Physical meaning and habit is essential for learning what is and isn’t important within our own existence. We acquire this knowledge from the immediate things around us, but more often than not, we stand to gain more from looking back to our ancestors. The way they lived, the mistakes they made, and the things they left behind inform us in a way that the present can’t. A relationship between humans and the physical world around us has always existed. At a base level, it determines the way we situate ourselves within our physical environment. There will always be a floor below us, and locations within our spaces that we choose for their suitability – a place to sit for instance.

 

Perhaps this is why it is so distressing when one of these anchors (in the form of a familiar piece of heritage, for instance, a monument) changes or disappears. Our need for these monuments is of course nothing new, 'A Phenomenology of Landscape' by Christopher Tilley addresses populations within the Neolithic period, explaining that ‘places themselves may be said to acquire a history, sedimented layers of meaning by virtue of the actions and events that take place in them. Personal biographies, social identities and a biography of place are intimately connected.’ (Tilley, 1994, p.27). This grounding in our identities happens through both our personal and collective history – whether this is the marks we make on our landscape or our ancestral lines. Looking back to the Neolithic again, [Ancestral] ‘monuments served to make permanent, anchor, fix and visually draw out for perception the connections between people and the land for the first time.’ (Tilley, 1994, p.202). Places usually viewed in passing became familiar, with the link between people and their surroundings growing stronger.

 

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