Slipping away from the election last week while a Tory candidate gladhanded rural voters, I walked down a country lane and into the grounds of Lanercost priory in Cumbria. Hard by the Scottish border in what were once the "debatable lands" – lawless, self-reliant and remote, a primeval big society – Lanercost has endured through close to 900 years of social and political change. The red sandstone ruins are themselves built from the wreckage of an earlier governed Britain, ripped from Hadrian's wall, fragments of Roman inscriptions used as rubble: "LEG VI V ... PIA FID".
Sitting in thin evening sunshine, I wondered if the "loyal and faithful sixth legion", which commissioned that engraving and which once patrolled the border, had felt itself to be definitively modern. Its members must have believed they were a force for progress, just as the Augustinian canons who founded the priory 700 years after the legionnaires departed will certainly have done so, and perhaps, too, the Tudor enforcers who dissolved their institution on behalf of Henry VIII in 1538. Wreckers, perhaps, but they must in some manner have thought themselves part of the future. So did the 19th-century conservationists who saved the priory from collapse, and the 20th-century heritage institutions that stripped away the ivy and turned it into state property, the too trim tourist attraction of today.
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