Megalithic shipping and trade routes

[Boreades]

[Mick Harper]

While you're away, Borrie, get hold of Time Song: Searching for Doggerland by Julia Blackburn (out today) and report back. While you're in the bath, Hatty, read the Guardian Review's review of the same book and report back. Both are a bit long for me.

[hvered]

Julia Blackburn's Doggerland book is not a factual history despite the Guardian categorising it as 'history'. Judging by the review it's a meditation on the distant past, imagining people's lives partly based on encounters with indigenous tribes in Australia and the far north, perhaps inevitable due to the scarcity of physical evidence.

[Mick Harper]

For God's sake, don't tell Borrie.

[TisILeclerc]

[Mick Harper]

Quite a remarkable cataloguing.

It might be useful to assume, until it's blown out of the water, that the system is 'English' and to dispense provisionally with all Celtic and Norse derivations. This might mean for instance that Cape Wrath means ...er... Cape Wrath. (Is it? Borrie's wife would know.) But of course the system might also follow strict THOBR principles and be English in the south, Celtic in the west and Norse in the North. (There is the matter of all the T-rivers in the east.) It will certainly be a relief if we can rescue Thor & Co from Valhalla.

I think we are generally agreed that sea arches are diagnostic rather than natural but why, for instance, is Durdle Dor at Durdle Dor? Unless it has something to do with Chesil Beach it's hard to see who and why it is beckoning. [Beacon, beckon ... is that new? Surely it's more often "Stay away".]

[TisILeclerc]

[hvered]

[hvered]

[Mick Harper]