Trade Secrets

[hvered]

Tintagel?

[Boreades]

Another trade secret has leaked out via the BBC Hampshire website.

Ground-penetrating scans of the New Forest have revealed a network of (at least) Iron Age sites never previously known or documented. It all comes as a great surprise to ortho-types. But not to ME-types who are thororoughly aware of the enormous two-way trade in pre-Roman times that went through Dorset/Hampshire and sites like Hengistbury Head and Poole Harbour (to name but two). British metal and grain in one direction, wine and (err, something else) in the other.

See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-24368290

[spiral]

Extract Thirty-Nine



So what was the Megalithics' Big Secret? It would seem they had a knowledge of tides that we have quite forgotten. And we even have a reason why it was forgotten. The entirety of our historical tradition, that is our detailed continuous record of what happened in the past via the written record, comes from the Mediterranean where there are no tides. History just blanked out tidal technologies as soon as it arrived in the tidal world. Let us not permit another failure of the imagination to obscure these momentous but not-really-impossible achievements.

That is the point.

A pedant adds....It might need a little reworking, though, as Mediterranean tides do exist, they are just not large enough to be noticed........

[Mick Harper]

Extract Forty

Nonetheless it is to modern practices that we must turn for guidance. First it has to be observed that the general phenomenon of ‘longshore drift’, that is the accretion of small particles to form long ‘spits’ (or short sandbars come to that), is a very rapid process. We may speak in ‘years’ rather than ‘decades’. And it would seem the ‘butterfly's wing’ principle is in play because while the outcome is large (a long spit) the apparent cause may be much more modest (a minor headland perhaps). This is presumably because the force of tide and current while very great tends to be regular in direction and hence diverted in an equally constant direction.

We ourselves take advantage of this state of affairs by constructing modest butterfly wings of our own e.g. groynes, breakwaters, dredged channels, even sunken ships, in order to create our own relatively large desired outcomes. But for us the whole business is somewhat secondary in our overall priorities. Saving a bit of coastal land here, opening up a shipping channel there, are things that may be worth throwing money at but they are rarely worth throwing an entire civilisation’s brains at. (Unless perhaps you are Dutch.)

Not so the Megalithics. Their civilisation was built on sand. They needed ‘sandbars’ for their boats since, it would seem, they eschewed formal harbours. There is no guarantee that there will be a a nicely graded Chesil Beach or a completely sandy Weymouth Bay where they are needed. The presumption is that the Megalithics knew how to create both.

[Boreades]

Tintagel?

Aaaaand the winner is ...... Hattie!

The point I was obliquely making is that megalithic trade hubs, like Tintagel, Hengistbury, etc., all seem to be in places that to "modern" eyes seem slightly strange. Why use a tidal beach as a major trade port when you could have some equivalent of a big dock accessible at all states of the tide?

I think part of the answer is the Unit of Measure. These days it is a 40ft ISO Container that can be craned on & off a huge container vessel. In megalithic, bronze and iron age times, it was usually (at most) the size of something that one or two humans could easily carry. Unless we are talking about megaliths, but that would be special cargo, even now.

Another part of the answer is, I believe, in the relationship between maritime-based trading communities and land-based customers/suppliers. The further up-river you go, the more you are in the control of "other people". That might only mean tariffs, harbour dues, mooring fees and the like. But it's all tax. That's why I believe that a significant number of coastal places were the equivalent of Free Ports, where goods could be imported, exported or transshipped without taxation.

We also know from the example of the monks of Mont Saint-Michel that people were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that the trade they were interested in only went through ports they controlled.

[spiral]

Saint Piran.

The heathen Irish tied him to a mill-stone, rolled it over the edge of a cliff into a stormy sea, which immediately became calm, and the saint floated safely over the water to land upon the sandy beach of Perranzabuloe in Cornwall

What does this refer to.....

A miracle?

A shipping lane/forecast?

The transportation of megaliths by boat?

The control of both Irish and Cornish ports by a group of monks?

[hvered]

It might be interpreted as any of the above but the story seems to emphasise both risk and peace. The Piran voyage gets repeated with various 'saints', including women, unarmed and alone or few in number, sailing off and successfully landing in a trade hotspot.

Usually if a miracle occurs, such as a storm at sea suddenly subsiding, it's followed by conversions and recantings but here the voyage and the beaching take precedence.

[Mick Harper]

Extract Forty-One

The Megalithics' favourite geographic feature, the causewayed tidal island, introduces a new feature into the land/seascape: the causewayed tidal channel. Anybody visiting one of these islands will pass a large white notice board warning people not to attempt a crossing in either direction if water has started overlapping the causeway. This is because the force of the current between the mainland and the offshore island will rapidly overwhelm a pedestrian (and often small boats).

This is so invariable a feature that, while it may be a natural consequence of the situation, the suspicion must be that Megalithics knew how to build tidal islands that created this effect or, as may be, built tidal islands in order to exploit this effect. Either way, a tidal island provides a powerful means for taking massive quantities of material from one place to another, And, since the Megalithics appear to have been active for thousands of years, more or less any land/sea-form is within their capabilities exploiting this one natural force alone.

Large amounts of sand should always be viewed as prima facie evidence of the result of Megalithic intervention whenever there are one or more causewayed tidal islands and a history of Megalithic activity in the area. So for instance Mont St Michel is an outpost in a positive Sahara of sand and the British equivalent, Morecambe Bay, is dotted with causewayed tidal islands and Megalithic outposts.

[Mick Harper]

Extract Forty-Two

But sand has another use quite apart from parking ships on. It is an abrasive. And when allied with powerful currents or controlled tides it becomes hugely significant in the mining industry. The problem with minerals is that they don’t normally occur in the most accessible of places. Here for instance is a description of how tin was mined

Once a tin-bearing valley had been identified, the stream-workers would arrange a stream of water, probably carried by a leat from higher up the valley, and starting at the lowest end of the deposit they would dig a trench (known as the "tye") as deep as possible to allow the finer gangue to be washed away.

No doubt efficient in its way but not only is it laborious and sometimes impractical to “arrange a stream of water” but the output is always going to fairly meagre. ‘Meagre’ is fine when dealing with precious mertals like gold but a valuable-but-not-precious metal like tin is only going to be ecomomically mined using such methods in particularly advantageous places.

Why not substitute for the ‘tye’ (the trench) a whole channel between islands in the sea (the tye-mar) and then in the place of a rather modest ‘leat’ the oceanic tide, current and sand can do the job on an unimaginably larger scale? To which the answer is, "A great idea ... so long as the tin deposits are right on the sea-shore, but any that are will obviously get exhausted in no time flat using such methods."

No problem. Just take the tides and the current and the sand to the tin. When you know, for example, that there are abundant tin deposits in the Dartmoor area, just (sand) blast an inlet from the sea to the tin and you have a twice-daily rise and fall in the tide to do the heavy work of exposing the tin and/or separating it out.

After a few thousand years this is how the end-product would look, the Taimar, tye-mar, estuary:

[Mick Harper]

Extract Forty-Three

We now have a hypothetical Megalithic gazetteer, a list of characteristics that identify places where this ancient maritime trade was conducted. It is true we have only two reasonably certain geographical indicators – causewayed tidal islands and Venus Pools – and even these may, at the individual level, be naturally-occurring, but we also have the Michael name which appears everywhere to be a solid clue.

Beyond that we have a much more inchoate list of flat top islands, rocky outliers, cardinal points, sand banks, incised mining valleys and so forth. But we do have the crucial advantage now of pattern, we not only know what to look for but where to look for it.

For instance, just along the French coast from St Malo is the Ile de Brehat which is a causewayed tidal island or, as it is somewhat bafflingly described, two islands that have a bridge between them that is covered at high tide:



The official guide unwittingly yields the tell-tale Megalithic past:

– ... climb the hill to the highest point, marked by the chapel of St-Michel, just 26 metres in altitude. The building also serves as a seamark for boats in the vicinity. The Bréhatin men long lived from the sea, and the extraordinary, recently restored historic Moulin à Marée shows how ingeniously they made the most of the tides. Two lighthouses also stand out. Le Rosédo rises to the west, while the remarkable Phare du Paon marks the northernmost tip of Bréhat.

This is the first mention of 'tidal mills' which, if not purely French and modern, must be provisionally added to the list of characteristic Megalithic achievements.