Megalithic shipping and trade routes

[macausland]

It's obviously a star map giving directions to the local pubs, of which there are many.

The 'Troy' type mazes look intriguing as well. They must have had some importance seeing as they turn up as land features and now carefully mad diagrams.

Perhaps this stone is the equivalent of a school blackboard where information of some kind was passed on.

I hope the stone will be well protected from the attentions of local graffiti artistes who think it is essential to pass on their artistic talent to the rest of the world.

[Boreades]

I have to say, well done sir! That was fast work, you must be thirsty after that.

As a reward, get on your bike and dash down to Wadworths Brewery, to investigate the local members of the Beerage. Be sharp! You have to get there before the Tour Of Britain cycle race.



The tours are £6, with beer sampling at the end.
http://www.wadworthvisitorcentre.co.uk/ ... tours.html
(Apply for a TME expenses refund in the usual manner)

TME's questions:
When did hops take over from barley?
And why?
Do they still make barley beers?
How did they move barley/hops in the days before railways?
Have they always used Shire Horses?
Where do Shire Horses come from?
Why is Kent big in hop production?

[macausland]

Elevation to the Beerage already? Things can only get better. I knew Cameron was desperate but I didn't know it was that bad.

I've jumped on to the cross bars of a lost French velomaniac and told him to take me to Wadsworths immediately.

It's a short hop from Calais to Kent so I imagine they hopped in a froggy kind of way.

They obviously said 'zat is barely beer 'av a 'op'. They do mangle the language somewhat. Which is why we don't bother. Why speak anything else when you've been blessed with English?

They moved barley and hops in the same way we do, quick trip out t'back t'feed t'fishes.

Shire horses come from Shire horses.

Clark Kent was infected with kryptonite which meant he was forever jumping huge distances. Is it a bird, is it a plane, is it a Shire horse?

Funny thing is we are told beer was made with barley in Iran where no doubt they no longer make it. A bit like whisky really, the arabs invented that and left it to us to put it to good use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer

And why waste barley on beer when you can make it into wine? We are in the common market after all.

http://www.chilternbrewery.co.uk/buy/bo ... arley-wine

Two and sixpenny postal order please, in the post now.

[Boreades]

Wadworths is in Devizes.

Just a hop, skip and a jump from Durrington Malsters.

https://www.academia.edu/217111/The_Dur ... _Maltsters

[Mick Harper]

How did they move barley/hops in the days before railways?

This is an important question. In TME we state that the Romans (and the Iron Age Brits) were able to shift barley in exportable quantities but it is assumed that it is never worthwhile transporting beers, ciders, wines in bulk because they are just not worth weight-to-value. (Unlike barely they're all mostly water.) Which is why Megalithia Inc got involved in, for instance, drugs, fortified wine, distilled alcohol etc. But for this reason, local Megalithia might well be in the hands of pub landlords, apple orchardeers, grape pressers etc.

So perhaps the beerage came into existence when technology (the shire horse plus roads?) allowed the two to become one.

[Boreades]

There seem to be some similarities between the production of tin ore & barley and where it was refined/brewed into tin metal / beer. In both cases, you need a much bigger volume of fuel / water to convert it into the desired product. That's why you move the ore/barley to where the fuel/water/demand is, instead of the other way round.

Also, and with barley especially, the weight/volume ratio is a lot lower than beer i.e. a given volume of beer weighs a lot more than the same volume of barley. So much kinder on your donkey or ship to load up to the max with barley instead of beer.

This is the kind of simple supply-chain logistics that defeats our ortho-archaeologists who, when confronted with evidence of (e.g.) tin ingots on a shipwreck in Salcombe, insist that the tin was being imported. Like coals to Newcastle.

[Boreades]

This talk of the Beerage reminds me of a few mundane things that the ortho-historians never bother with (because it's not to do with High Caste Religious Artefacts, Wars, and the like)

How do you preserve food?

We hardly give it a thought, just stick it in the fridge/freezer.

But what would you do, 2K+ years ago, without refrigeration or freezing? Especially when everybody knows there's a winter coming. There's always a winter coming, it happens every year.

Most people fermented their foods. This supplies necessary probiotic bacteria, which many people supplement with today since we eat natural fermented foods so infrequently. (See the adverts for probiotic yoghurt)

Wisdom passed down through the ages says that a varied diet with foods found abundant in nature is best. In almost all cultures this means a diet, as available, of fresh or dried wild meats and fish, fermented cheeses, fresh whole or fermented milk, butter, eggs, fresh, dried, or fermented fruits, fresh or fermented vegetables, whole grains (these were fermented normally, even if dried), some beans, and water or fermented beverages to drink.

In short - (the executive summary) - it's fresh or it's fermented. Full stop. Anything in between fresh and fermented was as likely to kill you as do you any good.

[Boreades]

Here at Chateau Boreades, m'lady is very keen on the quality control. Especially to do with sampling the fermented grapes. (It's a hard life, but somebody has to do it)

I make do with bottling our fermented vegetables - a.k.a. pickling everything.
Pickled Onions, Pickled Beetroot, Green Bean Chutney, the list goes on & on.

The only mystery for me is - what did our TME ancestors put it all in?

[macausland]

You missed out drying food. I remember on Norwegian ships they used to dry fish they had caught. These fish would dry out in the sun, wind and salt spray and be available for anyone on watch to cut chunks out of to nibble at if they got a bit peckish.

Drying food also shrinks it so you can get more of it into a smaller space. The North American Indians have a mixture of dried meat and fat that they call pemmican. This can last for years. A bit like dwarf bread I suppose. But it is highly nutritious and an excellent way of preserving meat.

What did they use for containers?

I would suggest baskets of some sort for dried stuff. Easily made from grass, willow and other tree branches or tree bark.

Perhaps if a basket were coated on the inside with clay this would make it ideal for holding liquid. Perhaps a stew could be made in such a container by putting it into a fire pit and letting it cook for a long time. It could be that the clay became hard and could be used again as a pot of sorts.

Animal skins have always been used to hold liquids.

[hvered]

Animal skins have always been used to hold liquids.

Recently I came across a piece about churches in Holland, built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that had foundations of oxhide though whether this is simply a Dutch legend wasn't clear.

It may be to do with having watertight foundations, a top priority for Dutch masons surely, though archaeologists seem to reject this explanation (perhaps rightly since leather rots in water) but in any case it raises an intriguing possible connection with our leather compasses proposition, churches being traditionally sited on megalithic/ navigation nexuses. There may be a case for seeing hide-covered drums, sometimes likened to 'horses', as a shaman's leather compass.