Noting an allusion to Poussin in his book on Finlay, Nature Over Again, John Dixon Hunt suggests that in the digital era some manner of mobile phone app might enhance the stroller’s enjoyment of the garden at Little Sparta. His follow-up comment on the poor phone coverage in the area suggests an instinctive resistance to such an innovation. As mentioned, there were no road-signs in wartime Britain, and in Little Sparta too there are no signs. Its exhibits must speak (or not speak) for themselves. Nor has its history since Finlay’s death seen it appropriated by subsequent poets or turned into a Scottish Arvon centre. Who are its ideal inheritors? The world is full of ruined buildings but there are no ruined stones, observed Finlay’s ally/antagonist MacDiarmid in ‘On a Raised Beach’, but it did not take posterity to supply Finlay with ruins, its designer having taken the precaution of smashing its columns in advance. ‘The world has been empty since the Romans’, after all, as Little Sparta demonstrated more comprehensively the fuller it became. How best should posterity add to the garden and honour its self-cancelling logic at the same time? Abandonment would not be an unFinlayesque destiny for his creation. MacDiarmid’s memory might best be honoured, Norman MacCaig suggested, by a two-minute national ‘pandemonium’, but perhaps what Finlay’s needs is a strategic assault on any premature canonisation, which is to say neutering of its legacy, a fresh Battle of Little Sparta to vindicate and if necessary produce the condition of ruin and emptiness against which the garden’s glory comes most truly into its own. No medium is more violent than marble, no branch of architecture more violent than funeral masonry. Against such a backdrop the menace of Finlay’s battleships and tanks seems oddly softened, these engines of death become so many playthings spilled from the toy box of a capricious Greek god, the giant word-blocks spelling THE PRESENT ORDER IS THE DISORDER OF THE FUTURE illustrating and undoing their message where they lie.