Being England, I hesitate to call this new crowd 'mates', but I did make their acquaintance. Some were exalted:
Some were not:
I wouldn't trust this one down a dark alley:
But each of them reminded me that there had been people here before me, not just those commemorated in stone, but the craftsmen who had built up the skill, over years of steady, patient work, to shape these often unnoticed portraits of the great and the good. In those days, things were not made in Mordor, although no doubt, in the absence of a health and safety 'framework', the odd sculptor fell off his ladder from time to time: