The Past brought to Life
This is a poem which is ‘printed’ on the side of the Scottish Parliament.
by Hugh MacDiarmid
But Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream
Fitful and dark,
Unseizable in Leith
And wildered by the Forth,
But irresistibly at last
Cleaving to sombre heights
Of passionate imagining
Till stonily,
From soaring battlements,
Earth eyes Eternity
Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978)
Following my post where I introduced the story of Henry Ford and his visits to Broadway; my subscriber from Paris sent me details that led me to a really comprehensive description of Ford’s activities in the Cotswolds. He loved it so much, as the post from the Henry Ford Museum reveals, that he sent to the US not only a complete Cottage, but also the Barn, Stables and dry stone walling. He then went to stay in the Lygon Arms in Broadway; visited nearby Snowshill, where a dilapidated Blacksmith Shop dating to the 1600s with all its tools was purchased and sent to the Museum in Michigan.
Here is the post – it has lots of interesting photos.
And here is my post that introduced the subject:
Salon IF reported a shocking destruction in France – this is the report, verbatim from Salon IF issue 514.
Dozens of standing stones, erected over 7,000 years ago, have been demolished to make way for a DIY store near Carnac, in Brittany, in North West France. Some 37 stones, measuring between 0.5 – 1.5m tall, were removed despite the fact the site had long been on France’s National Archaeological Map. The stones, moreover, had been submitted to the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites (although the application had not yet been approved).
The region of Carnac is famous for its ancient ‘menhir’ – heavy, raised standing stones. Indeed, the area is often described as ‘the French Stonehenge’, with over 3,000 stone megaliths at the two sites of Menec and Kermario. There, the stone columns are arranged in long, straight rows and, according to the Carnac Tourist Office, it is the largest gathering of this type of standing stone in the world.
The land at the centre of the recent controversy, along the Montauban activity zone, had been granted a building permit by the local mayor’s office in August 2022 and construction of the new store, ‘Mr Bricolage’, was already underway. According to local amateur archaeologist, Christian Obeltz, who had originally raised concerns about the ‘brutal developments’, a bulldozer destroyed the stones overnight.
The Regional Office of Cultural Affairs for Brittany, the body responsible for the protection of the monument, said ‘Given the uncertain and in any case non-major character of the remains, as revealed by
checks, damage to a site of archaeological value has not been established’, but Obeltz maintains that archaeological investigation into the area had not been sufficient.
‘The Chemin de Montauban site included two intersecting rows of small granite stelae, each spreading out over fifty meters in length. One had been exactly in its original place for 7,000 years,’ according to Obletz. ‘The small menhirs of the Chemin de Montauban were undoubtedly one of the oldest sets of stelae in the town of Carnac’ believed to date between 5480 and 5320 BC, ‘the highest dating obtained for a menhir in the west of France’.
The Sir John Soane Museum is my second favourite London Museum. It’s the place I choose to take people who don’t know London. What I like about it is the atmosphere. It’s not a place I go because of the collection, it’s a place I go because I’m just awestruck when I enter the doors.
Architect Soane, made a Museum of his house, filling it with architectural and sculptural pieces but also some stupendous Art, particularly paintings by William Hogarth. But that isn’t my motivation to keep going back. It’s the Picture Room (and the domed ceilings). Soane had a great collection of paintings, but not enough walls. What he did was to design the Paintings Room. When you visit you go in, admire the paintings on the wall, and the attendant comes in, opens a shutter, and behind the great paintings are another wall of great paintings. And then he opens another set of shutters, and there, is another feast for your eyes.
Now, they have made high quality digital images of the rooms, and put them together using photogrammetry into a digital model which you can explore.
So, feast your eyes on it here: (choose Picture Room from the three options).
It’s not quite as user-friendly as it might be. Firstly, when the tour delivers you to the Picture Room, you have to take over control to go in and explore the 360 degree image of the room. Unfortunately, the pictures are not clickable, so you cannot get information about them from here. Also, the ‘hot spots’ which allow you to open the shutters, only reveal themselves, on my computer, if you approach them at a certain angle.
But don’t let this put you off, I’m sure you will find your way around. So go into the Room, look around, move the cursus, and you will see little signs pop up which open and close the shutters. Really, do try it! There are a couple of other rooms to explore too.
Here is a link to descriptions of the Picture Room and the paintings.
Oh, and the Dome Ceilings? Soane was a specialist in buildings that didn’t want windows in normal places. He was the architect of the Bank of England where windows in the walls were a security risk, and also of London’s first purpose built art gallery – the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Windows reduced the space for paintings, so he designed special low domed ceilings, and the Soane Museum is full of his experimentation in the form.
Scara Brae Three D Model
Another delight is the 3D model of Scara Brae which allows you to explore the Neolithic village, and walk around it. There are labels on this one, so you do get information too.
360 Degree Panorama Virtual Tours. My part in their development.
I was an early adopter of this form of virtual reality, setting up virtual tours of the Old Operating Theatre Museum in the 1990’s. I have a draft post of this which I have been awaiting time to finish, which I hope to finish soon….
Thanks to the Museum’s Journal article on Photogrametry of May/June 2022 for the two examples above.
It’s bad luck to buy, make or use a new broom in May because:
Sweep with a broom that is cut in May
You’ll sweep the head of the house away.
But you can give good luck to a friend by leaving a branch of hawthorn flowers on the doorstep. But other woody messages were not so friendly according to traditional verses:
Alder for a scrowler; pear for the fair
Nut for a Slut; plum for the glum
Bramble if she ramble; gorse for the whores
It is basically rhyming slang, so no great wisdom involved, also I’m not sure quite how some of the rhymes work, and it does seem rather at the expense of women.
It was, probably, mid 70s when I came across this book and, I think I can say, it had a lasting effect on my opinions. The book is about many things, but what it did for me was introduce sustainable development and the beauty of small scale innovation. Schumacher believed that resources were limited, that pollution represents an ever-increasing danger to society, and that appropriate scale innovation offered the best hope to create a fairer world.
He helped set up ‘the Intermediate Technology Development Group’, but found a better title in ‘Small is Beautiful’ for his book outlining his philosophy. ITDG became Practical Action, which is a charity that works around the world finding innovative solutions to real world problems.
To see Schumacher’s legacy have a look at the Practical Action web site or follow this link to see what it is doing, for example, in promoting ‘regenerative agriculture.’
I donate regularly, and maybe you might enjoy reading positive stories of human ingenuity in action around the world.
A study of the Stone of Destiny, the Stone of Scone, the Coronation Stone, has revealed new information. Firstly, it has some markings which look like three X’s and something like a V – perhaps Roman Numerals or more likely, crosses.
The Stone also revealed traces of copper alloy showing that a metal object had been attached to the Stone for a considerable time. The most obvious suggestion would be a relic associated with a Saint, and a Bell is one possibility.
Traces of gypsum suggested someone sometime made a plaster copy of the stone. No one knows when or why, and it has not been found.
Historic Environment, Scotland has released this fascinating 3-D scan of the stone for the public to view – it is annotated too.
You can read more at the links below, and thank you to Jean Kelly of the Britarch mailing list for alerting me to this.
Hidden symbols and ‘anomalies’ (Live Science)
Cutting-edge digital technologies (Historic Environment Scotland)
The Stone has been moved from its permanent home at Edinburgh Castle for the first time since 1996, to be placed under the Coronation Chair for Charles’s May 6 Coronation at Westminster Abbey.
The Stone was kept at Scone before it was stolen by Edward 1 of England, who placed it under the Coronation Chair, at Westminster, to sanctify English Kings and to make the point that he was the overlord of the Scottish. In the 1950’s Scottish students stole it back, hid it for a few weeks and then left it at Arbroath Abbey. They did this because the so-called Declaration of Arbroath (1320) is a letter to the Pope asking for his endorsement of Scotland’s claim to be independent of England. The Pope agreed.
The Stone was recovered from Arbroath taken back to Westminster. The Labour Party under Tony Blair, granted Scotland back their own Parliament and as a symbol of their regained independence, the Stone of Destiny was taken back to Scotland.
To my mind it should be in Scone, which is where Macbeth and most other Scottish Kings were crowned, but perhaps they thought it should be in the Capital and in the safety of the Castle. At Scone, the Stone was placed on a mound of earth which was said to be made up of the dust from the feet of those attending Coronations symbolising the consent of all of Scotland for the new King.
I went to New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon to see the First Folio Exhibition on the anniversary of its publication in 1623. It was a very small exhibition, and, at first sight quite disappointing. Almost everything in it I had seen before. But, I came away quite excited, because it had a much better explanation of the Signet Ring than the one in its previous display.
In 1810 someone found this gold ring in field near the Holy Trinity Church where Shakespeare was baptised and buried. It has a lover’s knot and the initials WS. It could ofcourse be anyone’s with those initials. But it certainly excited comment at the time as the display makes clear:
I did not know about the ring until New Place was refurbished a few years ago and the ring went on display. The new display gives more of an explanation as well as the delightful quotation above from Hayden to Keats.
Michael Wood suggested that Shakespeare might have lost the ring on the occassion of his daughter, Judith’s, marriage to Thomas Quiney in February 1616. Shakespeare made his Will a month later, and it is marked by three of his signatures. The Will says ‘whereof I have hereunto put my seale’. The word seale has been crossed out and the word ‘hand’ put in in its stead. So, he was intending to seale his approval of the Will, but changed his mind and put his signature instead? Why? Because he had recently lost his seal ring? Shakespeare died a month or so later.
Judith was the twin of Hamnet who died at age 11 and the Church has recently planted a couple of trees as a memorial to the twins, who are not buried, like their older sister, Suzanna, next to their mum and dad by the altar in the Church. Judith’s husband was a bit of a rogue, as he was called to the Bawdy Court and accused of debauchery with a local women who he made pregnant, and who died in childbirth. He is not mentioned in the Will.
But Shakespeare did leave money in his will to buy gold rings for his fellow actors, John Heminges and William Condell, who are buried in St Mary Aldermanbury in London. They outlived Shakespeare and collected his plays together in the First Folio. A Remembrance Ring is also in the display.
The other main item in the display is this tiny 7.8 cm high notebook in which its unknown owner copied out his favourite quotes from the First Folio. It contains material from all 38 plays, and internal evidence shows it must have been made from the First Folio. It is about the size of the minature books the Brontes made. The tiny writing of the book must have been written with a quill from a small bird.
The display shows that a lot can be made of a few objects, if they are well chosen and with an excellent explanation.
By the way the rings and the Folio are clear evidence that Shakespeare wrote the plays as his friends put together his plays in a volume with introductory information which makes it absolutely clear he wrote them. Also in the Church the memorial to Shakespeare compares him to King Nestor in judgement, Socrates in wisdom, and Virgil in art. Nothing can be clearer, and why people continue to say Shakespeare was simply an actor who copied out the plays is beyond me.
I’m with a group touring the UK. Haven’t much time to post but saw this interesting object in the British Museum. It is a housepost from a Latmul people’s male Cult House.
These are long houses up to 120 ft long, in two floors with mighty gables and carved posts.
Last year on the 18th April I led a Chaucer’s London Walk in the morning and a Canterbury Tales Virtual Pilgrimage in the evening. I chose the day is it was the closest to the 18th April which is when Chaucer’s pilgrims leave London to ride to Canterbury.
At the beginning of the prologue, he gives clues as to the date. They go when April showers and Zephyrus’s wind is causing sap to rise in plants, engendering flowers, and when Aries course across the sky is half run.
The pilgrims are accompanied by Harry Bailly who is the landlord of the Tabard Inn in Southwark and was a real person and a fellow Member of Parliament of Chaucer.
He is jolly and quite knowledgeable and in the Man of Laws prologue we get a glimpse of Harry time telling in the days before clocks.
Chaucer mentions ‘artificial day’ and this is a reference to the way days were divided into hours. There were twelve hours in the daylight part of the day, and twelve hours in the dark night. So in the winter daylight hours were short, and in the summer long.
Romans used water clocks, King Alfred used candles marked into hours and Harry Bailly knows how to tell the time by the height of the Sun. Harry tells the pilgrims it’s about time they got underway. Here is an extract:
Essentially, he is telling the time by the length of the shadows. The illustration of the mass clock at Jane Austen’s Church at Steventon is another example of how the sun can be used easily to tell time.
The first mass clock I noticed was at the church in Kent which Dickens used for Great Expectations, where Pip’s brothers and sisters were buried. Once you find one mass clock, you suddenly discover them everywhere!
Telling the time, before mechanical clocks, was not complicated. The basic unit is the day and the night, and we can all tell when the dawn has broken. The Moon provides another simple unit of time. The month’s orbit around the Earth is roughly every 29 days and the new, the crescents and full moons provide a quartering of the month. For longer units, the Earth orbits around the Sun on a yearly basic, but divided into four, the winter solstice; the spring equinox, the summer solstice and the autumn equinox.
But there were other ways of marking days in the calendar, with natural time markers marked by, for example, migrating birds, lambing, and any number of budding and flowering plants such as daffodils and elm leaves:
When the Elmen leaf is as big as a mouse’s ear,
Then to sow barley never fear;
When the Elmen leaf is as big as an ox’s eye,
Then says I, ‘Hie, boys” Hie!’
When elm leaves are as big as a shilling,
Plant, kidney beans, if to plant ’em you’re willing;
When elm leaves are as big as a penny,
You must plant kidney beans if you mean to have any.’
In my north-facing garden, I have my very own solar time marker. All through the winter, the sun never shines directly on my garden. Spring comes appreciably later than the front car park which is a sun trap. But in early April, just after 12 o’clock the sun peeks over the block of flats to the south of me, finds a gap between my building and the converted warehouse next door and for a short window of time a shaft of a sunbeam brings a belated and welcome spring.