I mentioned in Saturday’s post that I’ve recently been pulling data off a hard disk I haven’t touched for more years than I care to think about, and saving the things that are worth saving. The original text of my degree dissertation, for example, which I thought I’d lost, and more than one terrible short story. Photos that are even older, that I’d had scanned in for one reason and another. I thought it might be worth sharing a few bits and pieces here.
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Keyword noise: The Guardian, photography, Outer Hebrides, Callanish, Calanais, urbexing, derelict, abandoned, archaeology, standing stones, stone circle.
Sunday: a trip out to Stanton Drew stone circles. They are a mysterious and imposing group, relatively little-investigated and therefore with little certainty about them. The Great Circle, second in size only to Avebury, appears to be the remains of a complex henge monument containing multiple concentric circles of wooden posts and an avenue down to the nearby river: rather like Woodhenge, if you know it. The precise date or sequencing, though, is very unclear; it is almost certainly at least four thousand years old, possibly five thousand or more, a range of timescales which in the modern day would easily encompass both a medieval cathedral and the latest office blocks with a huge amount of room to spare.
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Keyword noise: archaeology, Stanton Drew, Ancient Britain, neolithic, stone circle, paganism, religion, sacrifice, fish and chips.
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.