Photo-a-Day  (Saturday, 19th September, 2015)

Good photo, but who or what are the Diggers, I've never heard of them.

Ken.
The Diggers ‘nickname’ came from their belief that the land should be available to every person to dig and sow, so that everyone, rich or poor, could live, grow and eat by the sweat of their own brows, as according to them “The earth was made to be a common treasury for all.”
THE DIGGERS also advocated absolute human equality including equality between men and women which in the 1600s was a very radical idea indeed.

Instead of simply voicing their opinion through the books and other papers GERRARD WINSTANLEY(born in Wgan) wrote, he and THE DIGGERS, who consisted of mainly poor families that had no land of their own (as land was only owned by the rich) decided to take direct action by taking over common land that belonged to no one, and which was not in use, and started to farm it, so as to allow everyone who worked the land to eat..
At first this went well, but unsurprisingly the ideas of THE DIGGERS were considered extremely dangerous by those with a vested interest in the preservation of privilege, property and power..
A plaque is to be placed in the area near Wiend ,and to be renamed The Gerrard Winstanley Gardens.

How boring!

The Diggers were a movement at the time of the English Civil war supporting the Parliament side. One of their key sayings was "When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was a Gentleman". In other words (if you believe in it) when God created the world we all worked with our hands and were equal, Adam "delved" ie dug the soil for crops and Eve "span" or spun ie made cloth. The point was that "in the beginning there was no aristocracy or landowners. As you can imagine this did not go down well wither with the Kings side (aristocrats) or with the Parliamentary side most of whom like Oliver Cromwell were yeomen farmers (landowners) or merchants.

If they are celebrating digging why dont they bring some spades and tidy up some neglected areas and footpaths, instead of drinking ale and listening to loud music

For once I find myself agreeing with Garry.