Construction site accident and the Celtic monument

The weekend before last I had the good fortune to stumble upon a site of potentially significant archaeological interest - literally. I was visiting an idealist friend in South West Wales; he's trying to build an eco-friendly "community" and needs as many pairs of hands - even realist ones - as he can muster so that he can build "horse poo huts" and such-like. Anyway, I was assisting in preparing the foundations for one of these huts when I suffered a construction site accident; tripping over a seemingly ordinary piece of jutting stone and spraining my finger in a sudden and unplanned descent.

Whereas my impulse was to kick the thing while uttering a pained expletive, and perhaps suffer further personal injury, one of the rather more spiritually enlightened members of the team muttered something about the offending stone being an "interesting shape" and proceeded to dig around it.

After around a couple of hours careful digging we managed to unearth the thing before summoning a local "archaeological expert" who managed to clean it with the consideration it clearly deserved. Although we could make out that its girth had been slimmed by the pressures of time, it was obvious that upright it would have stood at around five feet tall; it was totemic and brilliant and immediately inspired a great deal of awestruck reflection. Whatever the case, there was no doubt that it was very very old, ancient even, and that in all probability ours were the first human eyes to see it in quite a number of generations.

I had to return to London the following day - as ever my job in the no win, no fee office calls me - so don't yet know what's happened with the stone. As far as I could gather from the local expert, the complex and interwoven patterns on it are some kind of Celtic symbol, denoting what I don't know. As the community is far away from phone signals and phone lines I'm unlikely to find out any time soon.

At the time however, I did speculate that it might be the work of a Celtic soothsayer and offer a prescient warning such as Future generations: be warned, ancient construction site accident risk. The joke was received lukewarmly, not only because it was bad, but also because it was never likely to appeal to a lot of very serious and spiritually preoccupied new age hippies.

And, never able to quite cast off my professional hat, I did wonder aloud who might have been liable had I suffered a significant injury. "What would a personal injury solicitor make of it?" I asked.

"Would I have to make a time-travelling construction site accident claim or would you..." I asked my friend "...be considered liable?"

He replied that it would not be in the spirit of the community to talk of solicitors or liability, because, as a community, they would ensure I received "just compensation".

Just compensation? Perhaps idealists and realists are not so different after all.


Can I claim?