscription is barely legible these days but the stone still stands in this lonely spot.
I can’t help but think it should stand as a memorial to something else these days because it is surrounded the rubble of stone extraction and quarrying on a massive scale.
Great Asby Scar was once one of the greatest limestone pavements in England.
Over the years the rock was smashed up and carted away as rockery stone for fashionable gardens and we will never see it’s like again.
As I stand in this place I can only imagine, from my knowledge of other, better preserved pavements, what it must have once been like.
In time it may once again be returned to that magnificent state, because the forces of geology still march on.
I will not live to see it of course, nor will anyone living today but such is the shadow of mankind.
It saddens me to see such destruction, but the task provided work for much of the community in the area and it is perhaps far too easy to be critical in modern times.