Keeping your feet dry, 8,000BC

[Mick Harper]

Strewth, I can't even remember. Probably the first declared gay cabinet minister in the world. Don't dismiss the idea as ridiculous unless you can name an earlier one. (It may the first in a major country if you can.) But it may be something else entirely.

[hvered]

I remember reading that he is the longest-lived person with HIV and certainly the first minister to openly declare the fact. Being a Tory it wasn't made much of.

[Mick Harper]

Or Labour as we call it in this country.

[hvered]

No wonder he was sacked.

[Boreades]

Is that why Peter Mandelson was sacked? (confused icon)

[Boreades]

Wrenching the thread rudely back to the original topic (Keeping your feet dry).

While peering at OS maps of Devon and the locations of Dartmoor's motley collection of stone circles, some childhood memories of yomping across Dartmoor came back to me. Most of them involved wet feet. It was blooming difficult to walk across Dartmoor and keep your feet dry. There are very few pathways that help you do that. Like the Greater Ridgeway, the ancient tracks have to do a lot of wandering around to stay on the highest ridges and driest ground. It doesn't help that the River Exe goes almost all the way to the north coast.

For a traveller starting (say) somewhere in Somerset, to avoid crossing lots of water anywhere you'd have to walk a fair way across North Devon, as far as South Molton, before turning sharp left and heading south towards Chulmleigh, North Tawton and Okehampton.

It's suddenly dawned on me that this driest ridgeway route goes through a lot of the "Druid" places. That is, the Drews, Nemetons, Nymets, Nymphs, Nempnett and Nemetostatio.

[Boreades]

But why?

[TisILeclerc]

But why?

Didn't you alert us all somewhere, probably on the page with red hair, of the theory that all the high ground areas were really islands surrounded by water after the end of the ice age? Presumably it was natural to stick to the high ground rather than splodging through shark infested waters.

Did the druids come up with the rest of the population after their Spanish holiday?

Or were they always here? Or did they come later? Or were they home grown once everyone got settled and didn't know what to do? You know the sort of thing. Get back off the holidays and you can't be bothered to do much. Laze about looking at the clock waiting for opening time. What you need is a good druid or two to whip you into shape. 'See that big stone laddie? Pull it over that mountain and stick it in the ground. And don't ask why.'

[Boreades]

Ah, yes, thanks for the memory nudge. The contractors hadn't finished putting in the drainage. Or it was a boggy marsh. Or something like that?

[hvered]

Since Dartmoor was a Bronze Age industrial area, large sections would presumably be off limits to the public, rather like MoD areas today. There are still noticeably few roads today.

I was wondering about nemet words on the AEL site as the Cornish 'emmet' means an outsider, tourist, incomer, so perhaps a nemet became 'an emet'. Nemet names are not associated with trees and on the face of it have nothing to do with Druid sacred groves and so forth.