Easy access

Visiting the Old Country has changed in one important aspect over the years.

For his bus-commute reading, our tutor is now in the middle of Washington Irving’s Sketch Book.  It is a series of essays mostly on Irving’s visit to England. The second edition has a preface dated 1848, though the visit must have taken place twenty years or so previously: it is a window into a different time.  We could comment on many aspects of life then, but one in particular struck us: how easy it was for him to visit important and historic places.  He simply opened doors and went through them, or asked for the key in the house down the block, and wandered unescorted through Westminster Abbey or the reading room of the British Library.  Indeed, from his essays he seems to have spent a lot of time quite alone in these places.

Where such visits are even possible at all now, we’re pretty sure they cost a more than nominal fee and are strictly limited in time; mostly being carried out in escorted groups.  We’ve seen the difference in our own travels over the past decades.  Our navigator first visited Ireland during a winter many years ago (it was the only time he could get off his ship).  He remembers being quite alone in the Long Room of Trinity College in Dublin, where the Book of Kells was on display.  It was in a case under a glass cover, open to show the incredible calligraphy and decoration; the page was changed daily.  It was well worth spending a long time just looking.  He went back maybe twenty years later.  The book was in a bullet-proof case and tourists were allowed just a few minutes to scan the page as they were hustled by (a privilege that cost several euros).

Friends of his are now touring Italy, and their reports of the cathedrals of Florence have popped up on Facebook.  Each has an entrance charge now; they were free when he visited the city years ago.  In any European cathedral he had to pay a fee only if he took pictures inside, and not always then.  (He was admonished not to use the photographs for commercial purposes.)

The current restricted access is no doubt inevitable.  There are just many more people visiting the historic sites these days; some form of control had to happen.  And, alas, more people means more badly-behaved ones, some of whom think of reasons (or need none) to damage important things.  Plus, old things are expensive to keep in repair, so an entrance charge is fair.

There are alternatives.  Good reproductions, detailed images, even 3D computer models of many important items and locations are widely available; you needn’t visit the real thing to see what it looks like.  And serious researchers, with proper credentials, can no doubt get their hands on the original on their own time.

But we do lament the loss of access.  It was part of the awe of our visits to the Old Country that we could actually touch history.