By James Cormick
The Ashokan Pillar is up and running again. Well, not exactly running, but reconstructed and in a different place: further forward than before and easier to see and circumambulate. It was made for us in 1996, in memory of Sir Harold Bailey, one of our founding trustees, who had died earlier that year, by Professor Ulf Hegewald of the University of Aachen in Germany. He is now retired, but during his career as a teacher of design he also established a reputation as a creator of red brick sculptures for open spaces like parks and gardens. We have another earlier sculpture of his in the garden in the shape of a curved wall, with each brick coded by a series of dots enabling us to take it apart and re-assemble it with confidence, should we care to do so.
The reconstruction of the pillar – which we had to dismantle after Storm Eunice in early 2022 brought down a huge Leylandii close to it – was a specialist job. We were fortunate to find Kim Meredew, a stone carver based in Suffolk, who has put it back together and anchored it to the ground wonderfully.

The inscription on the Ashokan Pillar was chosen by Anna Chaudhri (née Butler) who was then a PhD student at Cambridge University. It is in Ossetic, the Iranian language spoken by the inhabitants of Ossetia in the Caucasus, and is a poem by the celebrated poet Xetӕgkaty K’osta. It begins (in translation) ‘Farewell! You are free from our cares – May you never more have any at all!’ – a fitting valediction for Sir Harold, in one of the languages he was particularly interested in.
The pillar has aroused some local interest recently through its inclusion in the guide book Walking Cambridge by Andrew Kershman (first published by Metro Publications in 2020, revised 2022) and we are pleased that anyone following the tour in the book can now see it intact again.