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Tuesday, 16 April 2019

Our cultural heritage is more important than foreign aid

I wept bitter tears of loss as I watched Notre Dame burn and in pain pleaded to God for his mercy.

It is early, but this morning the structure still stands, the photographs suggesting the rib-vaulted roof over the crossing had gone, and a further part of the stone vaulting over the Chancel. However, the roof over the Nave is still at great risk - the fire will have inflicted extremes of heat and streams of molten lead from the roof covering, the cold water used to extinguish the flames then likely to crack the stone. The timber roof structure dated from 1220 - 1240 and is alas now wholly gone.

Notre Dame's 13th century timber roof over the rib-vaulted Nave
When the Germans reduced the historic centre of Warsaw to rubble in the last war, the Poles swore to rebuild it exactly as it was, and even under a repressive and authoritarian Communist regime they did so. Every roof tile and window exactly as it was before the Teuton barbarians subjected it to HE. And this was exactly the right thing to do - for our European cultural heritage has a value above rubies; our nations and our peoples, our forbears and ancestors live in these stones and in this wood and in the craft and art and love with which they proclaimed for the world to see our being, our Sein.

Here's a clear message to government and to our pathetic failure of a Parliament, both antithetical to the interests of the People. Our cultural heritage is more important by a factor of magnitude than pissing away billions of our taxes to corrupt third-world tyrants in the name of modish liberalism. Notre Dame is a warning to you; you have a duty to use every effort, take every measure, spend whatever is needed, to secure our own cultural heritage from damage, neglect, negligence or malicious damage. Your failure will not be tolerated.


jack ketch said...

Nothing to add to your post, for once, save that it saddens me that Macron is touting for international donations to rebuild it. He should be declaring "WE will rebuild it, WE will find the money-even if it means everyone paying a euro a month more tax."

Dave_G said...

If you (rightly so) worry about our cultural heritage then why don't you place more emphasis on the threat from people that come to Christian countries and then seek to undermine it?

right-writes said...

Great shame...

... Still, moving on, there is now a significant opportunity to build housing for the new EU citizens.

Wake up Micron!

Raedwald said...


I do. The people responsible for cultural degradation are the globalists and their dag politicians, not the poor creatures they use.

Targeting the migrants means supporting the globalists.

Anonymous said...

Being a joiner by trade, I am always psychologically hurt when these wonderful buildings are damaged like this.

The work - without machines - would have been carried out to the highest standard and by people who would have dedicated their lives to one project.
The amount of timber used must have been mind-boggling.

But please, Raedwald, don't be under any illusions regarding our hierarchy's lack of love for our historical buildings; to the Marxist, family, religion, society - and the buildings that inspire and provide our communities with a solidifying focus - all are an obstacle.

There will be some happy people this morning.

Poisonedchalice said...

Anon @ 09:35
I fear you are right. Cultural destruction is part and parcel of the extreme left. I wonder how the fire started?

Anonymous said...

Another Reichstag moment.
Who is the fall guy this time?
Not some Dutch communist. Maybe Gilets Jaune ?

jack ketch said...


I was a sec-man by trade for a time and spent many nights sitting in the middle of building sites/renovation works on 'fire watch'. As far as I know insure companies demand that any historic building being renovated and having no sprinklers (or those sprinklers being turned off for renovation works etc) have a 'fire watch' at night. So I'm guessing there is a Security man in Paris this morning with some explaining to do.

Span Ows said...

"There will be some happy people this morning."

sorry but I am going to say it...I HOPE this is an accident and not Moh and friends on the construction worker gang carrying on as usual.

Amazing detail on Wiki only a day on:

jack ketch said...

Ahh the rise of conspiracy theories...and the share price of Bacofoil.

Raedwald said...

Some people never learn Jack -

I had a job in Greenwich that involved a lot of hot work, immediately adjacent to the fire-ravaged Cutty Sark; I had the Stats surveys and the first thing I did was locate the closer of the 2 fire hydrants available to both my site and the ship. There was a Cutty Sark portacabin on top of it. Idiots.

Then on another job I had an agency that supplied nothing but Nigerian night security guards. Now I couldn't reject them on the grounds of being Nigerian, but I couldn't be arsed to visit the site at 3am each night to catch them snugged up in the cabin with the heating on full blast using the site wi-fi to carry through a six hour call home. So I had the sparky rig up a time switch for the wall-mounted electric heater - which would switch off every 40 mts and needed a remote solenoid on the other side of the site reset to restore it. It was a good way of ensuring they did the fire patrols. I thought. Until I caught one bringing in two plug-in fan heaters of his own ..

Anonymous said...

Ketch @11:24
“Ahh the rise of conspiracy theories...and the share price of Bacofoil”.

And the price of Kool-Aid for those who don’t think Macron will take advantage of a tragedy.

jack ketch said...

Raed, question for you as you know a little bit about building. Someone wrote:

"Over the next four hours, the fire burns through most of the cathedral’s ribbed roof, made up of hundreds of oak beams, some dating back to the 13th century and measuring up to 110 metres long"

Which is all good but puzzles me because I know from other fires in historic buildings that oak beams that have been curing for centuries are pretty impervious to fire. There was one famous case in the UK where fire raged in a tudor half timbered hall and when they came to rebuild it they discovered they needed only to shave off the charred 2 inches or so of those oak beams. Is French oak not so fire resistant as English?

Anonymous said...

OK, based on no personal experience of fire-watching whatsoever so maybe this is all being done anyway...

I would have thought that remote monitoring, either instead of or as a back-up to people on site would be relatively straightforward and comparatively inexpensive.

Wifi heat/smoke/light/motion sensors and CCTV linked to a central monitoring station - which may or may not cover numerous locations could compliment bodies on the ground - as well as being a check that they are actually doing their rounds.
The remote monitoring, apart from being able to alert the fire service (or police in the case of intruders) would be likely to alert on-site personnel more quickly than the occasional tour of a large site would.

Anonymous said...

Well a lot of craftsmen are going to find steady work. I give the French establishment about a week of solidarity before the knives come out. The building was owned by the state and leased to the church. They both could not agree who should maintain it and it has been underfunded, probably since the rushed 19 th Century repairs. I imagine the work was being carried out on a competitive tender and the night watchmen was away at his prayers.

The fact that 850 years of culture has gone up in smoke on Macron’s watch is a silver lining. Can you imagine if Westminster Abbey had burned down, every remainer would say it was divine intervention. Mind you our beloved PM is quite capable of ordering the Abbey burned down to show solidarity with our European partners.

RAC said...

Most fires start small. Before work even started a temporary array of smoke detectors could have been installed in the roof space, assuming there wasn't permanent one already or it was inoperative. (The Daily Meghan reports 4.50 pm GMT smoke first seen billowing from below the spire.)
Barriers, fencing etc.,are just a challenge to thieves, vandals, or just kids looking to explore.
Where were the on site security staff, or was it someone miles away watching an array of monitors?

Raedwald said...

Jack - correct; it's actually quite hard to get big timber beams of most types to burn. And what they don't teach you in building school is that in the era of carefully harvested handgehackt timber, it was harvested only at a certain time of the month during the dormant season - timber harvested at the right phase of the moon is virtually fireproof. Yes it's true and I'm serious.

I suspect the covering of timber boards under the lead - Larch or pine probably - visible in the pic - plus the usual litter of shavings, debris and nice dry litter in the crannies was more likely to have been the seat.

*anorak mode* my own roof has timber from I guess the 1500s onward - all dense, heavy, high-altitude Larch as tough as English oak. The first part of the house was built 1650-1700 and then remodelled when the mine-owner got rich and rebuilt 1750-1800. For the rebuild, old timbers were re-used, but cut back - but there are also a few massive short pieces with old mortices and of great age that were clearly 2nd hand when the house was first built. And all moon-harvested - I've tried to burn sample off cuts in the 7kW stove but it just smoulders, even ehen thrown in with some blazing beech.

*anorak mode 2*
I the UK I would have had dendro corings done - it's pretty cheap and easy. Here, it's incredibly costly and not possible. And UK labs can't date non-UK timber. But dendro is very very rough at the best of times - and sometimes the results, er, fit the theory; a great chum and drinking buddy of mine is ex-Museum of London archaeology service utterly obsessed with the Roman period. He sent some good timber samples off to the lab for dendro and got a call asking when did he think they dated from (to get them started) he replied simply "Conquest" - his OCD verbal shorthand for AD 43. Sure enough the dendro report came back

"... we are 84% certain the samples were from trees felled in the period 1035 - 1066 ..."

jack ketch said...


May not, "Fire safety teams constantly patrol the neo-gothic Palace of Westminster, which caught fire 40 times between 2008 and 2012 alone; the small fires were quickly put out by wardens".

- Anon

Of course he will, he is a politician and being French he might even do it with more panache than our own seem to manage.

jack ketch said...


*looks at the huge oak beam above his head, that some philistine painted white, and wonders if it were cut in the correct moon phase all those centuries ago....yes he is that sad* and thanks for the answer, it had genuinely puzzled me.

Craig said...

Poland was able to rebuild Warsaw, arguably, precisely because of its imposed statist regime, rather than in spite of it.

The private sector might have struggled to make its returns.

The truth isn't always convenient, but on that point we'll never know now.

Anonymous said...

Raedwald said:


The 1300 ancient oaks used in the construction of the roof were of a length no longer available today.

Nations are like trees, they take root in the land and like the acorn that grows into an oak a nation grows its heritage. Globalists are anti-nation, they poison the land with a potent mixture: uncontrolled mass immigration. Heritage is how we got here, our destiny inverted. The Globalist uses change agents to wither that heritage, because he knows demography is destiny. A nation dies where it cannot grow.


Dr Evil said...

So what happened re the rebuilding of Coventry (beautiful medieval buildings) and Birmingham in the UK then?

Fahrenheit211 said...

When I looked into this issue of the Notre Dame fire in an effort to spike the guns of the 'out there' conspiraloons who are really muddying the waters and are almost impervious to logic, I was utterly shocked by how little the French government gave to the management of Notre Dame for maintenance. It was a measly £1.7M which is just under 20% of what it costs just to keep up routine repair work and the running costs of a comparable building Westminster Abbey.

Although some out there are trying to make it look as if 'Mo did it', it seems to me that the chief blame for the conditions that caused this devastating fire may lie elsewhere. My view is that it may well have been the French Government's parsimonious attitude to funding the support of this building and maybe really bad building site practises.

Ted Treen said...

Macron's a politician: it is therefore clear that his grip on reality is tenuous, to say the least.