Again and again, beautiful old buildings have been torn down or allowed to fall to ruin.
Get in the sea – should we allow coastal heritage sites to fall to ruin?
This is why there are still ravens at the Tower, and why there is an abiding belief that if ever they leave, the kingdom will fall to ruin.
But, of course, faces like that are magnets for all manner of trials and troubles, and in the silent movie "Seven Chances" Keaton, who also directs, plays a lowly businessman whose firm will fall to ruin unless he can raise a lot of cash quickly.
Renters of may become first-time homeowners of the house they already live in, prospective small-business owners may secure a storefront for their new company, investors from New York to China may find an investment opportunity in the Detroit renaissance, a family may lose their childhood home only to have it fall to ruin.
Actually, the latter is rather sinister; towns have fallen to ruins, roads into disrepair, fertile fields have returned to wilderness, wild beasts and evil beings on the prowl, and travel is difficult and dangerous.
The most famous (or, given the deep aubergine hue of the author's prose, perhaps infamous) of all Pompeii novels is Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "Last Days of Pompeii," first published in 1834, a book whose villain is a devotee of the exotic cult of Isis (the New Age religion of its time), and whose two main characters convert to Christianity as their city falls to ruins around them.
It's not just that a hangover cure could cause society to falls to ruins because we'd all be drunk, but that the only people who wouldn't be drunk would be psychopaths.
Without proper upkeep, many missions fell to ruin.
