johnnythin.bsky.social
Prehistory & landscape
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Perhaps he'd seen Millet's (or Van Gogh's) 'Diggers', and added some hats...
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He's writing at the time of transition into the military training area and says he's "ceased to frequent" the War Office land - so he was seeking out the quiet areas that were still sheepwalks. Plus his main informant was 80 at the time, so really he's writing about the (long) 19th century...
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How it went
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But as to special effects, "results are not so happy. The Selenites are grotesque but innocuous. The Grand Lunar is grandmotherly. The landscapes of the moon are too obviously canvas fakes… One misses also the note of terror & the atmosphere of unknown but inimical forces." They may have been right!
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Indeed
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Nice idea, though I suspect getting SMC to put one on a guardianship property might prove tricky!
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Some of these cities are having you on!
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"but their own feelings must be sufficient to deter them from wanton abuse." Ah, the ever-topical human remains question. We end with what feels like understatement: "These few observations may be sufficient to palliate the slight odium which has arisen against those who excavated the priory." Oops!
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"Yet such is the mortal shell—the deserted tenement—thrown off by the ever-vital soul, which takes its flight to another and, let us hope, a happier world." Where's this lofty tone going? "The living are therefore free to use these mortal remains for any purposes the arts and sciences might dictate…
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"by the superstition of the country people, who seem to have an impression that an awful denunciation awaits him who disturbs the ashes of the dead… It is a sight both awful and impressive when we behold the mouldering bones of our fellow men exhumed, particularly after an interval of centuries…
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"If our speculations are correct, that these bones are the remains of Rual de Calva, they must have lain in earth for a period of 600 years, alike defended from decomposition by the quality of the soil and the lofty walls which surround them. They have mainly been protected from previous innovation…
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"One of them appeared to be the bones of a gigantic person… They were curious, not only for their large size, but for their state of preservation, as well from the harrowing effects of sepulchral decomposition, as from the ordinary baneful irregularities incidental to the living man" [ie good teeth]
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Digging deeper, they found two skeletons "which had, to all appearance, received the proper rites of sepulture." To give the 'excavators' credit, they did spot "a square black line, evidently the decomposed shell or coffin that originally enclosed the bodies." Then it gets a bit less scientific...
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The rest of the article expands the mortuary theme, to the writer's apparent relish. Bones found close to the surface are interpreted as "remains of persons who met their death by the demolition of the building"; in one "the front of the skull was divided… as if a blow had been dealt upon the head"
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Nevertheless, the writer suggests "they marked the sepulchre of Rual de Calva, the founder… which seems to be supported by the circumstance that more than ordinary attention was paid to its ornaments." Ruald de Calna, to name him correctly, founded the priory with his wife Beatrice in the late C12.
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Accordingly the Gazette report adds little by way of fact to Brayley's summary but plenty of speculation: the work uncovered a number of letter tiles, on each of which "a Saxon letter was inlaid; and but that the whole had been disarranged in digging, a valuable inscription might have been obtained"
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The results of this earlier work, apparently carried out without permission by "several persons in the neighbourhood", were published in a pamphlet that Pearce was unable to trace, described in the Gazette as "an interesting little tract" and in 1850 by Edward Brayley as "small but garrulous".
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Not just historically but geographically alien - references and tropes that many Londoners would still get probably don't mean much to students in Kansas?
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I guess hi-vis is for the auxiliaries?
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Wikipedia records that Schuster was a difficult character whose ornithological legacy is debated; what's not in doubt is his unfortunate end in a Nazi concentration camp 20 years after his climate theory made the news
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm...
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Actually he was called Wilhelm Schuster von Forstner and he was a pastor and amateur scientist, not a professor. The report seems to have confused the Tertiary period with the last interglacial "when hippopotami wallowed in the Thames" but at least thinks it would be nice to have them back!
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How about their previous incarnation?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=iolA...
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Mount Unpleasant?
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As you can tell, I'm sceptical about much of this - but if anyone can verify any of Mr Snare's arithmetic, bubberhutching or discovery of judge-shaped flints, please do enlighten us!
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There's more: "He discovered by a minute examination of his implements that neolithic man was left-handed" and says "I executed an order for the natives in Singapore & found a large flint marked in such a way as to bear a striking resemblance to Mr Justice Lawrence. It is now in a museum at Oxford."
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"He means, 'Let's go and sink a pit, mine the flint strata and work on the slant'." Snare's skills are evident but the journalist is clearly no prehistorian: "Mr. Snare can make flint fish-hooks complete with barb and flint necklaces and bangles that would have captivated The Queen of the Iceni."
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Snare then pulls the other leg: "The stone-digger of today also uses words that cannot be found in any dictionary, however ancient. For instance, when the Flint-Knapper says to his mate, 'Let's go and bubberhutch on the sosh,' he is getting back, Mr. Snare tells me, to very near the Stone Age.
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"As he sits in his primitive hut working for Wembley [an order for the British Empire Exhibition] he counts and even holds converse with strangers—like a man of the Stone Age." As for the "neolithic arithmetic… You must take Brandon's word for it. Mr Snare explained it. I can't." None the wiser then
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"To those who think that the world is moving too fast, a talk with Mr. Fred Snare, the 'King of the Flint-Knappers', whose ancestors have been making flints since the tenth century, is a sheer delight..." In the same way as an episode of 'Would I Lie To You', perhaps?
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"Tradition traces the present-day habit of adding two and two together and making them twenty to the careless days when the ancient Briton chipped arrow heads out of the good Suffolk flint and went forth to slay his fellow creature." Has somebody seen a credulous journalist approaching?
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The longue durée...