In our built heritage, is the truth stranger than fiction?

When Athena travels to see a building or monument, she repeatedly finds herself fascinated by the specifics of its history. She wants to know who were the historical personalities associated with it and the circumstances in which it was created and developed, as well as the events that took place there.

In her view, it is only by exploring these questions of who, when and why that it becomes possible to explain its form and appreciate its significance. It’s in these realities about the past — as far as we can rescue them — that, in her view, the value of heritage lies.

The commercial exploitation of heritage, however, often necessarily and understandably takes a rather broader view of what constitutes the interest of a site when interpreting it for a wide and general public. To engage with the specifics of a particular place’s history, you need to be able to recognise the issues and personalities that shaped it.

Yet time has a brutal way of diminishing reputations and rendering issues that once seemed important obscure, trivial or absurd. Even Athena sometimes forgets. Small wonder, then, that the concerns of once-powerful personalities fail to command the interest of a modern audience. On the rare occasions that they do, it is generally because they illustrate some compelling or immediate human story. The temptation, therefore, is to jettison them and seek something with more popular appeal.

The problem is that houses, castles, abbeys and monuments devoid of historical specifics become little more than generic curiosities, admired only for their strangeness or beauty. There is nothing wrong with this, of course — who is not moved by the strangeness and beauty of the past?

Taken to extremes, however, it does have some peculiar consequences. One in particular that Athena has repeatedly observed during her visits this summer is the way that the real stories of buildings can become completely overlaid by the fictions of contemporary historical dramas and fantasy films shot on location. How much easier it is to populate a historic room with personalities and dramatic episodes written to engage the interest of a contemporary audience — nearly all of which play very fast and loose with scene setting — than the figures who appear in stiff and mute portrait on the walls.

There is nothing new about the usurpation of the past by accessible modern fiction. It lay at the heart of the success of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels, for example. It is easy to imagine the two — what might be described as the specific and generic views of history — as natural enemies. In fact, they are inextricably linked. At a fundamental level, that is because, however recondite and marginal the specific may seem, the generic ultimately feeds off it. In return, the generic ends up offering the widest possible audience a window into the specific. Glance through that and who knows where it will take you.