Comments on Walking Ancient Landscapes (British History)

[Mick Harper]

A made-up (by me) name of a publishing house. The original THOBR was self-published but I wanted to disguise the fact. Would you read a self-published book?

[Ishmael]

[Rocky]

I finished the second half of Chapter 6. No real complaints. Just one minor thing. I thought that the section named "Au Revoir" was the last. But then the "Reading the Megalithic Landscape" section comes after it, and my first impression was that this section had been misplaced.

Is your publisher going to let you keep the THOBR stuff in this section?

Also, what about this:

[Mick Harper]

All this extravagant stuff is due for the chop. It will be reinstated when the new, spare, brutalist version is rejected in its turn. And so the Wheel of Revisionism turns.

[Rocky]

How are you going to market the book? Do you send the book yourselves to newspapers for review? What if you want to get on one of those morning shows? Do you call them up yourselves, or is your publisher going to do that for you?

[Mick Harper]

The first step is to persuade somebody to read it. This is called "getting past the cleaner" since all writers suffer from the sure and certain knowledge that they would be wholly successful were it not for their manuscript being binned in error on the morning of its arrival at the publisher's.

If it passes this test, however, one's book actually ends up on the Unsolicited Manuscript shelf where it moulders for some years until a cleaner is told to bin the lot when the publisher is sold to Rupert Murdoch or somebody else who demands the place show a profit.

At this point, a literary dustman whose brother-in-law works on the Oprah Winfrey Show stumbles across the manuscript, reads it with growing astonishment and then throws it onto the landfill out of sheer jealousy.

Only for this blackbacked gull to swoop down....

[Hatty]

The Lapps have become a footnote. This is no reflection on their status but puts them in the context of reindeer which undoubtedly have the aaah factor for walkers (they always get excited when they spot a common-or-garden deer on walks).

[Mick Harper]

I am just about to say that St Michael is important because he uniquely combines both dragons and angels (he fights one and is the leader of the other). Is this true? Can anyone come up with any other personage who does this?

[Hatty]

The angel-dragon link is very good, angels being sort of divine but not ranked as gods which exactly describes Hermes' position as a (purported) son of Zeus but not officially one of the Olympians.

The wings are the give-away, making the Michael-Hermes nexus as clear as a swan's reflection (it only just occurred to me that by dint of its curved neck it's always looking at itself)

[Ishmael]

The St. Michael line is a straight line. It is the longest straight line that can be drawn from one side of England to the other. This is precisely the line we would expect were it drawn by travelers who wished to minimize total travel time over land but reduce even further the travel time over water. The goal is to get from point A to point B (both of which lie outside of the UK) as directly as possible but while spending most of that time on dry ground.

This concern might well explain why Giza lies at the convergence of longitudes and latitudes that cross the maximum amount of land: Somehow, Giza serves as a base marker for overland, dead-reckoning navigation by the pole-star; follow those lines and you'll circle the Earth while spending the least amount of time at sea.

What these lines of navigation have in common is not their orientation: The St. Michael line is angled with respect to longitude and latitude. What they have in common is their straightness. Today, we call a straight navigation route a street -- which is obviously cognate with straight. These lines are streets: The original streets.

Now here's an interesting aspect of language on which to reflect: Depending on the language, the order of noun and adjective changes; in some languages, one says 'red apple' while in others, one says 'apple red'. So what we call the Michael Line others might call the Line Michael: But of course the name ought to be written as Michael Street, which they might call Street Michael.

And how do we abbreviate Street?

Why the exact same way we abbreviate Saint!

'St.'

So Michael St. becomes St. Michael.

[Ishmael]

Some interesting observations:

If we follow the St. Michael line we end up somewhere in the Caribbean -- said to be the landing spot of the legendary Christopher Columbus. I've yet to plot the line precisely but someone should. The location is absolutely chock full of "Street" names.

Directly across the Atlantic in Newfoundland, we find the phenomenon continues: The longest, straight land route across the Avalon Peninsula runs from John's Street to Bride's Street (St. John's to St. Brides).

Or you can take a more southerly route from John's Street to Shott's Street directly through the Avalon Wilderness Reserve.

Did anyone ever walk these streets?

My thesis says yes... but anyone who ever tried it would say, "No". Those streets certainly ain't paved!

[Ishmael]

So... shall we bet that there is a relationship between Streets and Angles? As in straight lines and angels? As in Saints and Angels?

LOL!

Too obvious....

(And people wonder why I question received history...)

[Ishmael]

Of course, Fransico Street was a location that interested me right from the start.

One thing I've noticed: A line drawn from San Francisco directly between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior terminates somewhere around Indian Tickle Labrador. I wasn't able to find any street names in that location but it's the bulgiest part of Labrador and I'm willing to bet that particular line is the longest east-west one possible in North America.

Anyone like to prove me wrong?

[Ishmael]

I said this years ago...

...but England's name is HENGE-LAND.

The HENGES, or 'Enges, are the same as Angles, Anglos and English. Angles are places where straight lines converge!

The convergence points may be older than their markers!

[Rocky]

It might be worth it to have a short section explaining how British megalithia connects up to European megalithia. I know there was a caption for a picture somewhere at the beginning of the book about this, but it might be worth it to have a small section about this somewhere near the end of the book.

I don't mean something oblique, but a practical description of how British tin got to Paris or Rome or wherever.