Missing Link

[spiral]

As part of his work on terraces....Spiral has developed a unhealthy interest in stones and quarries...It's a bugger knowing where to start as orthodoxy appears equally baffled....

Basically everyone accepts that the Ancients were using a lot of wood...Then along potter the Romans who would have (by common consent) needed a lot of stone, gravel etc...not least for their roads and some urban building, along with the odd villa...but nobody really knows where it came from (unless it's Purbeck marble).

The archaeologists haven't helped, until recently by showing little interest in "low status" stonework and guessing where the high status stuff has appeared from.

Your canny ancients were probably adept at passing off the bad for the good....a practice that appears to have carried on till the formation of THE... British Stone Classification (Stone Federation GB)

"There are many different classification schemes for stone, which have prompted the industry to simplify descriptions. This has led to many problems when, for instance, a stone laid as a granite is actually found to be a different stone type altogether and does not perform as expected. The British Standard BSEN12440 (Denomination of natural stone) addresses the classification problem and insists upon the correct identification of stone type and origin."

Thank heavens.

[Boreades]

Stone me!
I've been a bit worried about our local stone masons.
"Megaliths'R'Us" and "Menhirs without men hairs"
Perhaps their "ancient concrete" isn't as ancient as I expected?
Or are they fobbing me off with Roman concrete?

[Boreades]

Spiral's interest in concrete and stonework may yet prove to be very healthy. At least, healthy for the state of one's finances.

Like M'Lady Boreades, who was showing an interest in relocating to somewhere with space for more hens and less children. (We might pin a note to the front door to tell the children we've moved). The pics in the advert looked nice. But the small print said: "Concrete screening test has graded part of the ground floor accommodation as Class B."

We thought, now then, that's not the usual kind of florid prose one usually finds in an estate agents' blurb.

Sure enough, a quick search revealed that: Thousands of homeowners in the south-west are discovering their properties may be worth 25% less than they thought because they have "infected" concrete. These homes, built between 1900 and 1950 using cement mixed with waste from tin, lead and copper mines, are said to be "mundic" – a Cornish word for chemical pyrites embedded in the waste and which turn to sulphuric acid when water penetrates the concrete. The acid then causes the concrete to crumble.

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2009/n ... -mortgages

So - "mundic" - a new word for the TME vocabulary.
It's not just what they put in the pasties.

[TisILeclerc]

[Boreades]

[Mick Harper]

This is a truism. Since Frisian is the nearest same-family language to English, it follows that it is likely to be the closest relative to it. There has never been any paradox about the relationship between Anglo-Saxon and the Germanic languages generally, the paradoxes start when it comes to the relationship between Anglo-Saxon and English.

[Boreades]

[Boreades]

Besides the Isles of Scilly, at the opposite end of the British Isles, we have an even better example of what used to be much larger island(s).
Orkney.

[Mick Harper]

You've got a thick line round some islands. I don't know why they show it was all one island. You compared this to the Scillies but there was not even a line round them!

[Boreades]