A note from the administrator.
I have had to close the forum to new members. Registration is shut. I'm sorry for it - but I can no longer vouch for who comes through the door.
You may also find that certain older topics are no longer where you left them. I have, with great reluctance, removed a small number of threads and posts from this forum. I did so at the written request of a firm of solicitors acting for the landowner, who hold that the material touched on matters they would prefer were not aired in public.
I have complied, because I am one man and they are not. I want it set down plainly, here, that I did so under protest, and that I do not accept the grounds. Nothing removed was untrue. Nothing removed was anyone's business to suppress.
But I will not delete this board. What is left here stays, and you may read it for as long as I can keep the lights on. I have locked the doors; I have not burned the house. I have kept copies of everything. I would ask, gently, that those of you who hold anything of your own do the same.
E. Selwood
I have had to close the forum to new members. Registration is shut. I'm sorry for it - but I can no longer vouch for who comes through the door.
You may also find that certain older topics are no longer where you left them. I have, with great reluctance, removed a small number of threads and posts from this forum. I did so at the written request of a firm of solicitors acting for the landowner, who hold that the material touched on matters they would prefer were not aired in public.
I have complied, because I am one man and they are not. I want it set down plainly, here, that I did so under protest, and that I do not accept the grounds. Nothing removed was untrue. Nothing removed was anyone's business to suppress.
But I will not delete this board. What is left here stays, and you may read it for as long as I can keep the lights on. I have locked the doors; I have not burned the house. I have kept copies of everything. I would ask, gently, that those of you who hold anything of your own do the same.
E. Selwood
Search found 20 matches
- Tue Dec 29, 2020 10:15 am
- Forum: Earthworks, Barrows & Standing Stones
- Topic: Drone over the lynchets
- Replies: 1
- Views: 16
- Tue Sep 11, 2018 10:00 am
- Forum: Lost Villages & Deserted Settlements
- Topic: Shrunken-village earthworks - the lidar is showing it now
- Replies: 3
- Views: 23
<t>A word of caution to balance Col's enthusiasm, since I cannot help myself. Lidar shows you bumps, not dates. Ridge and furrow, drainage, wartime works, old quarrying and genuine medieval settlement can all look alike to the untrained eye. By all means find them, but log them as earthworks of unce...
- Sat Sep 16, 2017 7:20 pm
- Forum: Earthworks, Barrows & Standing Stones
- Topic: Footpath blocked up near the down - is this legal?
- Replies: 4
- Views: 32
They can, but only by a proper process. A right of way can be diverted or extinguished, but it requires an order from the highway authority, usually the county council, advertised publicly, with a window for objections. If it is on the definitive map it cannot simply be fenced off on a whim. What yo...
- Tue Oct 04, 2016 1:15 pm
- Forum: Earthworks, Barrows & Standing Stones
- Topic: Wansdyke - who built it and why?
- Replies: 6
- Views: 38
<t>I will be the awkward one, as ever. Parts of what gets mapped as Wansdyke reuse the line of the Roman road, and parts may be older boundary than people allow. Do not let anyone tell you it is one thing built in one go. Jordan, if you can get up onto it, walk a stretch, stand in the ditch and look...
- Tue Jul 21, 2015 10:30 am
- Forum: Lost Villages & Deserted Settlements
- Topic: The drowned village under the reservoir?
- Replies: 3
- Views: 22
<t>You are being half had. There genuinely are drowned villages in Britain; Derwent under Ladybower in the Peak District is the famous one, demolished and flooded for a reservoir in the 1940s, and yes its remains do show in droughts. But not here. We have no reservoir of that size on the downs; the ...
- Sat Jun 13, 2015 8:00 pm
- Forum: Earthworks, Barrows & Standing Stones
- Topic: Found a standing stone in my new garden?!
- Replies: 5
- Views: 27
<t>Easy now. Nine times in ten it is a sarsen, a natural stone, dragged to the field edge or garden boundary by some earlier occupier precisely because it was in the way. They are all over this country. That does not make it nothing, mind: a sarsen used as a boundary marker or a rubbing stone can be...
- Wed May 13, 2015 10:00 am
- Forum: Myths & Folk Tales
- Topic: The White Horses - which are old, which are Victorian?
- Replies: 3
- Views: 33
<t>I will allow you the poetry, Annie, since you allow me the dates. The scouring fairs are the genuinely old and interesting thing, you are quite right; Uffington was scoured within living memory and there are wonderful accounts of the cheese-rolling and the games. The figure is only kept alive by ...
- Tue May 12, 2015 11:00 am
- Forum: Myths & Folk Tales
- Topic: The White Horses - which are old, which are Victorian?
- Replies: 3
- Views: 33
The White Horses - which are old, which are Victorian?
A public service announcement, because it comes up every time a visitor posts a photograph. Most of our white horses are NOT ancient. We have a dozen or so hill figures in this county and only one, the Uffington horse just over the border, is genuinely prehistoric, Bronze or Iron Age, and it does no...
- Wed Sep 17, 2014 11:30 am
- Forum: Myths & Folk Tales
- Topic: Wayland's Smithy - leave your horse and a coin
- Replies: 3
- Views: 26
I have left a coin there myself, I confess, late one evening, more in the spirit of the thing than from any expectation. It was gone the next time I passed, though I dare say a walker pocketed it rather than a lamed god. But I will say the place earns its legend. It is the only barrow on the Ridgewa...
- Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:30 pm
- Forum: Myths & Folk Tales
- Topic: The Devil and the long barrow
- Replies: 3
- Views: 23
The folklorists would agree with you, Bran, on the mechanism at least, even those of us who keep the rods and robes at arm's length. When the new religion cannot account for an old monument it brands it the Devil's work; it is a way of forbidding the old reverence without quite denying the power of ...