An opportunistic walk near my holiday accommodation led me to the most enchanting river I have ever walked. The River Gelt sculpts insane fluvial shapes in its bedrock channel, whilst the valley, which once clanged with the chisels of Roman soldiers, quarrying blocks for Hadrian’s Wall, hides the ghosts of these men in the graffiti they left on the quarry faces.
A Walk in English Weather Posts
In this second blog on Mesolithic White Tor, I focus on its geology – dolerite. Dolerite, also known as greenstone, has been recognised as being important in relation to other Mesolithic and early Neolithic sites, but as yet White Tor’s dolerite seems to have gone under the radar in considerations as to what made this place special. What might research on stone use in the Stone Age tell us about the ontology of Mesolithic people at White Tor and their ‘charismatic’ stone tools?
In this blog I take my interest in Cudlip and its dairying history right back to the beginning – to the Mesolithic and a time before agriculture. I use this blog to explore why White Tor, with its early Neolithic tor enclosure, emerged as an exceptional place at the birth of pastoral farming. What was happening in the Mesolithic that helps us understand our ancestral shift at Cudlip to a cattle-based way of life, and the monumentalising of this landscape?
In this blog on the landscape of Cudlip, I explain my inspiration for wanting to explore the deep pastoral history of this place and its connection to women and dairying. This first blog sets the scene for more writing to come, exploring different stages of this landscape’s pastoral past from the Neolithic to the present, and all the incredible folklore, ritual and butter-making practice that brings alive this landscape of cows and maids.
I love landscape and I love Dartmoor. With a background in physical geography I have some understanding of geology, but a geologist I am not. I find mineral compositions, geological terminology, and geology’s buried strata, sometimes challenging to get my head around. That is why Josephine Collingwood’s new book – ‘Geology of Dartmoor: An Introduction to Dartmoor through Deep Time; its Geology, Tor Formation and Mineralogy’ – is so fantastic. Yes, Josephine knows her subject, but what makes this book so engaging and useful is her ability to communicate. The book adeptly handles the detail of Dartmoor’s geological history in a simple, yet not dumbed-down way. She provides explanations with clarity and uses abundant diagrams and annotated photographs to beautifully illustrate the concepts. All of this requires skill and effort – it is much easier to make something sound complicated than to make it sound straightforward! It has been fifty years…
Searching out landscapes different to my Dartmoor home, in this blog I explore Lincolnshire – a landscape influenced by north sea transgressions and regressions of ice, sea, people and trade.
A necessity to visit the outskirts of the city sparked a walk, in territory I wouldn’t normally think to walk – rural spaces in the city. North Plymouth is particularly endowed with woodlands in its steep valleys, which provide important corridors and habitats for both nature and people.
In this blog I finish the route over Dartmoor, between Tavistock Abbey and Buckfast Abbey, two monasteries founded in the late Saxon. This final section revealed: churches built for the glory of God separated by over a millennia of time; caves full of pre-historic fauna; an individual who, even in death seemed to provoke fear in the local population; and elite hunting Saxons, enjoying the sport of the Buckfast landscape.
In this blog I start pulling at the thread of the name Buckfast to reveal, through other place-name and landscape evidence, what I contend is an ancient Saxon deer park, previously uncommented upon. Discovering so many ‘clues’ was thrilling and just goes to show what amazing landscape histories are sitting in plain sight.
Born to parents who had moved from Carlisle, my grandmother Christiana’s first couple of years was spent in south Manchester, in the 1910s. Their stay here was brief, but the family connection to the area had been made. In this blog I explore the Gorton and Openshaw landscape with my focus on the Edwardian era and the places that my relatives would have known, a landscape more nuanced than the industrial city stereotype I had anticipated.
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