Whilst I've nothing against the National Trust per se, I do question the time, effort and money put into preserving "stately homes", those often quite hideous buildings (is neo-classical really true English vernacular style?) that stand as monuments to misery and edifices of oppression; built by landowners who were the beneficiaries of the enclosures, which deprived a whole class of society of the means to live independent, if hard, lives and forced them to become wage-slaves of the very people who had deprived them of their livelihoods (and, in the process, drove John Clare mad). Surely, it would be better to allow these redundant buildings to become ruins and watch them fall apart and rot along with the over-privileged class that built them and the wastrel monarchy that is the backbone of a defunct and discredited social system.