Petrified Unrest

It's certainly a very strange tangle of tales with an unexpected possible antecedent and literary echoes. Curious, indeed...

Photo of a yellow sun setting towards a calm sea and bathing the foreground green field with two standing stones in a golden light. Between the two standing stones there is a fallen or recumbent stone. The sky above the sun is blue and a distant hill burns an autumnal russet colour. The standing stone that takes up nearly half of the picture is covered in patches of white lichen and has a sinuous line that marks the edge between a stone face that is flat and a face that isn’t.

…and another photo of this stone with the rest of the stone row (towards sunset this evening) #StandingStoneSunday

An angular but smooth tall standing stone, grey- but covered in patches of calico-and mustard-coloured lichens, stands amidst a clump of Juncus rushes in a pile of grey cobbles. The green grass beyond sweeps away to more yellowing rushes and then drops away to the calm blue of Cardigan Bay. Beyond, the distant purple mountains of the Lleyn Peninsula form a thin strip below a yellowing sky preparing for sunset.

Tallest stone of the Waen Oer stone row looking out over Cardigan Bay to the distant mountains of the Lleyn Peninsula. An odd-shaped stone with odd cigar-shaped natural markings for #StandingStoneSunday

Finnegans Wake/Nakshi Kantha Credit: Niaz Zaman, The Art of Kantha Embroidery (1995), 93. 1. For all his openness to the unpredictable, James Joyce could never have imagined that the word ‘googling’, one of many he…

"Maass! But the majik wavus has elfun anon meshes.
And Simba the Slayer of his Oga is slewd" (FW 203).
‘maji’, ‘wavu’, ‘elfu’, and ‘simba’ are all Kiswahili words, meaning, respectively, water, net, a thousand, and lion/warrior - elfun anon becomes 1001
artefactsofwriting.com/2020/10/10/f...

A black and whte photograph showing a shepherd and his dog, in mid-1901, standing in the middle of a trackway that crosses the photo from centre left to bottom right. Scattered around on the grass either side of the track are numerous grazing sheep. THe landscape beyond is open pasture with a couple of plantations of trees on the slightly higher ground in the distance. Clarissa Miles' photos of Detmar Blow and WIlliam Gowland's work at Stonehenge in 1901 were included in both of their reports. Those photos have been republished many times since, often without crediting the photographer. Sets of her photos exist in various archives, including WIltshire Museum, Devizes, and the National Record Office at Kew. In the latter, each print is attached to a copyright declaration form submitted in Clarissa Miles' name.

For #StandingStoneSunday, I was going to post one of Clarissa Miles' photos from Stonehenge in 1901. She was the photographer during architect Detmar Blow's operation to straighten Stone 56, and William Gowland's excavations, but instead, here's a passing shepherd and his sheep on the (1/2)

Kate Bush Cloudbusting single cover. A person sat at a machine pointed at the sky.

'For all its apparent celebration, the narrative of ‘Cloudbusting’ recounts the repression of utopianism: #WilhelmReich would die in prison within a year of his arrest, his machines destroyed and writings burned by the US government'

#KateBush’s Hounds Of Love, 40 Years On

buff.ly/B1GSAn1

#HillfortsWednesday
Castell Henllys is an archaeological site near Nevern in north Pembrokeshire, #Wales. The Iron Age hillfort has been the subject of an ongoing excavation since the start of the 21st century, accompanied by an exercise in reconstruction
#Archaeology #History

Idbury Hill and the Quest for the Miraculous Very few people would fail to feel, on hearing the rustling of leaves, that the leaves are speaking to us, that there is something like a language of nature, that we are the only ones who cannot un…

Taking heart from this, they carried on through the snow until they reached a farm near Stow where a farmer allowed them to lodge for Christmas charity. ‘The Christmas bells were ringing and the snow stopped, and the little white Kit-Cat was gone’
thegrammarofmatter.wordpress.com/2025/09/13/i...

Spotted this first edition today

Thank you for that recommendation... It sounds like a good place to start!

My knowledge of both is patchy, but Hinton Ampner has in the past vied with Borley as the most haunted in England. I heard, when the old HA house was demolished, a casket with the remains of a baby was found under the floor. Implications of infanticide with other crosscurrents, colonialism included

Nice little pebble feature at work

Hauntings at Hinton Ampner Amongst the papers of the Ricketts and Jervis family (Add MS 30001-30013) at the British Library lies an 18th century account of ghoulish goings-on. Add MS 30011 documents a series of curious observat...

As accidental as it is, I found it a compelling image, and agree it has a very spiritual vibe.

I found this just now. During the owner's absence on his plantation in Jamaica, the disturbances became more frequent and terrifying for his wife and children at Hinton Ampner blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/...

These are the two menhirs on the Ile-de-Sein (Finistère) known as Les Causeurs (The Gossipers) possibly because they are set close together and one leans slightly towards the other. This card by Boelle in Brest pre-1904.

My newt, in comparison

"We didn't come here to listen to a load of stuff about famine and colonialism and genocide and being forced into exile, we came to hear some Irish folk songs!"

A Milky Way Trapped in Stone In this article I explored the cosmological dimensions of something as mundane as the herding of animals, finding in the paths of migratory and driven animals on earth the course of the stars and p…

A cow’s jawbone placed beside Stonehenge’s south entrance and dated to the monument’s very beginning in 2995 to 2900 BCE. Evidence for the longevity of drove roads from Wales, linked to Stonehenge (and on to London). Talked about this stuff for years
thegrammarofmatter.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/a...

A Milky Way Trapped in Stone In this article I explored the cosmological dimensions of something as mundane as the herding of animals, finding in the paths of migratory and driven animals on earth the course of the stars and p…

A cow’s jawbone placed beside Stonehenge’s south entrance and dated to the monument’s very beginning in 2995 to 2900 BCE. Evidence for the longevity of drove roads from Wales, linked to Stonehenge (and on to London). Talked about this stuff for years
thegrammarofmatter.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/a...

They needed a starting motor for the choir practice

Made a pilgrimage today to Twyford Down - the chalk downland torn asunder for a road scheme in the 1990s. Looking down on the scar left by the M3 cutting hurts. The (vandalised) memorial stone recalls the Tory ministers who ravaged this land; a defiant sticker on the fence reads ‘Twyford Rising’

The juxtaposition of book and balls was done in January 2018... Only today have I realised what might have inspired this - Emblem 141 (Eternitas) from Henry Peacham's Minerva Britanna (1612), featuring a very Melusinian-looking form holding two orbs, and she has 17 stars on her!

The juxtaposition of book and balls was done in January 2018... Only today have I realised what might have inspired this - Emblem 141 (Eternitas) from Henry Peacham's Minerva Britanna (1612), featuring a very Melusinian-looking form holding two orbs, and she has 17 stars on her!

"I wonder if, by any chance, they are related?"

Troll-faced flint on Bronze Age barrow

Let's say I didn't have to pay as much as they're asking on Amazon or eBay...

Happy to have it confirmed independently by two archaeologists today that this is indeed a flint core. One of them suggested it could be a sign of settlement. As there's a spring 100 ft from our door that seems quite plausible. Mesolithic/Neolithic or later. Given details for reporting it to the PAS

Didn't expect to find this in the Fiction section of a National Trust bookshop 🧐

Never seen clouds cast shadows on a blue sky before

Managed to get Old Winchester Hill and Beacon Hill in the same shot. Taken from Wheely Down, while trying to view a ploughed out barrow (out of shot). The green mass of Beacon Hill peers out from the trees on the right. Distant OWH is to the left of the central stand of trees #HillfortsWednesday

Oh yes, I can see that now... Well spotted!