Photo of the comedian Norman Maclean taken from The Urban Clansman, the blog of the Galgael Trust

From the Guardian -

Its freshly oiled pine hull is as fragrant as a wet winter woodland. Modelled on a thousand-year-old prototype, this hulking birlinn – a Gaelic longboat – will soon be ready to sail out along the Clyde and up the west coast in homage to the time when water was Scotland’s main thoroughfare. It is taking form in an old iron foundry in Glasgow’s Govan, home to a uniquely imaginative community project called the GalGael Trust.

Here, local volunteers teach carpentry, saw-milling and metalwork, as well as boat-building and sailing – the skills so valued in the once thriving shipyards that secured for this area its reputation as the workshop of the empire. It was the inexorable decline in demand for such skills that gifted Govan the reality it contends with today: paralysing levels of unemployment, chronic alcohol and drug addiction, and habitual violence on the streets. The fractured life stories of the men who come here to learn bear witness to all this.

The GalGael philosophy addresses what many an academic study has theorised: that deprivation has psychic as well as economic consequences; that social exclusion is ameliorated as much by a sense of place and heritage as it is by targeted benefits and instrumental interventions; and that hope flourishes in the most unlikely soil. Crucially, given Govan’s history, it recognises that the future is informed by the past.

Perched on a high-backed chair as expertly rendered as anything you’d find in Heal’s, Jinksy tells of 10 lost years sitting in the house, “becoming a vegetable”, after he was laid off as a council roadsweeper. Then a pal told him about the GalGael. “I’d lost trust in people, but there’s a family feeling here. I’ve always been an outside person and this brings you back to the land. It gives you an idea of place.” Over the years, the GalGael has helped hundreds like him to regain confidence in their working abilities, relationships and community.

Gehan, who set up the trust in the mid-90s with her late partner, explains how the act of building and sailing a boat in the same way that one’s ancestors did offers an immediate connectedness that is different from academically acquired history. The fact is that many city-dwelling Scots are only three or four generations removed from rural living, and connection to the land looms large in the national psyche. Many descendants of the half-million Highlanders driven off their crofts to make way for sheep-farming now live in poverty in Glasgow. While the Scottish land reform movement has scored recent successes with community buyouts like those on the isles of Eigg and Gigha, the GalGael is restoring an area of derelict farmland in Argyll.

It is thus entirely appropriate that some of the men working here have recently enjoyed a foray into acting, as extras in a television series on Scottish history. The History of Scotland, which concluded last Sunday on BBC Scotland, proved controversial, with many senior academics lamenting its broad strokes and glaring omissions. This reaction was perhaps inevitable, given the startling lack of popular treatment of Scottish history, as well as the legacy of poor and piecemeal teaching of the national heritage in schools. For many Scots, knowledge of their history begins and ends with William Wallace – and Mel Gibson’sBraveheart version of the man at that.

The 10-part series, fronted by the archaeologist Neil Oliver, was a watchable introduction, and avoided the usual shortbread-and-saltires mythologising, even tackling the country’s role in the slave trade. But it remains to be seen if this will serve to kick-start public examination of Scotland’s political, social and cultural past, or be seen as the history box ticked for another decade. It’s worth noting that on the same network Andrew Marr has been offering an examination of just the first few decades of British 20th-century history with the same amount of airtime that Oliver had.

Homecoming, a year-long festival celebrating the Scottish diaspora that concluded on St Andrew’s Day, prompted further examination of the national self-image with the news that the centrepiece Clan Gatheringevent in Edinburgh, which attracted claymore obsessives from across the globe, had made a £600,000 loss. Those clan chiefs, so beloved of our ancestry-minded American and Canadian cousins, continue to draw resentment over their collusion in the Highland clearances.

An organisation like the GalGael is local by intention, a bespoke vision that is constantly retuned and refreshed by its participants, rather than a one-size-fits-all template imposed from Holyrood or a charitable behemoth in London. To recognise its worth is not to submit to David Cameron’s big society rhetoric, but to see how small-scale originals like this one can only succeed alongside centrally governed support structures.

If it can teach us something nationally it is that, in understanding our past, we must face the faultlines of Highland or lowland, Catholic or Protestant, nationalist or unionist that have come to define the nation, though not always the people within it. And particularly at a moment when independence is once again top of the political agenda.

Moreover, if a sense of history is about a grasp of narrative and one’s place in it, this can only assist us in imagining the future. Last year theGlasgow 2020 project, funded by Demos, found that inhabitants of some of the most deprived areas continued to tell stories of optimism for the future of their families, friends and neighbourhoods. The true legacy of history can be hope.

From YouTube -

From the Galgael website -

Folk without an enriched sense of their culture are like trees with shallow roots… To our minds, this analogy describes the loss of identity and sense of meaningless that creates vulnerability to the vagaries of the worst excesses of modern life. A situation steadily worsened by the consistent undermining of the bonds of community.

Agencies picking up the pieces and the tab for tackling the symptoms of this rootlessness are essential. But beyond this – what is called for is nothing less than to reconvene a sense of ‘peoplehood’; deep roots for an identity that builds resilience, embodies shared values, and in the same breath, transcends narrow forms of nationalism.

The very name GalGael is our way of re-rooting these notions of identity in nourishing ground and recognises that there is both a bit of the stranger and a bit of the native in us all. In history, Gal Gaidheal were a 9thC people; the Gal – the ‘strange or foreign’ Norse, embraced by the Gael – the ‘heartland people’.

As a modern day people, GalGael folk have been re-visioning inclusive forms of community that build on our interdependence rather than slip into dependency culture, and that explore our collective responsibilities, not just our rights. From this stand point, we are reweaving the fabric of our families and communities, experimenting with notions of clanship, extended family and kinship.

‘by the people, for the people’ by kayodek

From the BBC -

The anger in the air is palpable. The ordinary people hold the political class in contempt.

The government is failing, as war and economic catastrophe are dealt with in increasingly unconvincing fashion by second-rate public servants. There is, for the first time in a generation, a sense of revolution brewing.

This is not today’s Britain. It is England in 1381, the year that witnessed one of the greatest popular risings in our history: the Peasants’ Revolt.

Between May and November that year, England was seized by spasms of popular rebellion, provoked by poll taxes and a disastrous war, and underpinned by the common belief that the government was a pack of scoundrels.

Towns and villages from Somerset to Scarborough rose against their rulers, beating and sometimes killing MPs, lawyers, landowners and politicians, tearing down their homes and vandalising their land.

Bloody revenge

At the heart of the rising was a march on London on Corpus Christi weekend (Thursday 13 to Saturday 15 June).

Traditionally this was a time of mystery plays and festive processions. In 1381, the main procession consisted of villagers from the Thames estuary marching along the pilgrim road between Canterbury and London, burning houses and taking political prisoners as they protested against their venal, incompetent masters.

The peasant’s revolt ransacked London before it was put down

When the protestors, led by their general Wat Tyler and the maverick preacher John Ball, reached London, they found they had significant common cause with the townsmen.

The London populace bore long-held grudges towards their own ruling elites – which included the oligarchic, super-rich merchant traders in the City as well as the hapless courtiers who governed in the name of 14-year old King Richard.

Common fury with the state of lordship bound rural and urban rebels in a compact to clean up government.

So the town mice opened their gates to the country mice, and together they all set about the cats.

At first there were organised protests, attacks on specific, symbolic landmarks: the Savoy Palace, home of the powerful and unpopular duke of Lancaster, was burned to the ground; the Temple, home of the legal profession, was sacked. Prisons were broken open and the Tower of London, where the government had holed up, was besieged.

Demonstrations became riots. A chopping block was set up at Cheapside, where the street ran sticky with the blood of the condemned.

Kind Richard II was only 14 years old when faced with the rebellion

The Archbishop of Canterbury had his head hacked off on Tower Hill. The Treasurer was murdered, as – in Suffolk – was a Chief Justice.

Some 140 Flemish merchants and their families were butchered on the banks of the Thames, in a shocking xenophobic massacre.

But for the luck of the young king, Richard II, and the fortitude of a few good men around him led by Mayor of London, William Walworth, the City would have been burned to the ground.

Tyler and his mob were eventually defeated at Smithfield, but it took nearly six months to calm the rest of the country.

Political revolt

The summer of discontent left a profound mark on the English political consciousness.

A few lines written, prior to the rebellion, by the Kentish poet John Gower, were suddenly recognised as an important tenet of government.

“There are three things of such a sort that they produce merciless destruction when they get the upper hand,” he wrote.

“One is a flood of water, another is a raging fire and the third is the lesser people, the common multitude; for they will not be stopped by either reason or by discipline.”

I have thought many times during the past months that our politicians would benefit from revisiting the events of the Peasants’ Revolt.

In many ways it is a tale of mutual misunderstanding: the ordinary folk thought the worst of their politicians, and politicians saw their people as an economic resource, to be taxed and tormented as the necessities of government demanded.

The Black Death was a major factor in fermenting anti-government feeling

This government, like the government in 1381, has been caught out by a global crisis of unprecedented severity.

In the fourteenth century it was the Black Death, which killed 40% of Europe’s population.

The government’s reaction – to impose labour laws that stifled economic recovery but preserved the social hierarchy, was vastly unpopular, for it prevented ordinary people from improving their lives.

Now, it is the collapse in global credit which has brought a different sort of misery to millions.

No doubt there are many differences between 1381 and 2009. They were medieval, we are modern. And history never repeats itself as exactly as historians sometimes wish.

But if I were an MP today, I would make it my business to learn the course and the lessons of 1381 by heart. Then I would give thanks that there are no longer any chopping blocks at Cheapside.

Dan Jones is the author of Summer of Blood.

Once upon a time, when Saint Columba was traveling through the country of the Picts to meet the Pictish King in Inverness, he had to cross the River Ness. When he reached the shore there was a group of people, Picts and Brethren both, burying an unfortunate man who had been bitten and mauled to death by a water-monster. Columba ordered one of his people to swim across the river and retrieve the man’s boat, that was adrift, so that he might cross.

On hearing this, Lugneus Mocumin stripped down to his tunic and plunged in to the water. The monster saw him swimming, and having tasted blood, broke the surface of the water and made for him. Everyone who was watching was horrified, and hid their eyes in terror.

Everyone except Columba, who raised his holy hand and inscribed the Cross in the empty air. Calling upon the name of God, he commanded the savage beast, saying: “Go no further! Do not touch the man! Go back at once!”

Lugneus brought the boat back, unharmed and everyone was astonished. And the heathen savages who were present were overcome by the greatness of the miracle which they themselves had seen, and magnified the God of the Christians.

- adapted from the Serene Dragon and Green Canticle websites.

*

Loch Ness through Fire, by Citril.

Celtic Christians valued the natural environment for its own sake. They valued times of quiet in solitary and often wild places, where they could read Scripture, meditate and pray.

Because they lived close to the natural environment, it is not surprising that Celtic Christians discovered the immanence of God. Their poetry often echoes those Psalms which speak of God in nature (Ps. 19, 89, 98 ) suggesting a similar spiritual process at work.

The following extract of a poem in the Celtic psaltery is attributed to St. Columba in Iona:

“Delightful it is to stand on the peak of a rock, in the bosom of the isle, gazing on the face of the sea.

I hear the heaving waves chanting a tune to God in heaven; I see their glittering surf.

I see the golden beaches, their sands sparkling; I hear the joyous shrieks of the swooping gulls.

I hear the waves breaking, crashing on the rocks, like thunder in heaven. I see the mighty whales…

Contrition fills my heart as I hear the sea; it chants my sins, sins too numerous to confess.

Let me bless almighty God, whose power extends over the sea and land, whose angels watch over all.

Let me study sacred books to calm my soul; I pray for peace, kneeling at heaven’s gates.

Let me do my daily work, gathering seaweed, catching fish, giving food to the poor.”

- a psalm of St Columba from Green Canticle.

*

A depiction of Saint Columba in about 565AD, urging Picts on Iona to become Christian, from The Independent.

Many legends have gathered about Columba, but there is also some historical data concerning his many works in the writings of Bede and Adamnan.  According to one story, Saint Patrick of Ireland foretold Columba’s birth in a prophecy:

He will be a saint and will be devout,
He will be an abbot, the king of royal graces,
He will be lasting and forever good;
The eternal kingdom be mine by his protection.

Columba was a man of tremendous energy with a vigorous personality. Born Colum MacFhelin MacFergus,1 in Ireland in 521 A.D., the great-great-grandson of Niall of the Nine Hostages, an Irish king, on his father’s side;2 while Columba’s mother was also descended from a king of Leinster and was related to the royalty of Scottish Dalriada.3 Columba, who had the potential to become a king in Ireland, instead, chose to give his full service to the mission of the King of heaven.4 Early in life Columba showed scholarly and clerical ability. He entered the monastic life, and almost immediately set forth on missionary travels. Even before ordination in 551, he had founded monasteries at Derry and Durrow, and is said to have founded as many as 300 churches and monasteries during his lifetime.5

Columba had a love for literature, and tradition asserts that, sometime around 560, he became involved in a dispute with his mentor, Abbot Finnian, over a manuscript Columba copied at the scriptorium—intending to keep the copy. Abbot Finnian disputed Columba’s right to keep the copy. The dispute eventually led to the Battle of Cul Dreimnhe in 561, during which many men were killed—perhaps 3000.6 As penance for these deaths, Columba suggested that he work as a missionary in Scotland to help convert as many people as had been killed in the battle.

He exiled himself from Ireland, and in 563, Columba and a dozen companions set out for northern Britain, where the 5th century Picts had lost territory to the previous Irish kings, and were still generally ignorant of Christianity. The religion of the Picts—Druidism fok law —were the beliefs which prevailed in the rest of Britain and Celtic Gaul.7 Historian Adamnan records that Columba’s efforts at conversion were strenuously opposed by the diabolical arts and incantations of the Druid priests. Fountains were particular objects of veneration, as well as heavenly bodies and oak trees, a superstitious awe which many fountains and wells are regarded with today—likely a remnant of the ancient Pictish religion. Druidism acknowledges a Supreme Being, whose name was synonymous with the Eastern Baal, and was visibly represented by the sun and sun-worship. Many of the antiquities scattered across north Scotland, such as stone circles, monoliths, sculptured stones, etc., are believed to be connected with the Druid religion.8

Columba was kindly received by Conal, king of British Scots, and allowed to preach, convert, and baptize. He was also given possession of the isle of Iona, where, according to legend, his tiny boat had washed ashore. (The island was known by the simple name “I” changed by Bede into “Hy” and Latinized by the monks into “Iova” or “Iona.”)9 Here Columba founded the celebrated monastery which became a school for missionaries and the center for the conversion of the Picts, as well as the only center of literacy and education in the region, at that time. Says the historian Bede, “The monastry of Iona, like those previously founded by Columba in Ireland, was not a retreat for solitaries whose chief object was to work out their own salvation; it was a great school of Christian education, and was specially designed to prepare and send forth a body of clergy trained to the task of preaching the Gospel among the heathen.”10 From Iona Scotland, his disciples went out to found other monasteries to the west in Ireland, and to the east the famous Lindisfarne monastery in Northumbria, among others.

As a close advisor to the Gaelic king Conal11 of Dalriada, Columba served as a diplomat to neighboring kingdoms in Ireland and Pictland. (Dalriada was a Gaelic kingdom that extended on both sides of the North Channel: in the northwest of Ireland, and western Scotland. One of the little known facts about Scotland is that the county of Argyll received extensive immigration from the Irish of northern Ireland, known as “Scoti” and had become an Irish, i.e. “Scottish” area. Despite heavy onslaughts from the Picts, the Dalriada of the Scottish mainland continued to expand. From 574 to 606, Dalriada was ruled by one of its most dynamic and successful kings, Aedan mac Gabran. In the mid-800′s, King Kenneth I. MacAlpin brought the Picts permanently under Dalriadic rule. Thereafter, the whole country was known as “Scotland;” thus was the end of the Picts of the ancient British Isles.)12

Attended by his disciples, Columba made long journeys through the Highlands of Scotland, as far as Aberdeen, spreading the light of faith in God and instructing the people in the truths of the Gospel. For thirty years, he evangelized, studied, wrote, and governed his monastery at Iona. He supervised his monks in their work in the fields and workrooms, in their daily worship and Sunday Eucharist, and their study and teaching.

There are many stories of miracles performed through Columba during his work with the Picts. Columba perceived that by converting King Brude, one of the known leaders of the ancient Picts, it would lead to the success of bringing over the whole nation to the worship of the true God. So he visited the pagan king Bridei (or Brude), king of Fortriu, at his base in Inverness,13 where it is said that the king had the gates locked against Columba. But that when he arrived at the king’s castle, Columba made the sign of the cross and the gates opened of their own accord. King Brude was so impressed that he opened his home—and soul—to Columba, becoming a devoted follower of Jesus Christ.14

Among the many accomplishments of Columba, he was also an impressive sailor.15 Columba was known for his joyous love of life.16 As well as a man of action, Columba was also a poet, whose Latin and Gaelic poems reveal a man very sensitive to the beauty of his surroundings.17 He is also credited with transcribing 300 books personally.18 At the height of the Iona monastery, it produced The Book of Kells, a masterwork of Irish Celtic symbols, art and literature. The community Columba founded at Iona became the center for an early renaissance where books, art, music and culture were preserved at the on-set of the Christian destruction in Dark Ages from Rome.19 To keep a succession of the teachers of Christianity, Columba established a monastery in every district of the Pictish territories,20 and from these monasteries, for many ages, came men of authenticity who watered and tended the good seed planted by Columba.

Columba had great influence among the neighboring princes, and they often asked for his advice. They submitted to him their quarrels, which were frequently settled by Columba.21

Columba died peacefully in 597, while working on a copy of the Psalter. He had put down his pen, rested a few hours, and at Matins was found dead before the Altar, a smile on his face. He is quoted by his biographer Adamnan as having said, “This day is called in the sacred Scriptures a day of rest, and truly to me it will be such, for it is the last of my life and I shall enter into rest after the fatigues of my labors.”22

For many years after his passing, Columba’s influence was felt in the Celtic lands and abroad. Columba’s mission at Iona led to the conversion of Scotland and of the north of England.23 Columba’s life contributed to Ireland becoming one of the monastic hubs of Europe, with the culture of Ireland dominated by monasteries and monastic leaders. Other Irish monks became missionaries and converted much of northern Europe to Christianity.24

1 Saint Columba. www.geocities.com/c_brundage/saints/col2.htm?200718
2 Columba: Early life in Ireland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columba
3 Saint Columba. www.geocities.com/c_brundage/saints/col2.htm?200718
4 St. Columba or Columcille 521-597. www.cin.org/columba.html
5 Saint Columba. www.geocities.com/c_brundage/saints/col2.htm?200718
6 St. Columba. http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=419
7 General History of the Highlands – The Druids: www.electricscotland.com/history/genhist/hist17.html
8 General History of the Highlands – The Druids: www.electricscotland.com/history/genhist/hist17.html
9 General History of the Highlands – St. Columba: www.electricscotland.com/history/genhist/hist18.html
10 General History of the Highlands – St. Columba: www.electricscotland.com/history/genhist/hist18.html
11 General History of the Highlands – St. Columba: www.electricscotland.com/history/genhist/hist18.html
12 Dalriada. www.lyberty.com/encyc/articles/dalriada.html
13 Columba: Scotland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columba
14 Saint Columba. www.geocities.com/c_brundage/saints/col2.htm?200718
15 St. Columba or Columcille 521-597. www.cin.org/columba.html
16 Saint Columba. www.geocities.com/c_brundage/saints/col2.htm?200718
17 St. Columba or Columcille 521-597. www.cin.org/columba.html
18 Columba: Scotland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columba
19 Who is Saint Columba? www.columba.org/about/qanda.html#whois
20 General History of the Highlands – St. Columba: www.electricscotland.com/history/genhist/hist18.html
21 General History of the Highlands – St. Columba: www.electricscotland.com/history/genhist/hist18.html
22 Episcopal Book of Prayer on Lesser Feasts and Fasts.
23 St. Columba or Columcille 521-597. www.cin.org/columba.html
24 Medieval Sourcebook: Rule of St. Columba 6 th Century. www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/columba-rule.html

- from the St Columba Retreat House website.

From Showcaves.com -

Goat’s Hole Cave, better known under the name Paviland Cave, has its important entry in science history. It is the place where for the very first time the discovery of fossil human remains is recorded. Rev. William Buckland discovered in 1823 a skeleton, and he was the first who recognized that is was a remain of a former time, and wrote about it. Subsequently the new sciene archeology developed, so this is the birth place of a new science.

However, each birth is connected with pain, and the discovery of William Buckland is connected with complete error: he misjudged both its age and its sex. [...] Buckland believed the skeleton was from Roman times. And as it was discovered with decorative items, including perforated seashell necklaces and ivory jewelry, he thought it was a woman. The person was covered by red ochre, so soon it was commonly known as Red Lady of Paviland.

Modern archaeology identified the Red Lady of Paviland as a man, no older than 21, who lived 29,000 years ago (26,350 ± 550 BP, OxA-1815) at the end of the Upper Paleolithic Period. The skeleton was found along with a mammoth’s skull, which has since been lost. The formal burial ceremony, the number and kind of items, suggest he was a tribal chieftain. This is the oldest known burial in the UK and western Europe.

When the man was buried, the cave was about 120km from the sea. The cave was overlooking a plain similar to present day Siberia with tundra vegetation. The ice sheet of the Devensian Glaciation, the last ice age, advanced towards the site, and the weather was cold, 10°C in summer, -20° in winter.

From British Archaeology (published Oct 2001) -

Goat’s Hole cave, Paviland, on the Gower Peninsula in South Wales, has long been renowned as the site of one of the best-known prehistoric burials in Britain – the notoriously misnamed ‘Red Lady of Paviland’ which was discovered in 1823. Yet it has taken archaeologists nearly two centuries to unravel the mysteries of this remarkable site, with the definitive report published only last year.

The story begins not in 1823 but during the previous year, when Daniel Davies and the Rev John Davies, respectively surgeon and curate at Port Eynon on the south coast of Gower, explored the cave and found animal bones, including the tusk of a mammoth. The Talbot family of Penrice Castle was informed and Miss Mary Theresa Talbot, then the oldest unmarried daughter, joined an expedition to the site and found ‘bones of elephants’ on 27 December 1822.

William Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford University and a correspondent of that well-connected family, was contacted. He arrived on 18 January 1823 and spent a week at Goat’s Hole – a week in which his famous discovery took place. He later wrote:

[I found the skeleton] enveloped by a coating of a kind of ruddle . . . which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the distance of about half an inch [12mm] around the surface of the bones . . . Close to that part of the thigh bone where the pocket is usually worn surrounded also by ruddle [were] about two handfuls of the Nerita littoralis [periwinkle shells]. At another part of the skeleton, viz in contact with the ribs [were] forty or fifty fragments of ivory rods . . . [also] . . . some small fragments of rings made of the same ivory and found with the rods . . . Both rods and rings, as well as the Nerite shells, were stained superficially with red, and lay in the same red substance that enveloped the bones. (Buckland, Reliquiae Diluvianae, 1823)

In the field, Buckland had identified the skeleton as male, suggesting that the bones were those of a Customs Officer murdered by smugglers. By the time of publication later that year, however, the gender had changed with a new and better story.

The ochre-stained skeleton had become a ‘painted lady’ who serviced the needs of the Roman soldiers garrisoned in the camp on the hill above the cave. It was a good story. But by the early years of the 20th century, it could be seen not to add up: the burial was male, the mammoth ivories were Palaeolithic and not modern products made from fossil ivory as Buckland had claimed, and the camp was an Iron Age promontory fort.

Buckland had found a burial, representing a single event in the human history of the site, but found no more than a few flints, even though the site has since yielded thousands. Indeed, in subsequent excavations the site was to produce diagnostic or dated material – flint, ivory and bone artefacts, and the burial itself – spanning more than half a dozen Palaeolithic events over at least the period 35,000-11,000 BP (before present). Buckland did not know this. What he did know, as Dean of Westminster and Curate at Christchurch – or strictly speaking what he believed – was that the bones of such animals as mammoth and woolly rhino found in the cave could not be contemporary with the burial since such species, he thought, had not made it onto the Ark and so had been drowned in Noah’s, or an earlier, flood. His belief in such a deluge is shown by the title of his book, Reliquiae Diluvianae (‘Evidence of the Flood’).

He therefore regarded the ‘Red Lady’ as intrusive, a reasonable inference given the intellectual context of his day and the undeveloped nature of archaeological excavation as a technique. But did he really miss the flints because of his mindset? The answer may be yes, but Buckland’s elevation drawing of the site suggests that the burial may have lain at the lowest level then exposed. The many thousands of lithics, now interpreted as earlier than the burial, were not found until 85 years later through the excavations of William Sollas, also holder of Oxford’s Chair of Geology.

The ‘Red Lady’ would now be interpreted as a ceremonial interment of the Gravettian period of the Palaeolithic (c 28-21,000 BP), such as are now known across Europe from Paviland to Moscow and south to Portugal. But at the time when the ‘Red Lady’ was unearthed she – or rather he – was not only the first such burial to be found but also the first human fossil ever to have been recovered anywhere in the world.

The radiocarbon dating technique was not invented until the late 1940s, so neither Buckland nor Sollas could have known the true age of the interment. Sollas did, however, work on the assumption that the burial was Palaeolithic. He confirmed the burial site by finding a spread of ochre associated with ivory rods parallel to the cave wall, and added to our understanding of how the body – which was incomplete at the time of discovery probably because of marine erosion – had been interred.

The bones were deeply stained with red ochre, and the grave goods – ivory rod and bracelet fragments, and perforated periwinkle shells – were all similarly stained. In addition, small limestone blocks may have been placed at the head and feet. Perhaps, too, the skull of a mammoth found nearby may have been part of the grave furniture – this was the interpretation of the Abbé Breuil who had joined the Sollas expedition in the role of lithics analyst. Sollas correctly identified the body as that of a man.

Sollas’s fieldwork at Paviland in 1912 had been prompted by a visit to Oxford of the French scholar Emile Cartailhac, then preparing his magnum opus on the caves of Grimaldi in Liguria. Cartailhac dated these burials as Upper Palaeolithic and suggested that the mode of burial at Paviland was comparable. It was not until the 1960s, however, that an attempt was made to date the burial scientifically, when Kenneth Oakley published a radiocarbon determination made on the actual bones of the ‘Red Lady’.

The result of 18,460 ± 340 BP coincided with the peak of the last Ice Age when the edge of the ice lay only an hour’s walk north of Goat’s Hole. The date conjured up a picture of great charm and power, with a later suggestion that the body could have been transported from somewhere further south to a distant, venerated site at the edge of the ice for a summer burial when temperatures rose.

Things were beginning to hot up, however, for John Campbell’s 1977 study of the Goat’s Hole lithic assemblage showed convincingly that it belonged to the later part of the Aurignacian period of the Palaeolithic (c 40-28,000 BP) and was perhaps 30,000 years old. He suggested, however, that the burial might be younger, specifically Gravettian, on the basis of the dating of comparable European ivory bracelets.

At much the same time, hitherto little known material from Belgium was being studied by Marcel Otte and became widely known through his publication of a synthesis on the earlier Belgian Upper Palaeolithic. This was complemented, in 1980, by Roger Jacobi’s ground-breaking study of the British Upper Palaeolithic. Jacobi undertook a rigorous analysis of both the ‘Red Lady’ burial and human presence at Goat’s Hole and concluded that parallels could be found within the Belgian Aurignacian for the ivory artefacts associated with the interment and that the ‘Red Lady’ was therefore likely to be of that age.

He dismissed the 18,460 bp date on the grounds that human presence was simply lacking from north-western Europe at this time. Jacobi pointed also to continental parallels to artefacts termed ‘leaf points’ that should be contemporary with or, even, predate the Aurignacian and reaffirmed the presence there of a flint ‘Font Robert’ Gravettian spearpoint and of Late Upper Palaeolithic artefacts that related to the recolonisation of the British peninsula after the peak of the last Ice Age sometime after 13,000 bp.

In other words, it was quite clear by 1980 that Goat’s Hole had been the scene of a number of apparently discrete phases of human presence spread over 20,000 or more years of the Palaeolithic. But all this knowledge depended largely upon typological parallels and on one very suspect radiocarbon date.

The stage was clearly set for a scientific re-evaluation of Paviland. In 1989, a new and far more plausible result of 26,350 ± 550 BP was produced by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator on bone powder residual from the original Oakley sample. Because contamination of ancient samples normally results in ages that are too young, it was reasonable to assume that the ‘Red Lady’ died around 26,000 years ago in radiocarbon years (calendar years are possibly several thousand years older than radiocarbon years at this date). Even so, this dating was at least a couple of millennia too young for the Aurignacian.

Could he be yet older? A visit that I made myself to the site in 1989, following a massive storm that had exposed apparently in situ deposits, convinced me that further work would be useful. There the matter rested, however, until 1995 when I received an unexpected letter from Erik Trinkaus revealing that he had made a comprehensive study of the ‘Red Lady’ skeleton some years previously. Since then, Erik had been sidetracked into Neanderthal studies to the great benefit of palaeoanthropology. But now he was once more involved with the study of anatomically modern humans and the ‘Red Lady’ paper was just awaiting a publication outlet. This was the final spur to action.

The new study began with a radiocarbon dating programme and resulted in the dating of some 40 radiocarbon samples of fauna, artefacts and the bones of the ‘Red Lady’ himself. The skeleton was re-dated to 25,840 ± 280 BP and an age of the order of 26,000 years confirmed. None of the ivory or shells associated with the ‘Red Lady’ was dated because of problems of potential contamination by preservatives, but charred bone dates are earlier and centre on 28,750, and so are plausibly Aurignacian.

Of the ivory pieces, 75 per cent are ornaments, virtually all associated with the burial of the ‘Red Lady’, although the well known perforated ivory pendant made from a growth in a mammoth’s tusk is later at 24,000 BP. Bone artefacts include three bone spatulae dated to 23,000 BP. The latest phase of human presence with a firm radiocarbon date is represented by ivory-working of 21,000 BP.

At the time when the young man was ritually interred, there is no substantive evidence in this remote part of Europe for a human presence that was other than episodic. Indeed, faunal compositions and densities probably oscillated over time and space. Human presence in the British early Upper Palaeolithic may plausibly be linked to a ‘biomass expansion’, an overall increase in the availability of animals and other forms of food, centred on the 29th millennium. The coincidence of the dating of burnt bones to this period, combined with the presence of burnt Aurignacian artefacts, supports this as the most likely time for Aurignacian presence at Paviland. Radiocarbon dating of an Aurignacian bone spearpoint to around 28,000 bp at nearby Uphill lends additional weight to this interpretation.

Gravettian visitation is attested by a scatter of large tanged points occurring across southern Britain, including Paviland. Such points are generally dated to 28-27,000 BP, although their use may possibly extend down to the time of the ‘Red Lady’ burial.

As part of the radiocarbon dating process, the ‘stable isotope values’ of carbon and nitrogen within the bone sample were measured. These values provide important information about ancient diets and show that the ‘Red Lady’ had a penchant for seafood – either collected when living on the coast then 100 kilometres distant, or in the form of salmon fished out of the palaeo-Severn, which bears from Paviland are also known (from stable isotope values) to have eaten.

The ‘Red Lady’, when alive, was a healthy young adult male – aged 25-30, about 5′ 8″ (1.74 metres) in height, and possibly weighing about 11 stone (73 kg) – but less robust than might be expected for this period. Whilst the earliest anatomically modern humans in Europe were characterised by tropically-adapted body proportions, arising from their African ancestry, this is not reflected in the skeleton of the ‘Red Lady’, probably because the Paviland individual was a product of perhaps 10,000 years of evolution of modern humans within Europe.

Molecular biologist Bryan Sykes has shown that the ‘Red Lady’ skeleton has a DNA sequence corresponding to the commonest extant lineage in Europe. As such, the Paviland evidence lends support to the argument that the roots of modern Europeans lie not with Neolithic farmers but with the ingress into Europe of human populations who were to replace the Neanderthals.

Restudy of the Goat’s Hole lithic collections has confirmed material ranging from about 40,000 BP to about 13,000 BP (including Mousterian, leaf point, late Aurignacian, early Gravettian, Creswellian, and Final Upper Palaeolithic phases), although the earliest and latest phases are not dated by radiocarbon. Aurignacian finds form the dominant element. These artefacts were made from a range of imported and local raw materials. It is interesting that analysis of the ochres is consistent with a local origin, probably within Gower.

Clearly, the people responsible for the interment possessed considerable local as well as more far-flung knowledge. Preferential use of imported flint for ‘busqué burins’, a specialist kind of engraving tool, and blade blanks, suggests the import to the site of curated items. A type of Aurignacian inversely retouched scraper is special to the site and may reflect the long term isolation of a social group.

The ceremonial burial of the ‘Red Lady’ involved the interplay of art and consciousness which combine in an act that is simultaneously creative and symbolic. The rite possesses features replicated, in regionally changing modes, across Europe in other ceremonial Gravettian burials. These include an extended burial position, positioning of the corpse along the cave wall, the presence by the grave of large herbivore remains, the placing of stone slabs at head and feet, the use of ochre, the deposition of personal ornaments, and the possibility that the body may have been headless when interred. No head was found at Paviland, and other headless Gravettian burials are known.

In chronological terms, Paviland is early in the European series of burials and is actually the earliest with a firm radiocarbon date measured directly on human bone. These burials are resonant of a complex early European society in which status may have been inherited rather than acquired by merit – as evidenced by several very rich child burials elsewhere.

In the ancient world, the sacred and profane were inextricably intertwined. Paviland cave was occupied by the hunters of the Gravettian mammoth steppe as a functional shelter; but there may also have been an aura of sanctity attached to the place, explaining the burial here of the ‘Red Lady’. We may wonder whether one reason for visits to Paviland, as the climatic downturn accelerated and the British peninsula was increasingly abandoned, may have lain in its status as a special place.

From wikipedia -

The Red Lady of Paviland is a fairly complete Upper Paleolithic-era human male skeleton dyed in red ochre, discovered in 1823 by Rev. William Buckland in one of the Paviland limestone caves of the Gower peninsula in south Wales, dating from c29,000 BP.^[1]

When Buckland first discovered the skeleton, he misjudged both its age and its sex. As a creationist,^[2] Buckland believed no human remains could have been older than the Biblical Great Flood, and thus wildly underestimated its true age, believing the remains to date back to the Roman era. Buckland believed the skeleton was female in large part because it was discovered with decorative items, including perforated seashell necklaces and ivory jewelry. These decorative items combined with the skeleton’s red dye caused Buckland to mistakenly speculate that the remains belonged to a Roman prostitute or witch.

Later that year, writing about his find in his book Reliquiae Diluvianae (Evidence of the Flood), Buckland stated:

“[I found the skeleton] enveloped by a coating of a kind of ruddle … which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the distance of about half an inch [12 mm] around the surface of the bones … Close to that part of the thigh bone where the pocket is usually worn surrounded also by ruddle [were] about two handfuls of the Nerita littoralis [periwinkle shells]. At another part of the skeleton, viz in contact with the ribs [were] forty or fifty fragments of ivory rods [also] some small fragments of rings made of the same ivory and found with the rods … Both rods and rings, as well as the Nerite shells, were stained superficially with red, and lay in the same red substance that enveloped the bones.”

The “lady” has since been identified as a man, probably no older than 21. His are the oldest anatomically modern human remains found in the United Kingdom, as well as the oldest known ceremonial burial in Western Europe. The skeleton was found along with a mammoth‘s skull, which has since been lost. Scholars now believe he may have been a tribal chieftain. Tests made in the 20th century suggested he lived about 26,000 years ago (26,350 ± 550 BP, OxA-1815) at the end of the Upper Paleolithic Period: however, a more recent examination of the remains by Dr Thomas Higham of Oxford University and Dr Roger Jacobi of the British Museum suggests they may be 4000 years older. ^[3]. Although now on the coast, at the time of the burial the cave would have been located approximately 70 miles inland, overlooking a plain. When the remains were dated to some 26,000 years ago it was thought the Red Lady lived at a time when an ice sheet of the most recent glacial period, in the British Isles called the Devensian Glaciation, would have been advancing towards the site, and that consequently the weather would have been more like that of present day Siberia, with maximum temperatures of perhaps 10°C in summer, -20° in winter, and a tundra vegetation. The new dating however indicates he lived at a warmer period. Bone protein analysis indicates that the “lady” lived on a diet that consisted of between 15% and 20% fish, which, together with the distance from the sea, suggests that the people may have been semi-nomadic, or that the tribe transported the body from a coastal region for burial. Other food probably included mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros and reindeer.

When the skeleton was first found, Wales had no museum in which to keep it; instead, it was housed at Oxford University, where Buckland was a professor. In December 2007 it was loaned for a year to the National Museum Cardiff. Subsequent excavations of the area in which the skeleton was found have yielded more than 4,000 flints, teeth and bones, and needles and bracelets, which are on exhibit at Swansea Museum and the National Museum in Cardiff.

From the BBC (published Oct 2006) -

The cave skeleton was found by clergyman William Buckland

A world famous archaeological find – a 26,000-year-old skeleton discovered in the Paviland cave on Gower – is set to return to Wales.

The skeleton, known as the Red Lady of Paviland, was discovered in the 1820s and taken to Oxford University.

The National Museum of Wales said a deal had been struck in principle with the university to borrow the remains.

It said the skeleton would be on display for a year as part of its centenary celebrations in 2007.

Last month, druid Chris Warwick spent a weekend in the cave where it was found to campaign for the return of the bones.

The Dead to Rights group, set up by Mr Warwick, said the removal of the skeleton was a “desecration” of a sacred site, and has previously called for the bones to be reburied in the cave.

The remains have been on display at Oxford University

The skeleton was discovered by the Reverend William Buckland, also a palaeontologist, who removed the bones.

As the skeleton was stained with red ochre and elaborately buried with artefacts, Buckland misinterpreted the find as a young female prostitute from Roman times.

But the body turned out to be that of a young man, who was many thousands of years older, and had been buried with great dignity and ritual.

The skeleton is set to feature in a new archaeology gallery at the museum called Origins: In Search of Early Wales

The museum’s director general Michael Houlihan said: “The national museum is delighted with this decision as it will provide an excellent focus for the opening of this exciting new gallery.”

However, Mr Warwick still insists he wants the bones returned to the cave saying something is “amiss” with the cave since the bones and artefacts were removed.

From the BBC -

A sustainable global food system in the 21st Century needs to be built on a series of “new fundamentals”, according to a leading food expert.

Tim Lang warned that the current system, designed in the 1940s, was showing “structural failures”, such as “astronomic” environmental costs.

The new approach needed to address key fundamentals like biodiversity, energy, water and urbanisation, he added.

Professor Lang is a member of the UK government’s newly formed Food Council.

“Essentially, what we are dealing with at the moment is a food system that was laid down in the 1940s,” he told BBC News.

“It followed on from the dust bowl in the US, the collapse of food production in Europe and starvation in Asia.

“At the time, there was clear evidence showing that there was a mismatch between producers and the need of consumers.”

Professor Lang, from City University, London, added that during the post-war period, food scientists and policymakers also thought increasing production would reduce the cost of food, while improving people’s diets and public health.

“But by the 1970s, evidence was beginning to emerge that the public health outcomes were not quite as expected,” he explained.

“Secondly, there were a whole new set of problems associated with the environment.”

Thirty years on and the world was now facing an even more complex situation, he added.

“The level of growth in food production per capita is dropping off, even dropping, and we have got huge problems ahead with an explosion in human population.”

Fussy eaters

Professor Lang lists a series of “new fundamentals”, which he outlined during a speech he made as the president-elect of charity Garden Organic, which will shape future food production, including:

• Oil and energy: “We have an entirely oil-based food economy, and yet oil is running out. The impact of that on agriculture is one of the drivers of the volatility in the world food commodity markets.”
• Water scarcity: “One of the key things that I have been pushing is to get the UK government to start auditing food by water,” Professor Lang said, adding that 50% of the UK’s vegetables are imported, many from water-stressed nations.
• Biodiversity: “Biodiversity must not just be protected, it must be replaced and enhanced; but that is going to require a very different way growing food and using the land.”
• Urbanisation: “Probably the most important thing within the social sphere. More people now live in towns than in the countryside. In which case, where do they get their food?”

Professor Lang said that in order to feed a projected nine billion people by 2050, policymakers and scientists face a fundamental challenge: how can food systems work with the planet and biodiversity, rather than raiding and pillaging it?

The UK’s Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, recently set up a Council of Food Policy Advisers in order to address the growing concern of food security and rising prices.

Mr Benn, speaking at the council’s launch, warned: “Global food production will need to double just to meet demand.

“We have the knowledge and the technology to do this, as things stand, but the perfect storm of climate change, environmental degradation and water and oil scarcity, threatens our ability to succeed.”

Professor Lang, who is a member of the council, offered a suggestion: “We are going to have to get biodiversity into gardens and fields, and then eat it.

“We have to do this rather than saying that biodiversity is what is on the edge of the field or just outside my garden.”

Michelin-starred chef and long-time food campaigner Raymond Blanc agrees with Professor Lang, adding that there is a need for people, especially in the UK, to reconnect with their food.

He is heading a campaign called Dig for Your Dinner, which he hopes will help people reconnect with their food and how, where and when it is grown.

“Food culture is a whole series of steps,” he told BBC News.

“Whatever amount of space you have in your backyard, it is possible to create a fantastic little garden that will allow you to reconnect with the real value of gardening, which is knowing how to grow food.

“And once you know how to grow food, it would be very nice to be able to cook it. If you are growing food, then it only makes sense that you know how to cook it as well.

“And cooking food will introduce you to the basic knowledge of nutrition. So you can see how this can slowly reintroduce food back into our culture.”

Waste not…

Mr Blanc warned that food prices were likely to continue to rise in the future, which was likely to prompt more people to start growing their own food.

He was also hopeful that the food sector would become less wasteful.

“We all know that waste is everywhere; it is immoral what is happening in the world of food.

“In Europe, 30% of the food grown did not appear on the shelves of the retailers because it was a funny shape or odd colour.

“At least the amendment to European rules means that we can now have some odd-shaped carrots on our shelves. This is fantastic news, but why was it not done before?”

He suggested that the problem was down to people choosing food based on sight alone, not smell and touch.

“The way that seeds are selected is about immunity to any known disease; they have also got to grow big and fast, and have a fantastic shelf life.

“Never mind taste, texture or nutrition, it is all about how it looks.

“The British consumer today has got to understand that when they make a choice, let’s say an apple – either Chinese, French or English one – they are making a political choice, a socio-economic choice, as well as an environmental one.

“They are making a statement about what sort of society and farming they are supporting.”

Growing appetite

The latest estimates from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show that another 40 million people have been pushed into hunger in 2008 as a result of higher food prices.

This brings the overall number of undernourished people in the world to 963 million, compared to 923 million in 2007.

The FAO warned that the ongoing financial and economic crisis could tip even more people into hunger and poverty.

“World food prices have dropped since early 2008, but lower prices have not ended the food crisis in many poor countries,” said FAO assistant director-general Hafez Ghanem at the launch of the agency’s State of Food Insecurity in the World 2008 report.

“The structural problems of hunger, like the lack of access to land, credit and employment, combined with high food prices remain a dire reality,” he added.

Professor Lang outlined the challenges facing the global food supply system: “The 21st Century is going to have to produce a new diet for people, more sustainably, and in a way that feeds more people more equitably using less land.”

Here is an excerpt of Tim Lang’s speech:

During this talk I’m going to cover very quickly ‘structural factors’ that I think are shaping the world of food, then I’m going to explore ‘what the policy context is’ [...].

So the first:

I could probably rant at this point! Essentially the twentieth century and all the progress, which there undoubtedly has been, has been built upon certain assumptions and certain infrastructural givens.

I do want to stress, when we’re saying how terrible things are, that actually there have been huge advances in the 20th centaury; increased output of food, more people being fed, wider range and availability, people being fed better and life expectancy rocketing in many countries for all sorts of complicated reasons, but within that, diet has been a critical factor.

Lets not forget that.

BUT. The environmental cost has been astronomic. The impact on public health, which is what my colleagues and I work on a lot, is immense. Diet is now THE single, biggest factor in causing premature death worldwide.

Even in Sub-Saharan Africa five percent of the population are obese. Even in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The impact of inappropriate eating, inappropriate diet, and inappropriate food ingredients on the globe is now really well documented. The problem is, and just recently on the 28th August the World Health Organisation’s commission on Social Determinants of Health came out documenting this, where does that leave the world of food?

New Fundamentals

Within the Royal Institute of International Affairs’ food supply working party, which I’ve been in for three years and which is coming out with a big report this time next month, I have been arguing that the new 21th Century world of food in going to be based on what I call the ‘New Fundamentals’. These fundamental factors might be obvious to you (Garden Organic members) but not necessarily to everyone.

Oil

Firstly oil. Oil and energy. Cheap non-renewable resources of energy have underpinned everything; the agrochemicals, the fertilisers, the tractors replacing the land used to grow oats to feed the horses that drove the ploughs. You name it, you think it, its all based on oil. Even down to the oil that drives the Volvo that takes you six miles on average now to the hypermarket to get the cheaper food. We have an entirely oil based food economy. And yet oil is running out. The impact of that on agriculture is one of the drivers of the volatility in the world food commodity markets. Everyone knows that.

Water

Secondly, most of my colleagues in food policy around the world agree, that actually important though oil is, the thing that is going to bring 21st century approach to food to its knees, is actually not oil, but water!

I speak as someone who was a farmer in the Forest of Bowland, which is the centre of God’s plughole! I have a friend whose farm has 120 inches of rain a year. It seems inconceivable that anyone speaking in the English language, let alone anyone with a British passport, could say that water is a problem. It is.

50% of all vegetables coming into this country come from foreign countries. Think of the growth, the explosion of growth, just in Kenyan green beans. Well every stem of a green been from Kenya, each stem, has used four litres, yes four litres of potable water, and this in a water stressed country. We have a very complicated situation emerging around water.

I am a commissioner on the Government’s sustainable development commission and I led a review of how the Government deals and doesn’t deal with supermarkets as the gatekeepers of the modern food economy. One of the key things that we tried to push, and I certainly pushed very hard and have been pushing behind the scenes, is to get Defra to start auditing, begin to develop the methodology for auditing food by water. It is going to be the decider in the next 30 years. Water economy, water exchange, and virtual water are going to be critical factors.

Climate change

Thirdly, climate change. Climate change is altering everything; where food can grow, how it can grow, etc. You know it; it is going to alter what we can do.

Biodiversity

Fourthly, biodiversity. The collapse of biodiversity is something that even worries the agro-chemical companies whose market is about selling. Some very strange things are happening now. The old black/white, them/us divisions that the organic movement, and the gardening world, have dealt with are going to begin to break down. You will start to get very radical thoughts coming out of the long-term thinkers and planners in companies that we’ve spent a lot of our time arguing against and with. Biodiversity is another of the key factors.

Demographics

Demographics. You don’t have to be a eugenicist to see that going from 6.7 billion people on the planet to 9 billion on the planet by 2050 means a lot more food has got to be produced. A factor is what diet people eat, so if you eat like the average American, well, frankly, we’re dead, the planet can’t do it. If you eat like us in Britain, the planet can’t do it. If you eat like the Chinese of a hundred years ago you can feed 12 billion. What you eat is a critical factor but none the less the demographics are an important feature now.

Urbanisation

Urbanisation is probably the most important thing within the social sphere. The shift we have now, it is arguable, is that we are just past the point where, for the first time in human history, more people live in the towns than in the country. In which case where do they get their food?

That’s why I told you about my failures with my own garden. I can’t grow my own food. My wife and I try to have something from our garden, even if it’s just a herb each meal but we eat out a great deal. Any pretence of feeding myself is a nonsense.

Now write that over 5 billion people. Who’s going to grow the food? Where are they going to grow it? Who’s going to be the labour force?

Labour

There has been a collapse of the labour force. Look in Britain at the racism over the migrant labour. I was born in Lincoln; my home county has been a disgrace! The Fens are a major producer of vegetables. It has brought in migrant labour at very low rates and then treated them disgustingly. Now this is delicate stuff I know, but if British people are not prepared to go and work in the fields, how are we going to grow veg?

We need to consume less meat, less dairy, more fruit and more veg – but from where?

Nutrition transition

The ‘nutrition transition’ is a phrase that in my world is critical. It is a transformation that happens when people get richer and they alter their diet. They eat more fat and more meat, unless from vegetarian culture. People shift from drinking water or tea to soft drinks i.e sugar. They get increased calories. It makes them fatter, leads to heart disease and degenerative diseases. The nutrition transition is not just an issue of nutrition, though it is, with direct impact on health, it is also a major cultural phenomenon. The culture, the psychology of it is very important.

Health care costs

The thing that gets me out of bed each day is health care costs. The reason the food system cannot go on as it is going on is because of the cost of health care.

The cost of diet related diseases to the NHS in this, the 5th richest country, is unsustainable. Think what it does to India. The town I was brought up in, now one of the biggest cities in the world, Mumbai, has the highest rate of diabetes type 2 in the world. And it has no NHS. It is a disease of the rich. Here it is a disease of the poor. Poor people here are fat; in India rich people are fat. It is a return for us to the 18th Century. The health care costs are bringing the country to its knees.

Think about how much it applies in the US where 40 million people don’t even have health care insurance. Now apply it to the developing world, which is going through a nutrient transition and then think of your Cargill or Monsanto or Nestle, one of the big companies. Nestle sells 1% of all food consumed on the planet and plans to increase this to 2% by 2020. That may sound very small, but it is awesome power and that’s my final point.

Price volatility and Battles of power

Volatility of price is coinciding with battles of power, of power and control.

So these are what I call the ‘New Fundamentals’. But what’s the response of Government? What is the policy context?

Firstly they have not taken any notice of it. We have been lonely voices. But actually there is incredibly good evidence that has been building up since 1975. The Government’s own report from the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy in 1974 said the health care cost of cardiovascular disease and diet related ill health is unsustainable. That is 34 years ago. Nothing new about this but the evidence has built up to a point at which the system is not going to be able to carry on in the same way in which it has been doing.

Now let’s go back to the 1930s. The evidence creators, researchers and scientists said “We don’t need to have this crisis of collapsing farming, of malnutrition in the big Western cities, of absolute malnutrition in Asia.” and they came up with what my world would call Productionism i.e. that with suitable use of science, capital investment, and research, you can produce more.

Has anyone here heard about Sir George Stapleton? Well, what Stapleton was about was that if you put drainage into the uplands you can grow different grasses and what looks like unproductive moor land, will deliver. It may deliver more meat, they weren’t thinking about heart disease then, but it will deliver.

But basically that Productionist model is now what is under threat. That whole model, although it has gone through various changes and evolutions etc, is now in trouble.

The economic mainstream thinking is essentially neo liberalism; let markets survive.

But in fact what Productionism fed into in the 1940′s, in the post war reconstruction, symbolised by Lord John Boyd Orr who was the first Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation was the need to harness nature by investment and by rebuilding skills.

And that is what is now coming unstuck, that whole diverse set of experiments gone off on different paths that people like Stapleton and Boyd Orr, like the organic movement in their different ways have done, is now hitting its soft brick wall.

Mean-time one of the irons of doing things differently, the Common Agricultural Policy, (CAP) which actually was set up to stop malnutrition and hunger in Europe, people forget that, just became a subsidy milking scheme from you and me as tax payers to rich land owners. Particularly here in Britain. 80% off all the money from the CAP went to 20% of farmers. It was a siphon from the mass to the few.

Now what is the British Government’s position of dealing with the New Fundamentals? The first is that it is actually ignoring it. In 2005/06 the Treasury and Defra put out major policy statements that said don’t have policies, let the markets decide! Sweep away the CAP, decouple! And that’s actually happened! So now just when we need a policy, a set of levers to address the New Fundamentals, we haven’t got one. We actually haven’t got any engagement. That is when I start getting worried and that is why I’m here because I think this is the policy vacuum that people like your good selves have got to get involved with.

The news that Georgina Downs won her landmark High Court battle against the UK Government, regarding its assessment of risk in exposure to agricultural pesticide spraying, gives hope to those trying to improve the ecological impacts of today’s farming.

Here’s the news article from the Guardian -

An environmental campaigner yesterday won a landmark victory against the government in a long-running legal battle over the use of pesticides. The high court ruled that Georgina Downs, who runs the UK Pesticides Campaign, had produced “solid evidence” that people exposed to chemicals used to spray crops had suffered harm.

The court said the government had failed to comply with a European directive designed to protect rural communities from exposure to the toxins. It said the environment department, Defra, must reassess its policy and investigate the risks to people who are exposed. Defra had argued that its approach to the regulation and control of pesticides was “reasonable, logical and lawful”.

Downs, who lives on the edge of farmland near Chichester, West Sussex, launched her campaign in 2001. The judge described how she was first exposed to pesticide spraying at the age of 11 “and began to suffer from ill health, in particular flu-like symptoms, a sore throat, blistering and other problems”.

Downs said the government had failed to address the concerns of people living in the countryside “who are repeatedly exposed to mixtures of pesticides and other chemicals throughout every year, and in many cases, like mine, for decades”. People were not given prior notification about what was to be sprayed near their homes and gardens, she said.

In his ruling, Mr Justice Collins highlighted that the 1986 Control of Pesticides Regulations states that beekeepers must be given 48 hours notice if pesticides harmful to bees are to be used. The judge said: “It is difficult to see why residents should be in a worse position.”

Speaking after the ruling, Downs said her seven-year battle was over “one of the biggest public health scandals of our time”. She called on Gordon Brown to block any Defra appeal. “The government “should now just admit that it got it wrong, apologise and actually get on with protecting the health and citizens of this country”.

The case centred on the way the government assesses the risk posed by pesticides. The current method is based on occasional, short-term exposure to a “bystander” and assumes that individuals would be exposed to an individual pesticide during a single pass.

Downs said: “The judge has agreed with my long-standing charge that this bystander model does not and cannot address residents who are repeatedly exposed.” The model does not account for rural residents exposed to mixtures of pesticides and other chemicals “throughout every year and, in many cases like my own, for decades”.

She said: “The fact that there has never been any assessment of the risk to health for the long-term exposure for those who live, work or go to school near pesticide-sprayed fields is an absolute scandal, considering that crop-spraying has been a predominant feature of agriculture for over 50 years.”

Downs’ campaign has collected evidence from other residents who report health problems including cancer, Parkinson’s disease, ME and asthma, which they claim could be linked to crop-spraying.

The judge said “defects” in Defra’s approach to pesticide safety contravened a 1991 EC directive. He said Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, “must think again and consider what needs to be done”.

A Defra spokesman said: “The protection of human health is paramount. Pesticides used in this country are rigorously assessed to the same standards as the rest of the EU and use is only ever authorised after internationally approved tests … We will look at this judgment in detail to see whether there are ways in which we can strengthen our system further and also to consider whether it could put us out of step with the rest of Europe and have implications for other member states.”

The European parliament’s environment committee last week approved new ways of assessing the risk of potentially hazardous sprays to protect crops and plants. The new criteria are part of an attempt to halve the use of toxic products in European farming by 2013. A final vote on the proposals is due next month or in January.

Backstory

Georgina Downs was first exposed to pesticide spray in the garden of her parents’ house near Chichester, West Sussex, in 1984 when she was 11. She suffered several years of ill health, and after years of study into the possible causes, she founded the UK Pesticide Campaign in 2001. A hard-hitting video of a mannequin picnic in her garden, regularly drenched in pesticide spray, helped make her case. She has won many plaudits and awards, and was joint winner of the Andrew Lees Memorial Award at the 2006 British Environment and Media Awards.

Here is the statement Georgina Downs gave outside the High Court after her victory, published on her UK Pesticdes Campaign website -

I would like to start by confirming that I have won my High Court action against the Government. Therefore I am obviously very pleased with today’s result, and have been fully vindicated, as this case was based on a set of core arguments that I identified and have been presenting to the Government over the last 7 years.

The Judgment from Mr. Justice Collins is very clear in that the Government has been acting unlawfully in its policy and approach in relation to the use of pesticides in crop spraying, and that public health, in particular rural residents and communities exposed to pesticides from living in the locality to regularly sprayed fields, is not being protected (and this applies to both acute effects and chronic long term adverse health effects).

This is obviously a very significant and landmark ruling for the potentially millions of residents throughout the country who, like myself, live in the locality to pesticide sprayed fields.

The Government’s method of assessing the risks to public health from crop-spraying is based on the model of a ‘bystander’, in which it assumes that there will only be occasional, short-term exposure to the spray cloud at the time of the application only, from a single pass of a sprayer and to only one individual pesticide at any time.

The Judge has agreed with my long-standing charge that this bystander model does not and cannot address residents who are repeatedly exposed from various exposure factors and routes to mixtures of pesticides and other chemicals, throughout every year, and in many cases, like my own situation, for decades. Obviously those living near pesticide sprayed fields will include vulnerable groups, such as babies, children, pregnant women, the elderly, people who are already ill and who may be taking medication, amongst other vulnerable groups where the health risks are increased.

The fact that there has never been any assessment of the risks to health for the long-term exposure for those who live, work or go to school near pesticide sprayed fields is an absolute scandal considering that crop-spraying has been a predominant feature of agriculture for over 50 years. Under EU and UK law the absence of any risk assessment means that pesticides should never have been approved for use in the first place for spraying near homes, schools, children’s playgrounds and other public areas.

Reports of adverse health effects in rural areas have gone on for decades. In 2003, I produced a DVD that I presented to the Government, its regulators, (the Pesticides Safety Directorate) and main advisors, (the Advisory Committee on Pesticides) that featured individuals and families from all over the country reporting acute and chronic long-term illnesses and diseases in rural communities surrounded by sprayed fields.

It is important to note that the acute effects reported by people on the DVD are the same acute effects recorded in the Government’s very own monitoring system, such as rashes, itching, sore throats, burning eyes, nose, blistering, headaches, nausea, stomach pains, burnt vocal chords, amongst other effects. Government officials and advisors have therefore been fully aware for years of the adverse effects that are being confirmed by its own monitoring system, but the Government has continued to accept such effects as not being serious. Today’s Judgment again recognizes that it is unlawful for the Government to have added in a qualification to the standard of the European Directive which requires that pesticides are not approved for use until it has been established that there will be “no harmful effect” at all on human health.
Also by the Government allowing acute effects to be considered acceptable it is then also allowing the risk of chronic illnesses and diseases, because the risk of chronic effects developing can increase when acute effects repeatedly occur as a result of long-term cumulative exposures. This has been recognised previously by the European Commission that acknowledged that “Long term exposure to pesticides can lead to serious disturbances to the immune system, sexual disorders, cancers, sterility, birth defects, damage to the nervous system and genetic damage.”

The most common chronic long-term illnesses and diseases reported to me by rural residents include various cancers, leukaemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, ME, asthma and many other medical conditions.

The Judge has concluded that the DVD contained solid evidence that residents have suffered harm to their health, particularly in relation to acute effects, and that a different approach should have been adopted and accordingly there has been a failure to have regard to material considerations and a failure to apply the European Directive properly.

The crucial evidence I produced for my case in 3 very detailed Witness Statements, shows quite clearly that the Government has knowingly failed to act, has continued to shift the goalposts, cherry picked the science to suit the desired outcome, and has continued to issue grossly inaccurate information and mislead residents and the wider public by continuing to assert that the current regulatory controls in the UK are robust and fully protective and that pesticide spraying is safe. The Government’s response to this issue has been of the utmost complacency, is completely irresponsible and is definitely not “evidence-based policy-making,” and has now been ruled by a High Court Judge to be in breach of European (and UK equivalent) legislation. As I have always maintained from the outset of my campaign this is definitely one of biggest public health scandals of our time. In fact the UK Government’s relentless and extraordinary attempts to protect the industry as opposed to people’s health has been one of the most outrageous things to behold in the last 7 years of my fight. This is especially apparent at the moment as not content with not protecting its own citizens the UK Government has been trying to scupper new European pesticide proposals from having the primary focus on health protection of citizens across Europe, to one of primarily protecting the industry.

Therefore today’s judgment is extremely damaging to the Government, all the Government departments, officials and scientific advisors, responsible for pesticides, as it clearly confirms what I have always said from the outset of presenting my arguments in 2001, that the Government has fundamentally failed to protect people in the countryside from pesticides and has also knowingly allowed residents to continue to suffer from adverse health effects without taking any action to prevent the exposure, risks and adverse impacts occurring.

Of course whilst it is right that the Government as a whole is held responsible and accountable for its unlawful policy and approach, there is no doubt that there are a number of people within Government who have a very key responsibility for presiding over this fundamental failure in duty to protect the public from pesticides and those people should now be sacked with immediate effect. I would like to name just a few of these people. First of all David Milliband who previously held the position as the Secretary of State for DEFRA and who did not see it as necessary to meet with me to even hear the case and arguments presented in relation to residents exposure to pesticides and reported ill-health and neither did Hilary Benn the current DEFRA Secretary of State. Paul Hamey who has been in charge of the exposure assessment at the Pesticides Safey Directorate, since 2001 and has had direct responsibility for the exposure model that has been ruled unlawful in the Judgement today. Kerr Wilson Chief Executive of the PSD, Sue Popple the former director of policy at PSD, and now an official working within DEFRA, Richard Davis, Director of Approvals at PSD and Jon Battershill, the secretariat for the Government’s Committee on Toxicity. And last but by no means least Professor David Coggon who featured heavily in this case as he was the Chairman of the Government’s Advisory Committee on Pesticides between 2000 and 2005 and is now a chairman of another advisory committee, the Committee on Toxicity. Professor Coggon was responsible for introducing the adjective serious to describe the standard of the legislation which has been found to be an error in law in today’s Judgement. He also previously informed me that he only saw 15 minutes out of my 2 hour DVD (the one that the Judge has called solid evidence, and that should have led to the ACP adopting a different approach), as Prof Coggon said it was not good use of his time to watch any more. He has continued to maintain that this is merely a social issue, when the reality is that this is obviously a very serious public health issue.

I would now suggest that the Prime Minister himself sees the evidence I have presented in my case first hand without being told by his advisors that there is nothing wrong as that has been shown today to not be the case and I would urge the Prime Minister to step in and stop his Government from appealing this decision, as the Government should now just admit that it got it wrong, apologise and actually get on with protecting the health of the citizens in this country.

The most important action that must be taken, based on the evidence that adverse effects are occurring, is to prevent exposure for residents and communities by banning crop-spraying around homes, schools, children’s playgrounds and other public areas. Considering studies have shown that pesticides can travel in the air for miles then the distance of the no-spray area would need to be substantial.

I hope this Judgment now puts to rest any attempts by various parties to criticize me for what I am doing. I have worked to the highest professional standard in the campaign I have run and have been meticulous with accuracy and attention to detail. With all the unarguable scientific evidence I have amassed over the last 7 years, I would be acting completely irresponsibly if I didn’t do what I do. I should not have had to have spent the last 7 years of my life fighting to get the Government to do something on this when the evidence and arguments I identified were very clear from the outset and the Government should have acted when I first started to present the case in 2001.

Finally, I would like to thank my legal representatives, Michael Fordham QC, Emma Dixon, Derek Sutton and others at Blackstone Chambers, as well as all those at Foresters Solicitors, especially Joe Mensah and Robbie Manson, for all the work and support in this case and for agreeing to work in my very unique way, as I have been directly and fully involved in all preparations relating to this case and its overall management.

I would also like to thank all those who have supported the campaign over the last 7 years, all that support has been invaluable and is what has kept me going in this battle on behalf of all those who have had their health and lives destroyed due to the government’s very own policy.

Some might say that this event presents ‘a new hope’ -

Photograph from Bentley Organic

From Graham Harvey’s blog -

Those of us who produce and market local food – or, like me, simply enjoy consuming it – don’t need reminding that it’s often a healthier way to eat. Now at last it seems the government is finally catching up with the benefits.

Health minister Ben Bradshaw has told the Commons that patients in west country hospitals showed faster recovery rates when offered locally-produced meat, dairy products, fish and vegetables than those given the usual anonymous hospital food. The comments are based on findings in Cornwall where health trusts have made big efforts to cut food miles and support local farmers and growers.

According to Ben Bradshaw no less than 80 per cent of the food served in Cornwall’s hospitals now comes from local farmers, butchers, milk producers and fishermen. Not only was local food proving popular with patients, he told the Commons, but it had actually hastened recovery rates.

Let’s hope other government departments take note of the findings. If fresh, local produce can improve the health of people in hospital, it can bring benefits to the wider community too. Institutions like hospitals, schools and prisons are only the starting point. What this obese and sickly nation needs is a totally new food system based on well-grown, nutrient-rich produce.

Sad to see that National Farmers’ Union president Peter Kendall is still pushing for an expansion of large-scale, commodity food. At the union’s AGM he spoke of Britain’s “moral duty” to make “our optimum contribution to global supplies of food and bio-energy”. What this means is that big arable farmers should be free to profit from ever higher production of low-grade industrial crops for global markets. The main beneficiaries of such a policy would be chemical companies and commodity traders. The victims would include the people of Britain, small farmers, the world’s poor and the global environment.

I agree with the NFU president that Britain has a moral duty to use its farmland wisely. But as I see it the wisest thing Britain’s farmers could do for the world is concentrate on growing healthy foods for the 60 million or so people of these islands. And they need to do it using methods that safeguard soil fertility and the global environment for future generations. This way farmers will once again become national heroes. And, like the hospital patients of Cornwall, we’ll all be a lot fitter.

And another of his posts -

The truth is that, however smart our technologies, it’s the living community below ground that enables plants to grow. They supply plants with the nutrients they need, provide them with water and protect them against toxins and disease. Without the activity of soil life – from microscopic bacteria to earthworms – life above ground would quickly grind to a halt.

Sadly chemical farming subjects these living communities to a non-stop toxic barrage, wiping out whole species and disrupting the intricate subterranean network that keeps plants healthy. With their natural support systems weakened, crop plants become more dependent on pesticides to keep them growing – which is great for the chemical industry but bad news for the rest of us.