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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Studland might be familiar to us because of Studland Bay. Which is home to "rare" eel grass and "rare" seahorses.
| The long-snouted, or spiny, seahorse (Hippocampus Guttulatus) found at Studland Bay is protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. This means it is an offence to disturb, capture, injure or kill a seahorse, or to damage or destroy their habitat. |
Quite why is a mystery, as the eel grass and the seahorses are common as muck further west in Devon and Cornwall.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Apparently the initial beaver introduction was either illicit or accidental. (In, I think, the Otter Valley in Devon. Someone was having a larf.) It was decided--for reasons unknown to me--not to remove them but to see what happened, with intense supervision but without barriers. The results were held to be beneficial generally but wildly unpopular with a few local stakeholders who had to be compensated.
That population increased by natural means--though I would think there must have been genetic complications by the time of the third generation. It was then decided to start a handful of official beaver colonies, which were unsupervised but fenced in.
Beavers were then declared 'open season' starting, as mentioned, with a deliberate release in Studland. I am not at all sure this let-'em-rip policy is a wise one but we shall see.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Where they release the wolves will be interesting to watch.
Will it be deliberate or "accidental"?
How long before we have "urban" wolves?
Should it be in Wolverhampton?
Will they cohabit with the foxes?
Will they regard the foxes and beavers as tasty snacks?
So many questions spring to mind!
Get the popcorn ready.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The same beaver source said that wolves were surprisingly widespread. Even in civilised places like Italy. We could do with a few to keep the ravening deer away from our trees which are all that stands between us and the fiery ball. That and bin collection policy in the West Midlands of course, but I shall deal with that in the TV thread.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Wolves popped up in a conversation, just a couple of days ago, with some Ridgeway walkers. I've explained this same thing to so many people over so many years I should write it down somewhere.
Here's a minimalised version. Starting with the usual and necessary explanation about all those "castles".
No, they are not castles.
Oh, they must be hill forts then.
No, they are not hill forts.
Cue the usual explanation about hilltop enclosures on trade routes, and why they are so close together, and why people wanted protected spaces, and why perhaps on one or two days in hundreds of years there might have been some skirmish between (say) native Brits and mercenary Saxons.
But you don't get to be a TV Star Historian with a series and books, just by telling people about boring ordinary life. There's got to be battles, death, rape and pillage, and blood splattered everywhere.
| Editor: Get on with it will you, the audience is getting bored |
(insert some more waffle here later and skip to the punch line)
The hilltop enclosures were enclosed spaces. Because in Neolithic times there were still wild wolves and boars roaming the countryside.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Not bad but Megalithic Empire says different. We apply our Golden AE rule: where in the well-recorded world where wild animals wander, have the human inhabitants felt the need to build hilltop enclosures?
If the answer is 'None that I can think of' we are left with TME's explanation:
1. They are nightly pit stops for people moving their animals long distances. And for markets, fairs, animal sacrifice celebrations, livestock pedigree breeding, all sorts.
2. They are not on hill-tops. Not then. Years of animal shitting, pissing and stamping have rendered their surface as proto-wattle and daub, i.e. immune from erosion, so they have been left proud from the surrounding countryside as 'hills', together with the 'ridgeways' that connect them.
3. They are not forts. They have defences sufficient to keep the animals in. Their human accompanists and the dogs accompanying them can keep the ravening beasts (and people) out.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Years of animal shitting, pissing and stamping have rendered their surface as proto-wattle and daub, i.e. immune from erosion, so they have been left proud from the surrounding countryside as 'hills', together with the 'ridgeways' that connect them. |
Nice try, but that will only account for the top six inches.
Below that is 100 feet plus of solid chalk and flint. It just doesn't work. Unless, and uniquely in the last five thousand years or so, we have negligently lost species of mammals that could shit and piss that chalk and flint.
Perhaps it was the dragons and unicorns?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Below that is 100 feet plus of solid chalk and flint. |
People are always making statements like that. There are several thousand hillforts recorded, how many of these are made from 'solid chalk and flint'? You could make a start by naming one.
Hatty and I were always running into a similar objection when we were arguing the reverse case, that various 'tors' actually were made of 'chalk and flint' or at any rate some other combination of man-made geology. On every single occasion thus far it turned out that they were made from some rare, even unique, form of natural geology.
But the muppets thought that vanquished their dragons and unicorns (aka Hatty and me).
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| We apply our Golden AE rule: where in the well-recorded world where wild animals wander, have the human inhabitants felt the need to build hilltop enclosures? |
I'm also wondering what race of man would build a hundred foot high mound of chalk and flint, round up their animals every night, take them several miles, lead them up a hundred foot hill, to an enclosure that any predator would have hopped over in seconds in order to protect them from predators. And do it several thousand times.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | People are always making statements like that. There are several thousand hillforts recorded, how many of these are made from 'solid chalk and flint'? You could make a start by naming one. |
Barbary Castle.
While assisting with an event, it was necessary to put a post in the ground. Normally, a fork and shovel would be sufficient to dig down twelve inches, enough for concreting in a post.
Unfortunately, said fork would only go abut three inches into the ground. Before it hit solid chalk. Ironically as hard as the concrete we want to put there. A pickaxe had to be found to make any progress, smashing our way through the solid chalk, to get to the required twelve inches deep.
Of course, some hand-waving person might argue that in all of the hillforts in all of England, on that day we had found the only square foot in all of that one hillfort that had solid chalk underneath it.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Borry, you're raving. You stuck your pickaxe into a perfectly ordinary piece of south British geology. Since that chalk has been there since the last Ice Age, Barbary Castle would not be a hill if that chalk had been subjected to, say, five thousand years of south British rain. It would look exactly like all the lowlying land around it. It would be that lowlying land.
It isn't, because it hasn't. It's been protected by its Barbary animaloid carapace all that time so that five thousand years later a Mr A Boreades could plunge his dagger into the heart of it. They still sing about it in Wiltshire
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said, "What a good boy am I!"
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