Walks

by Stuart Butler | 9th September 2024 | Counter-Heritage, History, Walks | 0 Comments

The Slimbridge Diggers Every Age Rewrites History But not always textually And the History may not even have been textual To begin with tbh   ‘Every Age Rewrites History?’: well, that takes me right back to 6th form scholarship-level history (yes, I did get a distinction); and now, rereading Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down, that adage seems ever more relevant, as we try to discover the site of that mysterious, elusive Digger settlement at Slimbridge.   Thus wrote the magisterial Christopher Hill in 1972: ‘History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors. The Levellers were better understood as political democracy established itself … the Diggers have something to say to twentieth-century socialists. Now that the protestant ethic itself … is at last being questioned … we can study with a new sympathy the Diggers, the Ranters, and the many other daring thinkers who in the seventeenth century refused to bow down and worship it.’   And here we are in the twenty-first century, in the age of the Anthropocene, or Capitalocene (call it what you will): a new age of climate crisis, and here we are ready to try and discover the possible location of the possible Digger community at Slimbridge. And I imagine you are thinking as you read this: Why Slimbridge? Slimbridge? Somewhere on the edge of nowhere? That seems literally incredible. And why...