Not heard of these Andy, but seems like a bit of internal politics at the National Trust.
I'm not sure they'd be behind the creeping attacks on ancient sites that seems to have ramped up recently but you never know.
As for the Daily Mail hit piece, unless they got the nod from elsewhere to run it they made the decision in-house. Bearing in mind that the editor is a follower of Jorge in the Apostolic Palace I expect they aren't too happy with the popularity (or existence) of anything pre-Nicaean, it threatens their power structure. See history for details.
Will just have to keep visiting and recording the sites we still have left while we still have them. Even if our ancestors left behind no written record (undiscovered so far) it looks like they may have left all the information they wanted to pass on to us contained in their extensive engineering projects, it's just a different kind of language : )
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road