Trade Secrets

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Re: Trade Secrets

Postby Mick Harper » 12:34 pm

Extract Twenty-Three

We have yet to determne just why tidal islands are important but by now it can hardly be seriously contested that tidal islands are ‘positioned’ at significant navigational points around the Channel Islands and in the Western Channel generally. How they were used is not perhaps the largest question because how they can be ‘positioned’ at the necessary junctions is surely the more pressing.

To an extent – though even this is to extend our present understanding of pre-historic capabilities – it is possible to ‘think small’. It is feasible for instance to create a tidal island by cutting out a section of an existing peninsular in order to form a tidal one at the end of the spit of land. Arduous no doubt and requiring of large amounts of labour but not technically so very difficult.

But here, at La Motte, the southernmost point of Jersey, and therefore the southernmost point of the whole of the Channel Islands, we shall have finally to grasp the nettle and accept that the Megalithics lived up to their name and actually ‘built big’. There really seems little doubt that La Motte is a completely artificial island, built specifically because it was – actually to create – the most southerly point of Jersey/ the Channel Islands.

Image

Here is Wiki's description:

The island has a grassy surface and is predominantly clay surrounded by rocks. In recent times efforts have been made to reduce erosion of the island by the construction of walls.

This appears to signal that the island was built by carrying large rocks out at low tide, covering the whole with sand and mud and then relying on (marron?) grass to bind the whole thing together. The fact that it requires State intervention now to keep it in being would appear to indicate that La Motte is of less than geological stature.

However, if there is any doubt, the term ‘motte’ actually means an artificial mound, as in the well-known phrase motte-and-bailey castle where the motte is the mound on which the castle is built. Motte is a Norman-French term so it would seem the locals were rather well versed in the technique. (Bailey is also Norman-French as in the Bailiwick of Jersey.)

But of course it is open to anyone to prefer to believe that it was nature that provided this tidal island at the very southernmost point of the Channel Islands and that the locals decided on a whim to claim that a very ordinary offshore island was in fact man-made.
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Re: Trade Secrets

Postby macausland » 3:12 pm

I imagine your 'marron' grass is marram grass. It stabilises sand dunes around the coast and thus helps other plants to get established.


http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/species/marram-grass

South Uist is known in gaelic as 'tir na mhurain' land of the marram grass. It's also well known for its causeways although whether these were originally megalithic I don't know.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejgWWVYc-K4

http://web.undiscoveredscotland.com/areawestsouth/
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Re: Trade Secrets

Postby Mick Harper » 3:28 pm

The etymolgy of marram is interesting. As per usual the etymologists get it ludicrously wrong:

Etymology: 17th Century marram, from Old Norse marálmr, from marr sea + hálmr haulm


The idea that Mar- is Old Norse is obviously nutty (unless the whole of Europe borrowed it from these Johnny-come-latelies because they had no word for 'sea'). And haulm is very British. It means the stems of domesticated or at any rate humanly-useful plants. It suggests that 'haulms' of 'sea-grass' were specifically planted. It remains to be seen whether marram grass is itself a domesticated species.
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Re: Trade Secrets

Postby hvered » 4:11 pm

Marram is a palindrome which may be intentional since it grows in the intermediate area between land and sea, in which case it would only 'work' in English. [The word marram doesn't appear to exist in Norwegian, Google's Swedish translation gives it as Strandhavre which sounds like a borrowing.]
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Re: Trade Secrets

Postby Mick Harper » 7:55 am

Extract Twenty-Four

Motte Island serves warning of the approaching hazard of Jersey and informs the mariner which way to go. We are not dealing with software at this stage but a glance at the very characteristic form of La Motte is indicative because it is repeated so often elsewhere. We can provisionally assign meaning to the forms:

Image

1. the long flat shape tells us that this is a 'signpost'
2. the careful fashioning of 'megalithic' ie big rock outcroppings at either end tell us which direction
3. to the east, the route is open sea but dangerous whereas
4. to the west, the way is punctuated with islands but safe.

Image

Presumably a ship can choose (perhaps depending whether it is powered by oar or by sail) whether to go east taking the direct but dangerous route via the Race of Alderney or the safer 'marked channel' through the islands. It is certainly true that the ‘Megalithic System’ embraces any Weymouth-bound ship if that ship chooses to head west because by travelling west from the most southerly point in Jersey (above the M in Map here):

Image

to the most southwesterly point of Jersey (above the first O in Google), a ship moves from one Megalithic island (La Motte) to the next, La Corbiere, a causewayed tidal island with a Venus Pool. At this point the mariner can choose whether to follow the Great Circle route via Lihou Island to Burgh Island or head north to Weymouth via a quite different, but equally Megalithic island.
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Re: Trade Secrets

Postby Mick Harper » 4:09 pm

Extract Twenty-Five

Thus far we have been dealing with two very peculiar and very particular geographical phenomena: the tidal island and the Venus Pool. As our point of reference to decide on the frequency of these 'peculiar and particular features', we have chosen ‘the south coast of England’ which has three tidal islands and no Venus Pools.

It therefore takes no great statistical insight to see that the chance of a tidal island having a Venus Pool in nature is so unlikely as to be close to non-existent. Our own brief researches have turned up three of them – Burgh Island, Lihou Island and Corbiere (Jersey) – on a single trading route which is ... whatever the term in English signifies 'beyond close to non-existent'.

Causeways are not natural so it is perhaps less significant that seven of the eight tidal islands we have discovered thus far (the exception is Motte) have causeways. As we have seen the term ‘causeway' also occurred in the apparently significantly situated Chausey Islands. But now, travelling north having rounded the southwestern corner of Jersey at Corbiere, we are to encounter a new Megalithic Phenomenon, the causewayed non-island.

Image

This is the first land any such north-bound ship will encounter

Image

Not Sark so much as Little Sark which is, as are all the Channel Island tidal islands described thus far, at a significant navigational position in relation to its mainland. In this case it is the most southerly extension. But since Little Sark is not a tidal island, how do we know it is Megalithic at all? A good clue is to be found at the most southerly point of this most southerly 'island':

Image
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Re: Trade Secrets

Postby Mick Harper » 4:05 pm

Extract Twenty-Six

Thus far we have been dealing with ‘geographical' features that are, at least to a degree, objectively definable. There are a few difficulties when it comes to scale and there are also some grey areas because what we can see now, what we can read about in attested historical accounts and what we can reasonably deduce was there in the more distant past is not always a clear time-line, but causewayed tidal islands and Venus Pools can be ‘agreed’ as objects, even when not agreed as to status.

But Sark (and as we shall see, the nearest coastline of the British mainland) has geographical objects that are merely odd. Though odd in a Megalithic way. Here is La Coupée, the isthmus between Great Sark and Little Sark:

Image

According to Wiki, La Coupée is

three metres (nine feet) wide and 90 metres (300 ft) in length, with a drop of close to 80 metres (260 ft) on either side.

The reader has to decide whether a ridge 300 feet long, nine feet across and 260 feet high is something that occurs more often in Hollywood adventure films than in real life. But the problem with all these phenomena is the same: because they do exist in real life and because they have no known human causation it is concluded they must be natural.

Since it is perfectly possible for nature to carve out La Coupées anywhere she wants to, there is no real way of arguing against this except, as with tidal islands and Venus Pools, to show beyond reasonable argument that nature is acting in a way that statistically makes no sense whatever. She must have had a helping hand.

Little Sark is positioned at the most southerly point of Sark in the direction of Jersey; Brecqhou is situated at the westernmost point of Sark opposite Guernsey. Here is Wiki on these two ‘islands’:

La Coupée ... is gradually being eroded and Little Sark will eventually become an island (a similar process is likely to have occurred with Brecqhou close to Sark's west coast.

Certainly Brecqhou looks like a nearly tidal island from above

Image

but even more Megalithic from the side, with its flat top and trailing rocky outcrops:

Image
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Re: Trade Secrets

Postby Mick Harper » 5:20 pm

Extract Twenty-Seven

But what is the navigational purpose of the Little Sark/Brecqou combination? All the causewayed tidal Channel Islands we have been dealing with so far have been situated around the periphery of the islands, guiding ships that are sailing into the archipelago. Little Sark and Brecqhou, it would seem, are for guiding ships out. For all ships transiting the islands on their way north to Weymouth, or the British mainland generally, there is a great band of obstacles barring the way:

Image

From east to west, there is the Race of Alderney, the island of Alderney itself, Burhou and (above all) the Casquets. These last being especially hazardous because they set up a swell so severe that it can broach ships that come anywhere within range. But avoiding these hazards by too wide a margin risks becoming entangled with Herm, Jethou and Guernsey so, by lining up Brecqhou and Little Sark, a safe middle passage is laid out.

This completes the list of Megalithic Channel Islands with one exception. This island seems to have a very limited navigational purpose but appears to be the omphalos of the whole system.
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Re: Trade Secrets

Postby Mick Harper » 4:21 pm

Extract Twenty-Eight

Jethou is a tiny island at the very heart of the Channel Islands:

Image

There seems little doubt that it is thoroughly Megalithic. Here is its classic jelly mould shape:

Image

and the trailing outposts telling the mariner which way to go:

Image

There is a Venus Pool, though since Jethou is a private island no pictures are available. But there is this from an old guide from years ago when vistors were permitted:

Continuing along the path a notice on the left indicates the path leading down to a large rock pool which is a natural formation, deepened by the present tenants by blocking outlets. The pool, in a position sheltered from most winds, is always deep enough for a swim and is useful when the tide is too low on the near-by beach.


There is present evidence of a past causeway between Herm and Jethou:

Image

which happily, by a rare stroke of survival, is confirmed in the historical record:

The first records of Herm's inhabitants in historic times are from the 6th century, when the island became a centre of monastic activity; the name 'Herm' supposedly derives from hermits who settled there …. However, the monks suffered from the inclement Atlantic; in 709, a storm washed away the strip of land which connected the island with the small uninhabited island of Jethou.
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Re: Trade Secrets

Postby Rocky » 8:03 am

7. The phrase “carry it over to Gaul, and after travelling overland for about thirty days, they finally bring their loads on horses to the mouth of the Rhone” implies that the tin was being taken to Normandy for onward transmission via the shortest overland route through France.

8. Burgh Island is the nearest part of the tin area to Normandy; St Michael's Mount is the furthest.

9. Burgh Island is Ictis.


The shortest overland route through France?

Why does it imply the tin was taken to Normandy?

The shortest overland route through France is to sail south from Cornwall to the mouth of the Garonne. Sail or barge cargo up the river to Toulouse, the point at which the river turns south toward its source in the Pyrenees. From here cargo is taken overland via the Carcassonne gap through Montpelier to the mouth of the Rhone, which in ancient times was probably Arles or even Beaucaire but certainly not Marseille. This has been the main trading thoroughfare from the Atlantic to the Med since ancient times.

St Michael's Mount is the best departure point for the Garonne.
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