Symbolic Forest

Recently I’ve been reading Viking Britain: A History by Thomas Williams, so far at least a very good and modern history of the Viking Period in the British Isles, evoking what we know, what we don’t know, and particularly, what experiencing the Vikings may actually have been like, and what they may have thought. In particular it is very good at making clear which stories are likely true, which are likely not true, and which were assembled to make something that may have resembled a form of poetic, literary truth, even if in truth things did not happen exactly as the sagas and chronicles describe.

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Keyword noise: history, Somerset, Vikings, maps.

The previous post in this series is here.

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Keyword noise: radio, history, electronics, domestic appliances.

Back on to my complex and fragmentary sequence of posts about the history of the complex and fragmentary South Wales railway network. It was prompted by news that Network Rail are working on upgrading the Ebbw Vale line to allow a better train frequency than once per hour, by widening the line from one track to two for a few miles around Aberbeeg. Changing the track, though, involves changing the signalling, and changing the signalling will involve getting rid of a little island of 19^th-century mechanical signalling that still exists in Casnewydd/Newport. It’s the signalbox at Park Junction, in the Gaer area of the city.

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Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Casnewydd, Newport, hanes, history, hanes lleol, local history, rheilffordd, railway, railway history, trains, Gaer, Cyffordd Parc, Park Junction, Tredegar Park, Great Western Railway, signalbox, signalling, Monmouthshire Canal, modernisation, Network Rail, maps, RCH, Railway Clearing House.

The previous post in this series is here.

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Keyword noise: computers, coding, programming, history, chewing gum, slide rule, mathematics, calculations, Newton's Method, Newton-Raphson Method.

Back before Christmas I mentioned that I had finally persuaded The Mother to let me start clearing out some of her accumulated junk. Well, there’s a long way to go yet on that of course, but I’m slowly making progress. Slowly working through piles of things that really should never have been kept, sifting through them just in case there is anything important in there, like family photos in the middle of a stack of 40-year-old bank statements to give one real example. And then, there was one thing I came across, that potentially does have genuine historical interest. Well, there were two (one for each of my parents), but this is one.

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Keyword noise: The Mother, poll tax, Community Charge, history.

In search of more historical things to write about on here, I remembered something I had once randomly happened across when I was a teenager. A memorial, in the next village, to a man who had randomly died there. So yesterday I went out, bent over against the January wind, to search for it, find it, photograph it and write about it. Having only a vague memory from years ago, I was fully prepared to have to spend hours searching for the thing. In the event, though, I couldn’t miss it.

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Keyword noise: Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, Barnoldby, death, memorial, history, local history.

A trip away last weekend, to what is arguably one of the most iconic sites in British, or at least Anglo-Saxon, archaeology. It’s been famous since the 1930s, there have been TV series made about it, and it has shaped the way we see Anglo-Saxon Britain ever since. The site I’m talking about is: Sutton Hoo.

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Keyword noise: archaeology, British archaeology, history, Raedwald, Sutton Hoo, Sarah from Ipswich, Ancient Britain, Anglo-Saxons, death, burial, ship burial, cemetery, graveyard, photography, River Deben, East Anglia, Woodbridge, Suffolk.

Last week, I posted a little bit about the history of the railway junction at Pye Corner, just outside Casnewydd/Newport. There, the original route of the horse-drawn tramway opened around 1805 is now a quiet, grassy back alleyway, with the railway that replaced it a few yards away. That railway line, now just a single-track branch, strides over the road into Bassaleg with a complex series of three parallel railway bridges, imposing and monolithic.

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Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Casnewydd, Newport, hanes, history, hanes lleol, local history, rheilffordd, railway, railway history, trains, Pye Corner, Great Western Railway, Monmouthshire Canal, maps, RCH, Railway Clearing House.

For a few months now, I’ve been threatening to start writing a long series of blog posts about the railway history of South Wales, starting in Newport and slowly radiating outwards. The question, of course, is how to actually do that in a format that will be interesting and engaging to read in small chunks; and, indeed, for me to write. The “standard” type of railway history comes in a number of forms, but none of them are particularly attractive to the casual reader. Few go to the point of setting out, to a random passing non-specialist reader, just why a specific place or line is fascinating; just what about its history makes it worth knowing about. Moreover, not only do they tend on the heavy side, they are normally based either on large amounts of archival research, large amounts of vintage photographs, or both. Putting that sort of thing together isn’t really an option for me at present, especially not for a blog post.

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Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Casnewydd, Newport, hanes, history, hanes lleol, local history, rheilffordd, railway, railway history, trains, Pye Corner, Great Western Railway, Monmouthshire Canal, maps, tithe maps.

Only the other day, I wrote about heading out to visit a castle now that outdoor tourist attractions in Wales are starting to open up again. And now, along comes another post about it! This isn’t going to become a blog purely about days out I’ve taken, honest.

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Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Amgueddfa Cymru, National Museum of Wales, Sain Ffagan, St Fagans, museums, history, bees, bumblebees, sheep.

As it’s St David’s Day, and the shops are all full of daffodils and Welsh cakes, I thought it might be worthwhile writing something about the history of Wales, possibly even a chain of posts. And the obvious starting point for that is: well, what is Wales?

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Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, history, hanes, hanes Cymru.

I was asked the other day to provide a photo of The Children for a family project. Nothing difficult, nothing complicated, just a photo of the two of them, together, both looking at the camera, such as you might want to put on your wall. So I spent a while one evening going through all the photos I’ve taken since the start of 2020, and did I find a single photo that matches that description? Just one with both of them in it, looking at the camera, not pulling a daft face? Not one. Zero. Nil.

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Keyword noise: photography, The Children, history, archaeology, Wayland's Smithy, outdoors, countryside, landscape, Glastonbury, Stonehenge.

One aspect of moving house, especially if you move to a completely different neighbourhood or another town altogether, is the joy you can have in exploring the new area, finding all the interesting corners and places to go. In the current hospitals-overflowing stay-at-home situation, this is a bit limited; but at least there is exploration that can still be done on foot. In Bristol I was getting rather jaded of all the places I could visit on foot, even when it led to interesting local history blog posts. Now, there’s a whole new set of avenues of local history to explore.

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Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Casnewydd, Newport, Tŷ Du, Rogerstone, camlas, canal, Monmouthshire Canal, rheilffordd, railway, railway history, Great Western Railway, hanes, hanes lleol, history, local history, walking, cerddediad.

When the weather forecast says there’s going to be snow I’m always slightly cynical. For one thing, I’m suspicious the forecast always errs on the side of caution when it comes to snow. Secondly, in this part of town, snow falls less and sticks less than on the higher ground of high-altitude suburbs like Clifton and Horfield. In Easton, the snow is rare and quickly turns to slush.

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Keyword noise: Bristol, winter, seasons, snow, death, cemetery, Greenbank, Eastville, Easton, Greenbank Cemetery, history, local history, railway, disused, Rosemary Green.

Regular readers might remember the post last week about Ridgeway Park Cemetery, a small and heavily overgrown cemetery bordering Eastville Park in Bristol. As our daily exercise at the weekend, I took The Children back there again, but took the Proper Camera with me this time.

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Keyword noise: Bristol, Easton, Stapleton, heritage, history, local history, Ridgeway Park, cemetery, death, grave, photography.

A train of thought has been slowly easing into the station over the past few days, after I read a very interesting blog post by historian Caitlin Green about the Ridings of Lindsey and the route between Lincoln and Grimsby—at any rate, the route between Lincoln and Grimsby mapped in 1675 by the Scottish cartographer John Ogilby. Ogilby was the creator of Britannia, Britain’s first road atlas, in the form of 100 cross-country routes drawn as strip-maps at a scale of 1 inch to the mile. Nottingham to Grimsby via Lincoln is map 78.

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Keyword noise: history, local history, Grimsby, Waltham, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, John Ogilby, The Mother, family history.

Another day, another cemetery, although back on to a human one this time. Back in October, Twitter user @libbymiller asked if I knew Ridgeway Park Cemetery. Although I do know it, and I’ve been foraging for brambles there frequently in summer, for some reason I’ve never taken any photos. Today I woke up, saw it was a fine frosty day, so tried wandering off in that direction.

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Keyword noise: Bristol, Easton, Stapleton, heritage, history, local history, Ridgeway Park, cemetery, death, grave, photography.

Last night was a wild night. Howling wind, hammering rain, the sort of storm that wakes you up as it’s trying to blow your bins down the street.

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Keyword noise: Bristol, history, local history, death, cemetery, pet cemetery, Ashton Court.

As it is such a lovely, sunny, bright and winter day, we went out for a walk, for a picnic on Troopers Hill. The lumpy, bumpy and steep slope overlooking the Avon, crowned with a rough and slightly wonky chimney. It was busyish, not crowded, but full of groups of families, walking dogs, eating picnics and flying kites. We sat and ate our food, tried to look at the view without squinting, and watched buzzards hovering and circling over the woods.

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Keyword noise: Bristol, Troopers Hill, history, local history, archaeology, industrial archaeology, photography.

When I first moved down to South-West England, I was intrigued to note that one of the major local commercial property firms, their boards decorating every half-empty high street, was called Alder King. No doubt this is because at some point in the distant past Mr Alder and Mr King got together to form a business (their website is sadly unhelpful on the subject), but in my own private imagination I liked to think that their founder was deliberately trying to invoke a mythical archetype, implying that the cycle of closure, vacancy and opening on the High Street echoed the ancient cycle of death, sacrifice and rebirth, the brief but spiritually charged reign of the sacred king destroyed by the Great Goddess as described by James Frazer and popularised by one of the twentieth century’s best-known English-language poets. No doubt that poet, if he had lived to the 2010s and had seen Alder King’s advertising boards himself, would have thought the same. Rather, he would not just have thought “that’s an amusing coincidence of naming,” as I did: he would have thought it yet more evidence that all of his theories about mythology and prehistory were incontrovertibly, emotionally and poetically true, and that anyone who disagreed with him was probably a contemptible writer-of-prose or Apollonian poetaster with a degree from Cambridge. At least, I assume that’s what he would have thought. I’ve never managed to finish reading his book on the subject, and I’ve threatened to write a blog post about it more than once in the distant past. Today’s Book I Haven’t Read is, as you potentially have already guessed from this introduction, The White Goddess by Robert Graves.

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Keyword noise: Books I Haven't Read, reading, religion, paganism, Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Goodbye To All That, poetry, history, mythology, fake history, fake mythology, Ancient Britain, anthropology, archaeology, Blodeuwedd, Lleu Llaw Gyffes, Gwydion, Mabinogi, Mabinogion, Cad Goddeu, Cymru, Wales.

A damp, misty, gloomy November weekend: so obviously, we livened it up by taking another walk around Greenbank Cemetery!

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Keyword noise: history, local history, Bristol, Easton, Greenbank, Greenbank Cemetery, Coombe Brook, cemetery, heritage, culvert, grave.

Semi-regular readers might remember that, about a month ago, I posted about Greenbank Cemetery and its history, and looked at the available historic maps online to track its growth through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This weekend I went back to Greenbank for the first time since I wrote that post, partly for the autumnal atmosphere and partly to see how much evidence is visible on the ground for the different phases of growth I identified on the maps.

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Keyword noise: history, local history, Bristol, Easton, Greenbank, Greenbank Cemetery, cemetery, heritage, death, weekend, maps, archaeology.

So, yesterday’s post was originally going to be this blog’s sole Hallowe’en post for this year. As it happened, though, the other thing I did yesterday was take The Children out to visit one of the local castles, which turned out to have at least its fair share of autumnal creepiness and gloom. It was Farleigh Hungerford Castle, just to the south of Bath, originally built in the 14th century by Sir Thomas Hungerford, first Speaker of the Commons. Nowadays it is almost entirely ruined, a couple of jagged towers propped up and stabilised by English Heritage concrete. The only buildings left standing are the chapel and associated priest’s house.

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Keyword noise: Farleigh Hungerford, death, burial, coffins, photography, castles, E Nesbit, English Heritage, ghost stories, Hilary Mantel, history, human remains, effigies, crypts, ruin.

Time to answer some of the questions that have been sent in over the month or so since I revived this site.

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Keyword noise: Readers Letters, Battle of Hastings, history, counterfactual, alternate timeline, Cymru, Wales, Books I Haven't Read, Francis Bennion, E Shrdlu, blogging, Sarah from Ipswich.

It’s time for an anniversary! Nine hundred and fifty-four years ago tomorrow, give or take a calendrical change in the meantime, was the Battle of Hastings. An all-day affair, it is famously that One Date That Everyone Knows from all of British history. If you believe the more mouth-frothing end of the political spectrum, England has not been successfully invaded since, although that arguably isn’t really true.

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Keyword noise: Battle of Hastings, alternate timeline, anniversary, counterfactual, England, English, Hastings, Battle, history, William the Conqueror.

Yesterday, after the rain had stopped, we went for a walk around Greenbank, the local Victorian garden cemetery. It’s a lovely place to visit whatever the weather, but on a cold day, after a rainstorm, with drips coming from every branch and all of the colours having a dark rain-soaked richness, it is a beautiful quiet place to wander around. Even when the children are pestering you to turn around and head back home so they can have some hot chocolate and watch TV. “It is a very hot chocolate sort of day,” said The Child Who Likes Fairies.

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Keyword noise: Bristol, local history, Greenbank, Greenbank Cemetery, heritage, Easton, cemetery, history, maps, death, The Children, weekend.

Today: the anniversary of the one date in English history that just about everybody knows. It is – as you’ve probably realised – the 944th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which occurred on October 14^th, 1066. And, of course, all that: the death of King Harold II at the hands of Duke William of Normandy, which led to the duke’s coronation as King of England on Christmas Day that year.

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Keyword noise: alternate timeline, Battle, Battle of Hastings, counterfactual, England, Hastings, history, Norman Conquest, Normandy, William the Conqueror, Yorkshire.

In field archaeology, there’s a subtle process that field workers undergo called “getting your eye in”. A plain brown swathe of earth, after a few hours’ work, becomes suddenly a complex landscape of shade and texture. A mass of tumbled stone becomes a distinct sequence of structural building and collapse. All of a sudden, the things on the ground start to make sense.

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Keyword noise: archaeology, architecture, buildings, floor, floorboards, history, house, Symbolic Towers.

Back when I was 11, I started secondary school, and we started to learn French.^* Like most English children who learn French, one of the first words we came across was salut. As a greeting, for use with friends, something like “Hi”.

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Keyword noise: Committee of Public Safety, Devil's Island, France, French, French Revolution, Henri Charrière, history, Musee Carnavalet, Papillon, Robespierre, salut, salvation, translation.

Last Thursday’s post, I mentioned Gödel, Escher, Bach, the long, complex and self-referential book by Douglas Hofstadter which features a tortoise, Achilles, a crab, Alan Turing and Douglas Hofstadter trying to find the links between self-referentiality, consciousness, and the works of the three titular men.

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Keyword noise: Britain's Real Monarch, Channel 4, documentary, Douglas Hofstadter, Godel Escher Bach, history, inheritance, royalty, television, Tony Robinson.

I recently said that Maximilien Robespierre was, well, one of the villains of the French Revolution. And – well, he is and he isn’t. He’s also someone who, in many ways, I admire: that’s not really a way you can describe a villain. But, having thought of the handy “for some people he’s a hero, for others he’s a villain” line, I couldn’t bring myself to call him a hero.

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Keyword noise: France, French Revolution, history, Mastermind, revolution, Robespierre, television.

A while ago now, I bought a book, and predicted that it would quickly go on the Books I Haven’t Read list. Well, seven months later or so, I’m pleased to say it’s finished, and moreover, it sparked off a desire to read and know more. The book in question – if you didn’t follow the link – is The World Turned Upside Down, by Christopher Hill.

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Keyword noise: books, Christopher Hill, civil war, English Civil War, fanzines, history, London Zine Symposium, publishing, radicalism, self-publishing, The World Turned Upside Down, zines.

About time I finished off writing about SOAS Modern Jewish Studies professor Tudor Parfitt, and his rather dodgy theory, shown on TV in his documentary The Quest For The Lost Ark, that the Biblical Ark Of The Covenant was not the ark that is biblically described, but was in fact a drum; that it was taken to Africa, survived in the possession of a Jewish tribe there, and that its final version is now in storage in an Harare museum. Which might make more sense if you read the previous posts I’ve written about it: part one, and part two.

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Keyword noise: Africa, Ancient Britain, archaeology, ark, Ark Of The Covenant, The Bible, Biblical, British archaeology, British prehistory, Caitlin lectures you, change, Channel 4, cultural change, culture, Deuteronomy, diffusion, diffusionism, Exodus, Harare, history, Jewish, Judaism, Lemba, Moses, Old Testament, prehistory, Scotland, Scottish archaeology, television, telly, theory, Tudor Parfitt, tv, Zimbabwe.

We sat down last night to watch one of the Christmas present DVDs: Arrested Development Season 3. It got me thinking, after yesterday’s post, about pseudo-archaeological documentaries.

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Keyword noise: archaeology, Arrested Development, Atlantis, comedy, conspiracy theory, Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown, documentary, fake history, fake mythology, Freemasonry, Graham Hancock, history, Illuminati, Knights Templar, mythology, narration, Nostradamus, occult, Priory of Sion, pseudoarchaeology, Ron Howard, television, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

Since briefly writing about Maximilien Robespierre the other week – particularly, writing about the biography Fatal Purity by Ruth Scurr – I’ve had a couple of search hits from people looking for Robespierre information. And one, in particular, tickled me.

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Keyword noise: depiction, eyesight, fashion, Fatal Purity, French Revolution, George Galloway, glasses, history, Robespierre, Ruth Scurr, sight, spectacles, Tommy Sheridan, vanity, vision.

Over on the bookshelves – but not the bookshelf I talked about the othe day – is an interesting little local book by an artist called Cleo Broda. It’s called Symes Avenue: Building On The Past, and it’s about the rebuilding of the centre of Hartcliffe, and the ways in which public art was involved in the rebuilding; particularly, community art which celebrates the area’s history.^*

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Keyword noise: archaeology, Bristol, Bronze Age, Cleo Broda, countryside, Hartcliffe, history, megalithic, neolithic, oral history, photography, redevelopment, rural, Somerset, standing stone, Stanton Drew, stone circle, Symes Avenue.

One thing about yesterday’s post: it gives you a good look at the state of one of our bookshelves. Not a good enough look to make out what most of the books are, though, unless they’re books with distinctive spines that you’re already familiar with – like Peter Ackroyds’s London, for example.

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Keyword noise: biography, books, Books I Haven't Read, Fatal Purity, France, French Revolution, history, literature, Maximilien Robespierre, review, Robert Graves, Robespierre, Ruth Scurr, The White Goddess.

Getting this website going again, and posting things regularly, I was thinking that maybe I should resurrect Books I Haven’t Read, an ongoing series of posts in which I reviewed books that I hadn’t managed to finish reading, and briefly discussed why. This was on the grounds that reviews of bad books are often more interesting than reviews of good books;^* many book reviewers probably get away without reading the whole thing; and if I’m going to talk about something, I may as well be honest about whether I’ve read it or not. Hence, Books I Haven’t Read, which annoyed at least one author who discovered it and couldn’t resist responding.^**

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Keyword noise: archaeology, Books I Haven't Read, Christopher Hill, Robert Graves, civil war, English Civil War, Greek Myths, history, Levellers, literature, mythology, poetics, The White Goddess, The World Turned Upside Down.

From the recent search hits: “sir thomas bouch blog”. Somehow, I doubt Sir Thomas Bouch is likely to have a blog. For one thing, he’s dead.^* Secondly, he was always more interested in building railways than writing about them, or about anything.

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Keyword noise: bouch, Dean Cemetery, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, engineer, etymology, ferry, grave, history, memorial, railway, Tay Bridge, Thomas Bouch, train ferry, trains, urban myth.

Never mind about all the books I’ve written about here, in the past, that I’ve never managed to finish reading. Now I want books I can’t even afford to read: the facsimile edition of the Knights Templar trial documents.

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Keyword noise: books, facsimile, history, Knights Templar, medieval.

More notes on the Lambrigg and/or Grayrigg train crash from a couple of weeks ago. Continued from here.

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Keyword noise: accident, crash, derailment, facing point lock, facing points, FPL, flexibility, Grayrigg, history, junctions, Lambrigg, maintenance, points, Potters Bar, preventative maintenance, railway, railway history, signalling, shunting, trains.

Some notes on the Lambrigg rail accident (also known as the Grayrigg crash in the media).

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Keyword noise: accident, crash, derailment, facing point lock, facing points, FPL, Grayrigg, history, Lambrigg, points, railway, railway history, signalling, trains.

Within a month, another slightly silly news story about paleogenetics. This one isn’t quite as daft as tracing the descendants of Edgar Aetheling, though. Scientists in Leicester have discovered that loosely-related members of a Yorkshire family share an African ancestor, from at least 250 years ago^* and probably further back than that.

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Keyword noise: ancestry, descendants, genealogy, genetics, history, Yorkshire.

Photo post of the week: photos from the archives, because I haven’t been out and about. These are all from 1996, I think; so this is what the 1990s looked like, to my eyes at any rate.

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Keyword noise: Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, beach, black and white, footbridge, history, photography, railway, seashore, dunes, sidings, tower block.

Today’s top news^* story: English Heritage have been putting out newspaper adverts around the world announcing that they are searching for the descendants of Edgar Aetheling, claimant to the English throne in 1066. As the closest relative of Edward the Confessor, under modern law he would have received the crown; but under Saxon law kings didn’t automatically inherit their position, so he didn’t. Everyone remembers the other kings of England from 1066, but everyone forgets the teenage Edgar.

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Keyword noise: 1066, ancestry, descendants, Edgar Aetheling, Edward The Confessor, English Heritage, genealogy, genetics, history, Niall Nine Hostages, Niall Noigíallach, O'Neil, William the Conqueror.

In the news recently: the Antikythera Mechanism, a cunning ancient device which, it turns out, could predict planetary positions and eclipses. It was first discovered around a hundred years ago, but it has always been little-known. Partly, I’m sure, because of the domination of Greek archaeology by classisists and historians. The Antikythera mechanism is unique, and its purpose unclear without careful analysis, so it’s not too surprising that for most of the time since its discovery it lurked, little-known, in an Athens museum.

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Keyword noise: anomaly, Antikythera Mechanism, archaeology, calculator, computing, Greece, history, mechanical calculator, pseudoarchaeology, Richard Feynman.

I haven’t read Ian McEwan‘s novel Atonement. It is fetching a lot of publicity at the moment, because McEwan has been accused of copying phrases from the biography of wartime nurse and romantic novelist Lucilla Andrews. He, of course, says the claims are ridiculous, and that all he did was normal research. Other people have said the same thing, noting that he has acknowledged his large debt to Andrews.

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Keyword noise: Atonement, books, Books I Haven't Read, David St John Thomas, Ernest Simmons, fiction, Francis Bennion, historical fiction, history, Ian McEwan, Jack Simmons, literature, Lucilla Andrews, Memoirs Of A Station Master, reading, research, source material, The Country Railway, Victorian Railway Days.

Ambling around the house the other morning with the radio on, I heard a trailer for a documentary about Denis Diderot, the French Enlightenment philosopher, writer, and general all-round expert on everything. Indeed, the trailer described him as a “true polymath”, an expert at any field he turned his hand to.

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Keyword noise: Diderot, expert, history, knowledge, philosopher, polymath.

Today is apparently One Day In History, a day for creating a “mass blog” which will be stored by the British Library. It sounds like an interesting idea, but I’m not convinced.

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Keyword noise: anthropology, blogging, British Library, history, Mass-Observation, One Day In History, social history.

In the news recently: the government is making moves to reuse old burial plots, to deal with the problem of overcrowded graveyards. People are, naturally, a bit shocked at the idea of disturbing one’s eternal rest, especially given the synchronicity between this news and the reburial of Gladys Hammond.

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Keyword noise: burial, charnel house, cremation, death, Evelyn Waugh, funerals, Gladys Hammond, graveyards, history, invented tradition, Jessica Mitford, Kutná Hora, Sedlec, ossuary, ritual, The American Way Of Death, The Loved One, tradition.

There’s been an awful lot in the news recently about John Prescott and Dorneywood, the grace-and-favour country house he’s just given up. Which set me wondering: why do we have to have state-owned mansions for ministers anyway?

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Keyword noise: Bute House, Chequers, Chevening, country house, Dorneywood, government, history, invented tradition, John Prescott, minister, Petersberg, tradition.

When I was still a student, as a researcher, I was always a bit rubbish. I’m one of those people who hoovers up random, unconnected pieces of information like anything; but when it comes to use it I can never remember where it came from. Little factoids are no good unless you can judge how true it is likely to be, and you can’t do that if you don’t know their provenance.

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Keyword noise: baking, birthday cake, cake, castles, Celtic, Celtic mythology, cooking, English, history, kitchen, London, mythology, oven, ravens, research, researching, Tower Of London, tradition.

Two small things today, because I’m too sleepy to write more.

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Keyword noise: 1970s, books, death, Glasgow, Glasgow Subway, history, Jan Mark, literature, obituary, photography, railway, reading, subway, underground, Zeno Was Here.

Like a lot of people, I’ve spent a while today playing with the Surname Profiler website,^* looking at how distant relatives are spread around the country, now, and 125 years ago. As I was expecting, in the 19th century my mother’s family was very heavily concentrated in one area:

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Keyword noise: ancestry, cartography, Cornwall, family history, genealogy, history, maps, migration, spatial analysis, Spatial Literacy In Teaching, surname, Surname Profiler.

If you’re not just a regular reader, but the sort of regular reader who reads all the comments too, then you’ll have noticed that Colleague M dropped by the site the other day to let me know that her sister Lydia had been asking for its address. “I think she’ll be upset,” said M, though, “to find you haven’t written about her for some time.”

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Keyword noise: census, Colleague M, genealogy, ghosts, psychic, history, research.

Following on from last Wednesday’s post, here are some more photos by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, reassembled in colour form to go on my computer desktop.

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Keyword noise: 1910s, desktop background, history, Imperial Russia, photography, Prokudin-Gorskii, Russia, Tsarist Russia, Library Of Congress.

Heard on the radio this morning: a member of the Lords claiming that gay marriage Civil Partnerships are a bad thing because they’re unpatriotic.^* This country was built, apparently, on the values of two parents, their children, and the sacrament of marriage.^**

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Keyword noise: Civil Partnership, conservatism, divorce, family, gay marriage, genealogy, history, homophobia, nuclear family, social conservatism.

Following on from Thursday’s post, here’s the first Book I Haven’t Managed To Finish Reading Yet.

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Keyword noise: Books I Haven't Read, A History Of God, books, eschatology, god, Karen Armstrong, history, monotheism, reading, religion.

The Mother has discovered The Internet. Specifically, she has discovered a plethora of genealogy websites, and is using them to try to track down our family tree.

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Keyword noise: family secrets, genealogy, history, morality, The Parents, The Mother, social history.