Megalithic shipping and trade routes

[hvered]

Is there perhaps a connection between incoming tides/boats/cormorants and bell-ringing [or Baal-worship as Spiro puts it]?

[hvered]

The resident swans of Wells Abbey have a special trick of ringing a bell when they want to be fed. This kind of behaviour seems quite common in animal training programmes.

Archaeologists think there was a 'swan pool' at St Catherine's Tor on the north Devon coast, facing Lundy Island.



The most famous swannery is at another St Catherine's Hill, Abbotsbury on the Chesil Beach coastline facing Portland.

Presumably monks farmed swans as a food source but they also might have been useful for guarding fish stocks from, say, passing cormorants since swans are notoriously aggressive. In either case the cone-shaped St Catherine's Tor, though clearly badly eroded, is an iconic, or iconical, landmark.

[hvered]

I was wondering the other day about Portland Bill, the point marking the eastern end of Chesil Beach. Now it appears to have a 'twin' in Penestin in Brittany where the Mine d'Or cliffs are located



The name is supposed to reflect the golden colour of the cliffs though one wonders why 'mine'. Penestin is on the 'tin route' though the name could be irrelevant since the French don't speak English comme il faut.

The spectacular coastline is rather similar to Chesil Beach and there's even a (very rocky) Pointe du Bile:



Bile was one of the four humours, cholera/anger, said to be a yellow or yellowish-green colour, sometimes black. It's always bitter whatever the colour. Extracting metal ore would make most people bilious.

[macausland]

Penestin is in Brittany and Bretons don't speak French 'comme il faut'.

I would imagine it means something like the Tin Headland.

It's about 30 miles from Carnac. According to the Breton tourist site there was a gold mine at Penestin in the nineteenth century, hence the Mine d'or reference.

[Mick Harper]

You are correct. The word tin is itself, it would seem, a Breton/Cornish/Welsh name. The estin in Penestin is related to our stannary (the tin courts). However the word pen is not so straightforward. Yes, it is usually translated as headland (or some other prominent geographical feature away from the coast) but I am beginning to think it has a more rarefied meaning. Something like "megalithic marker'.

[macausland]

Mick Harper.

You mean a Megalithic marker pen?

[hvered]

In "Going Round in Circles" macausland pointed out that in Gaelic the same word is used for promontory and winged

Then there's also the Isle of Skye, An t'Eilean Sgitheanach.

Wiki says there's some doubt about the correct version of the name. 'Sgiathach' means 'winged'.

sgiathanach -aiche, a. Winged. 2 Jutting out into promontories. (Dwelly)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_Skye

In French plume means pen. It also means feather, wing, down, plume. Pens are traditionally made from goose- or swan-quills i.e. flight feathers.

Penzance near St Michael's Mount in Cornwall is supposed to mean 'holy headland' though anse means arc, cove or bay, handle. The headland is Battery Rocks, site of an eighteenth-century gun emplacement where a sea-water, open air pool was built in the 1930's. It's said to be a traditional place for bathers though sea-bathing doesn't seem to have begun earlier than the twentieth century; the cove is, rather strangely, popular with swans.

[macausland]

Perhaps they used 'homing swans' with knucklebone tin ingots attached to them? Megalithic airmail?

[hvered]

Even someone who hasn't read TME might regard swans swimming in the sea as unusual. Those who have read the book will know that in alchemy the swan = mercury and Mercury is Hermes aka Michael. A colony of swans overlooked by Michael's Mount seems entirely apposite.

[Boreades]

Penestin is in Brittany and Bretons don't speak French 'comme il faut'.
I would imagine it means something like the Tin Headland.
It's about 30 miles from Carnac. According to the Breton tourist site there was a gold mine at Penestin in the nineteenth century, hence the Mine d'or reference.

The colour of the cliffs reminds me of the sandstone cliffs in Devon, and ironstone cliffs in Dorset.

Not a lot of people know it, but gold has been found in headlands in South Devon, for example at Hope’s Nose near Kents Cavern in Torquay.

Here are some rather beautiful pics of that gold in leaf form
http://devon-gold.blog.co.uk/2009/04/30 ... #c19121875

Our orthodox cousins will tell all that it was a limestone quarry.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/devon/outdoors/wal ... e/05.shtml
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1188653