And its only £24,500, a paltry amount compared with the whole budget. For instance, we probably spend twice that per year on bolstering the legal right of Wiltshire's 300 detectorists to carry on doing what they do.
(Sorry. I'll try not to mention it again).

I read the news item Moss posted around 4am this morning and spent between 4 and 7 writing emails to the powers that be. I'm 200 miles away watching money get poured all over 'Capital of Culture 2008' (mostly spent on lots of ad-banner wraps on derelict buildings - nice), and at the other end of the country the finest prehistory collections I ever seen could be closed for want of ..not very much. All very alarming.

Just to say the Wiltshire Heritage Museum (Devizes) has been given the money after all, but for this year only it seems. From next year they have to fend for themselves in which case at current rates they have 14 years left at at most, more like 12, perhaps 10.

A Cambridge Prof told me this happened in America and the board simply closed the museum with the result that funding was reinstated 3 months later.

At Devizes, where the collection nationally and internationally famed : there is the Bush Barrow Gold collection, John Britton's library (and Celtic cabinet - wow! wow! wow!), and more Avebury artefacts than Avebury AK museum; you would think it would be supported more by the state as the county and the district council are under such strains to cut budgets.

I think we need to rethink what it is we want from museums and heritage, for example I have said for a long time that this collection would be better housed at Stonehenge leaving the Devizes building to be a local museum, library of the Wiltshire Archaeological Society and their HQ. But the average membership would throw their false teeth at me if I suggest it at the agm.

VBB