This week, two years after Martha was reinstated, she’s been smashed off her wooden plinth. Photograph: BCA View image in fullscreen This week, two years after Martha was reinstated, she’s been smashed off her wooden plinth. Photograph: BCA Country diary Rural affairs Country diary: Martha, a tribute to Buxton’s miners, has been knocked off her plinth. Why? Buxton, Derbyshire: Acts of vandalism are not unusual. Have we normalised the destruction of ‘common ground’?
Mark Cocker Tue 4 Aug 2026 06.30 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google O ur town is blessed to have the Buxton Civic Association, a charity devoted to the built and natural environment. It owns and manages, for wildlife and people, almost all our important woods, including Grin Low, which was a historically important area for lime‑burning. To celebrate that industry, the civic society commissioned wooden sculptures – Charlie, then Martha – to highlight the important work done by miners in uplifting the fertility of Derbyshire’s farmland.
Martha’s origins are bittersweet. She was created out of a groundswell of public outrage and generosity when Charlie was vandalised in 2021. In quick order, the same nihilism was visited on Martha after her installation: she was daubed with swastikas and her eyes gouged out. The sculptor, Lorraine Botterill, repaired the damage, but this week, two years after Martha had been reinstated, she’s been smashed off her wooden plinth.
Last week, the charity Hurst Farm, working on the outskirts of Matlock, suffered similar desecration. Their youth volunteers, aged between 11 and 14, had just put the finishing touches to a beautiful bird hide with wicker walls. These were promptly booted in and the broken weave ripped out.
“What is wrong with people” is a constant refrain on social media after such events are publicised. I’m yet to speak to anyone with convincing answers. One assumes the act is meant to cause distress, but does it, like some graffiti – including what we now consider the artworks of Banksy – carry a political message? It’s exceptionally basic if there is one.
View image in fullscreen We slaughter hen harriers (pictured) or goshawks to pursue driven-grouse or pheasant shooting. Photograph: RSPB/PA What I take away is that we have normalised so much destruction of what we can call “common ground”. Anything not deliberately, overtly owned is fair game for anything and anyone. We shit on our footpaths to the top of Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa). We slaughter hen harriers or goshawks to pursue driven-grouse or pheasant shooting. We spray our pavements with carcinogenic herbicides – poisons openly sold on every DIY store shelf.
The symbolic slaughter of Martha reminds me that in the 1930s boys burned down the Betty Kenny yew (which grew not far from Hurst Farm). She was possibly 2,000 years old and certainly the most revered Derbyshire citizen then in existence.
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