Sir - Your excellent editorial (November 30) suggests possibilities for the endangered Cogges Manor Farm Museum.

Oxfordshire County Council cuts are also threatening another precious cultural asset.

The Victoria County History (VCH) provides the basic source-material for understanding the history, landscape and distinctive local culture of Oxfordshire. Its volumes are the starting-point for everyone - professional and amateur historians, planners, school-children, ordinary people interested in their localities, houses or families - who need to find out about these things. Web access and outreach activities are helping to make this work even more easily available.

The Oxfordshire office, built up over many years with help from numerous funding partners, is the most active and successful VCH office in England. Its work is done by a small team of dedicated specialists with minimal back-up, and there is absolutely no administrative slack.

Now a group on the county council wants to torpedo it for a trivial saving.

They claim to prioritize the quality of life, activity and mental engagement of higher age groups: what sense then does it make to dismantle both one of the main visitor attractions in the county, and the organization that provides the basic seed-corn for some of its most popular retirement activities?

An inflexible determination to cut costs across the board has, in the case of heritage services, led to a deeply-flawed conclusion.

These facilities, so fundamentally life-enhancing to so many people in Oxfordshire, have been starved of funds for decades.

The lesson to draw is not that they should go on being squeezed to the point of disablement, but that they should be protected and enhanced.

Professor John Blair, The Queen's College, Oxford