The Rolt Memorial Lecture 2019: Landscape without Machines: Remembering the Little Things

ABSTRACT This paper concerns aspects of the granite industry in South West England, appropriately the region for the 2019 AIA Conference. It turns aside from spectacular industrial archaeology to address a concern for some of the little things that are so readily forgotten. The subject is parochial but shows how over two centuries a relatively little industry and its little quarries in Cornwall and Devon left a lasting physical legacy in many overlooked ways, throughout the British Isles and beyond. It opens an awareness of the ‘little things’ by discussing the special qualities of granite for civil engineering, monuments that are hidden in plain sight, transient events for erecting huge blocks, problems interpreting machine bases, landscape features and the much-needed designation of heritage granite quarries.