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.

Charles Darwin kindly posing for a picture… by tranchis

From the Darwin 200 website -

Darwin is now a household name whose ideas over the last 150 years have revolutionised our understanding of nature and our place within it.

Darwin challenged the thinking of the day because his observations – that every living thing is related and belongs to one big family – placed humans firmly within the natural world.

As the following quotes indicate, Darwin’s innovative thoughts are just as important to our lives today…

‘Charles Darwin’s concept of evolution through natural selection is one of the most illuminating scientific ideas of all time for understanding our biosphere and humanity’s place in nature. As an iconic figure, Darwin is matched only by Newton and Einstein – indeed, he has perhaps had a more pervasive influence on human culture than any other scientist.’ Lord Rees of Ludlow, The Charles Darwin Trust’s Science Advisory Panel

‘The two governing ideas of modern biology are first, the molecular basis of all life processes and second, the origin and evolution of all life processes by Darwinian natural selection.’
Professor E O Wilson, The Charles Darwin Trust’s Science Advisory Panel.

Through a combination of meticulous observation and innovative thinking, Darwin came up with an explanation for the incredible variety of living things: that evolution was driven by natural selection. By this process, organisms most suited to their environment survive and reproduce and pass their advantages to their offspring.

‘There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’ Charles Darwin

Although Darwin had already presented his theory to fellow scientists, it was the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in 1859 that shook the rest of the world.

‘We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’ Charles Darwin

Initially greeted with controversy, Darwin’s ideas now form the foundation of modern biology.

‘It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.’ Charles Darwin

A natural life

Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809. As a child he loved the outdoors and collecting beetles.

He abandoned his studies of medicine to study theology but then, when he was just 22 years old, joined a voyage around the world on the ship, the Beagle. During this five-year adventure, he keenly observed and collected hundreds of different types of plants, animals, fossils and rocks.

He spent the rest of his life carefully studying and interpreting what he had seen. Darwin came up with his original explanation for the variety of living things, the theory of evolution by natural selection, soon after his return from the Beagle voyage, but it was many years before he had accumulated enough evidence to publish his work.

‘I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me; and this was long after I had come to Down. The solution, as I believe, is that the modified offspring of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become adapted to many and highly diversified places in the economy of nature.’ Charles Darwin

Although Darwin is the most familiar name associated with evolution, he was only persuaded to publish his work when another young scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, came forward having independently come up with a similar explanation for how evolution occurs.

• Shrewsbury, Shropshire

Charles Darwin was born and raised in the family home in Shrewsbury and also attended school in the town.

The Mount

Charles Darwin was born in the Mount on 12 February 1809. The large Georgian house was built by his parents, Robert and Susanna Darwin. It has been used as offices but is currently being renovated and is due to open to the public in 2009.

St. Chad’s Church

Charles Darwin was christened at St Chad’s Church, which is now used as a venue for an annual Darwin Festival.

Shrewbury School

In 1818, aged just 9 years, Darwin was sent to Shrewsbury School, an Anglican boarding school in the centre of town. He boarded despite it being less than a couple of kilometres from his home, and only a few months after losing his mother.

Darwin hated the harsh environment of the school but made some good friends there. Charles, aged 12, wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘I only wash my fe[e]t once a month at school, which I confess is nasty, but I cannot help it, for we have nothing to do it with’.

His older bother, Erasmus, also attended the school and the brothers were renowned for their chemistry experiments, conducted in a self-equipped ‘Lab’ in an outbuilding of The Mount.

The school building has been renovated and now accommodates the town’s library with an imposing statue of Darwin outside.

The Bellstone

Darwin’s first introduction to geology was a granite boulder, called the Bellstone, situated in a courtyard in the town centre. As a child he was told that this sort of stone was only found much further north in Cumbria or Scotland and there was no explanation for how it ended up in Shropshire.

It was only when he studied geology at Edinburgh that Darwin learned that during the last ice age moving glaciers had transported massive rocks across the country.

An annual toast is now held at the Bellstone on Darwin’s birthday, 12 February.

St Chad’s Church, Montford

Darwin’s mother and father were buried in St Chad’s Church in the village of Montford about 10 kilometres from Shrewsbury. Darwin’s father, Robert Darwin was buried here in 1848.

• Maer Hall, nr Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire

Maer Hall was the Wedgwood family home, located near to the Wedgwood factory.

Maer Hall

Maer Hall was the family home of Emma Wedgwood, who was born there in 1808. The house was near to the Wedgwood factory owned by Emma’s father Josiah Wedgwood, who was also Charles’ uncle.

Charles Darwin was a frequent visitor in his youth. He greatly enjoyed the countryside for walking and shooting and the informal evenings with the Wedgwood family. It was in the fields around Maer that Charles first investigated the role of earthworms, recording that cinders spread on the surface became buried over several years.

After his return from the Beagle voyage, his attentions turned to courting Emma and they married in the church in the grounds. Charles and Emma continued to make frequent visits to Maer Hall with their growing family, spending many summer holidays there.

St Peter’s Church

Charles married Emma in 1839, two weeks before his thirtieth birthday, at St Peter’s church in the grounds of the Jacobean mansion.

Welsh holidays

During his childhood and student days, Darwin spent several family holidays in North Wales, staying, on different occasions, near Abergele, Tywyn, Pistyll Rhayader, Barmouth and Mount Snowdon. He enjoyed riding and beetle collecting.

After graduating from Cambridge, in 1831, he was Adam Sedgwick’s assistant on a field trip to North Wales surveying red sandstone in Llangollen, Ruthin, Conwy, Bangor and Capel Curig. He returned in 1842 to study the geology at Capel Curig, Bangor and Caernarfon. Darwin’s last visit to Wales was for a family holiday in 1869 to Caerdeon and Barmouth.

Edinburgh University

In 1825, aged 16, Darwin enrolled at Edinburgh University to study medicine, following his father and grandfather. Although it offered the best medical education in Britain, Charles found the lectures dull and the clinical studies distressing. He was horrified to witness the pain patients had to suffer when operated on with no anaesthetic.

During his second year, Darwin pursued his interests in natural history through a small student group called the Plinian Society. He became close to Robert Grant, a sponge expert, with whom he explored and studied the marine life of the coastline near Edinburgh. Grant moved on to University College, London, where he established the Grant Museum.

After two years Darwin finally abandoned his medical studies and left Edinburgh in 1827.

• Cambridge

Darwin studied theology at Cambridge University but also spent much time developing his passion for natural history.

Christ’s College, Cambridge University

In 1827, Darwin enrolled at Christ’s College, Cambridge University where he studied theology for just over three years.

During his time at Cambridge, Darwin continued to enjoy the countryside and spent much time with his cousin, William Fox, who introduced him to beetle collecting. He also became friends with William Paley, who promoted natural theology, and the geologist Adam Sedgwick.

In his last two terms Darwin spent much time with the Rev John Henslow, a professor of botany, and became known as ‘the man who walks with Henslow’.

It was Henslow, himself restricted by family commitments, who recommended Darwin as a suitable companion and naturalist for Captain FitzRoy on the Beagle expedition.

Darwin lived in the same first floor rooms in College from late 1828 until he graduated in 1831.

Today, the College Hall has a portrait of Darwin and a stained glass window depicting him.

A large bronze bust by William Couper, presented by an American delegation in honour of the centenary of his birth, is displayed in the Shrine in the college grounds.

Sidney Street

Darwin only moved up to Cambridge early in 1828, and at first lived in lodgings above a tobacconist’s in Sidney Street. He later moved into rooms in one of the college’s courtyards.

Fitzwilliam Street

Years later, after he returned from the Beagle voyage in 1836, Darwin revisited Cambridge many times. Needing time to sort his specimens from the voyage, he rented a house in Fitzwilliam Street for a few months, which can now be identified by a stone plaque.

• Plymouth, Devon

The Beagle set sail from Plymouth in 1831 with 22-year-old Darwin on board as the gentleman naturalist and companion to Captain FitzRoy.

HMS Beagle

Darwin spent two months in Plymouth before setting sail while Captain FitzRoy was supervising alterations to the ship. He stayed in lodgings in Clarence Baths with John Lort Stokes, one of the two survey officers with whom he would share a cabin on board.

The waiting and increasing anxiety about the impending voyage caused Darwin to refer to this time as ‘the most miserable which I ever spent’.

Darwin commented to Henslow on the ship’s cramped interior, ‘The corner of the cabin, which is my private property, is most woefully small. – I have just room to turn around & that is all.’

The Beagle finally set sail from the Devonport Dockyard in Plymouth on 27 December 1831 with Darwin on board.

• Falmouth, Cornwall

After five years spent circumnavigating the globe the Beagle returned to Falmouth harbour on 2 October 1836.

Epic voyage

During the voyage Darwin experienced extreme hardship and exhilarating discovery. Often having to cope with illness, hunger, tiredness, turbulent weather, natural disasters, and disagreements within the crew, Darwin dedicated his time to studying and collecting thousands of fossils, plants and animals previously unseen by his contemporaries back home.

• London Societies linked to Darwin

After his return from the Beagle voyage, Darwin developed contacts with many eminent scientists and scientific societies based in London.

Geological Society of London

Darwin was an active member of the Society as he was elected a Fellow in 1836, became a Secretary in 1838, and Vice-President in 1843. He had regular interactions with Charles Lyell, whose book, Principles of Geology, Darwin had fervently studied while on the Beagle voyage using it as a basis for developing his ideas on the formation of coral reefs.

Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons

After Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage, he needed to find people to identify the thousands of specimens he collected on his travels. In October 1836 he met Richard Owen, who was the new Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons. Later that year he handed over his prized fossil mammals for Owen, a skilled anatomist, to identify. Owen’s assertion that the fossils belonged to extinct giant mammals of similar types to smaller living mammals in South America, provided Darwin with evidence of common ancestry.

Linnean Society of London

On 1 July 1858 Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell read out Darwin’s and Alfred Russell Wallace’s papers on the tendency of species to form varieties and species by natural means of selection to a select group of scientists.

The timing was prompted by a letter Darwin received from Wallace a month before. Darwin was alarmed to find out that Wallace, who was collecting specimens in the Far East, had come up with almost the same theory as Darwin’s of evolution by natural selection. He was now forced to make his ideas public.

Hooker and Lyell arranged to read Wallace’s letter and extracts of Darwin’s unpublished manuscripts to the next meeting of the Linnean Society. Wallace was far away and Darwin’s youngest son had recently died of scarlet fever so they were both absent from the meeting.

Later that year, the president of the Linnean Society wrote in his annual report that the year had not been marked by any discoveries which “revolutionize science”.

The Natural History Museum

During the Second World War a number of Darwin’s fossil mammal specimens were taken to the Natural History Museum when the Hunterian Museum suffered bomb damage.

Today, the Museum stores hundreds of specimens collected by Darwin, including parrotfish preserved in jars of spirit, domestic pigeon skins, beetles, stuffed armadillos, giant ground sloth fossils, fragments of coral, and dried mosses and lichens.

There are many specimens from the Beagle voyage, including the finches and mocking birds from the Galapagos Islands that helped to crystallise his ideas. Darwin’s barnacle collections, which he studied later in his life to establish himself as a senior and serious systematic scientist, are also held at the Museum.

The Museum has recently acquired the Kohler Darwin Collection, the world’s largest collection of works by and about Charles Darwin, which includes a first edition presentation copy of On the Origin of Species.

Royal Institution of Great Britain

In 1880 Thomas Huxley gave an address on ‘The coming of age of The origin of species’, which was published in Nature. He talked of the significant accumulation of fossil evidence in favour of evolution that had occurred since 1859, when On the Origin of Species was first published.

Royal Society of London

Darwin was elected fellow of the Society on 24 January 1839. In 1853 he was awarded the Royal Medal for his exhaustive work on barnacles, and in 1864 he was awarded the prestigious Copley Medal for his outstanding researches in geology, zoology and botanical physiology.

Royal Zoological Society of London

Darwin became a fellow of the Royal Zoological Society of London in 1837. John Gould, who was then employed by the Zoological Society, described the birds Darwin had collected on the Beagle voyage. It was Gould who realised that the finches found on the Galapagos Islands belonged to a new group and that different species were confined to different islands.

In March 1838, Darwin saw his first ape in London Zoo, which had recently acquired an orang-utan named Jenny. Darwin observed a keeper teasing her with an apple and was fascinated by the similarity between the ape’s reaction and a child’s tantrum, later writing to his sister, that the ape ‘threw herself on her back, kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child’.

• London locations linked to Darwin

Darwin lived in several locations in London and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Great Marlborough Street

Darwin lived in rented accommodation here from 1837-8, soon after his return from the Beagle voyage.

Upper Gower Street

Number 12 Upper Gower Street, which later became number 110, was the first home of Charles and Emma Darwin after their marriage in 1839. Charles Darwin moved in on 31 December 1838, and Emma joined him after their wedding on 29 January 1839. They rented it, furnished, and called it Macaw Cottage after the gaudy colours of its furnishings.

Their eldest two children, William Erasmus and Anne Elizabeth, were born here. They moved out in September 1842.

The house was bombed in 1941 and the site is now part of the Department of Biology, University College London. A modern block called the Darwin Building stands on the exact site of Macaw Cottage.

Grant Museum

The Darwin Building, which bears a blue plaque commemorating Darwin, houses the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy. The collection was started by Robert Grant, an early mentor of Darwin’s at Edinburgh University.

Westminster Abbey

Charles Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey in April 1882. His gravestone and a bronze memorial relief are inside the Abbey.

• Glen Roy, Scotland

Darwin studied the unique geology of Glen Roy when he returned from the Beagle voyage.

Parallel roads of Glen Roy

In 1838 Darwin made observations on the parallel roads of Glen Roy, and of other parts of Lochaber in Scotland, with an attempt to prove that they were of marine origin. He published his paper but later wrote, ‘I do believe every word in my Glen Roy paper is false’.

It is now known that the famous geological feature is the remains of ancient shorelines. They formed at the end of the last ice age when an advancing glacier pushed up the water level of a lake that filled the valley.

• Downe, Bromley, Kent

Darwin moved to Down House with his growing family in September 1842, and lived here for 40 years until he died in 1882.

Down House

Darwin bought the house, with 18 acres of land, from the vicar of Downe for just over 2000 pounds. Soon after they moved in, Charles and Emma began extending and renovating the house and gardens to create the home they wanted.

Down house is now owned by English Heritage and is open to the public

Darwin’s study

Darwin’s study at Down House remains much as it was when Darwin was alive.

The writing desk and chair were used by Darwin as he developed his theory of evolution.

Gardens and greenhouses

The gardens and greenhouses have been restored and some of Darwin’s experiments on orchids, carnivorous plants and honeybees have been recreated.

Sandwalk

Beyond the garden was a path around a small wood, that Darwin referred to as his ‘thinking path’ as he paced around it fives times every day at noon.

Emma Darwin, Charles’ wife was buried in Downe churchyard in 1896.

Downe Bank

Darwin’s observations here of orchids and their insect pollinators gave him evidence of co-evolution and led to the publication of his famous book Fertilisation of Orchids in 1862.

Experts now agree that Downe Bank is indeed the species-rich setting that inspired Darwin’s conclusion of On the Origin of Species where he refers to an ‘entangled bank’.

High Elms

This large estate of about 370 acres of woodland and species-rich chalk grassland is now a Local Nature Reserve. The land once belonged to John Lubbock, the renowned biologist and politician, who Darwin encouraged as a boy to study the local wildlife. He helped Darwin illustrate his great barnacle work and later wrote a book on the social insects.

Keston

Darwin used this area in his earthworm research, investigating their presence and absence in different parts of the heath.

Darwin also spent much time observing round-leaved sundew at Keston Bog. He noticed how insects became stuck to the leaves of sundew, which led him to investigate how it trapped and digested insects, pioneering work which led to the publication of Insectivorous Plants in 1875.

Keston Ponds were the most likely source of the mud from which Darwin germinated plants in a sequence of experiments into the geographical distribution of freshwater plants.

• Malvern, Worcestershire

Darwin had several long stays at this spa town between 1849 and 1851, and again in 1863.

Malvern spa

Darwin stayed at The Lodge on Worcester Road and took daily water cure treatments at Dr Gully’s hydrotherapy facility. This therapy involved cold showers, wet wraps, steam baths, strict diets and long walks in the countryside intended to stimulate the circulation and drive out toxins from the blood and organs.

Malvern Priory

His eldest daughter, Annie, was taken to Malvern for treatment in 1851, suffering from a fever, and died there aged 10. She was buried in Malvern Priory.

• Moor Park nr Farnham, Surrey

Moor Park was a water cure establishment that Darwin visited often between 1857 and 1859.

Moor Park

Darwin referred to Moor Park as, ‘Dr. Lane’s delightful hydropathic establishment’. As well as the water therapy and relaxation, Darwin enjoyed solitary walks around the beautiful grounds.

Although Moor Park House is not open to the public, there is a short heritage trail in the grounds.

• Ilkley, nr Otley, Yorkshire

Darwin was staying in Ilkley and taking water cure treatments when On the Origin of Species was published in November 1859.

Water cure treatments

He finished working on the proofs on 1 October then travelled to Ilkley on 2 October, recording in his diary, ‘I am worn out & must have rest…’ Darwin and his family stayed here at Wells Terrace while he took water cure treatments, which included cold water baths.

• Oxford

Oxford was the location of the infamous debate on evolution and religion in 1860.

Oxford University Museum of Natural History

In June 1860 the newly opened Oxford University Museum of Natural History hosted one of the most famous debates in scientific history. It was the ‘great debate’ between Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and Thomas Huxley, the biologist and writer.

They argued furiously about Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and the questions it raised about man’s place in the natural world and religious belief. Darwin himself was not well enough to attend the debate but Huxley was nicknamed ‘Darwin’s bull-dog’ for his ardent defence of Darwin’s work.

Today the Museum displays a statue of Darwin and some of the crabs he collected during his voyage on the Beagle.

From The Times -

Horses were moved over long distances in pre-Roman Britain, recent analysis has shown. Previous theories that horses were bred on specialised ranches are now joined by evidence that animals may have been traded to southern England from as far away as Wales or Scotland.

The absence of young horses’ bones from some Iron Age sites, such as the Gussage All Saints settlement in Dorset, suggested that they had bred elsewhere; the capture and breaking of wild animals, perhaps similar to the feral herds of the New Forest and Dartmoor, seemed a likely source. The high proportion of stallion bones, as at Danebury hillfort in Hampshire, was also an argument for non-controlled herds, since a domesticated herd needs few stallions and many mares.

On the other hand, Julius Caesar’s claim that the Iron Age ruler Cassivelaunus had 4,000 chariots, and thus 8,000 chariot horses, at his disposal led the late Peter Reynolds to infer that horse breeding was a large operation, carried on at what were effectively stud farms. The presence of foal bones at only a few Iron Age sites supports such a breeder-customer model.

Analysis of horse teeth from two Iron Age sites near Winchester now indicates that breeder and recipient may not have lived close together, although the sample is as yet too small for firm conclusions to be drawn. One tooth each from the Rooksdown and Bury Hill sites, dating to the later centuries BC, were assayed for strontium-isotope content, examining the ratio between strontium-86 and strontium-87, which varies with the local geology, soil and groundwater content, and which is fixed in the tooth enamel through the early years of life as the teeth form.

Reporting in Archaeometry, Dr Robin Bendry and colleagues note that comparison with the teeth of domestic food animals from the sites, which could be assumed to be locally bred, and also human burials from Winchester, showed that the Bury Hill horse had been bred locally, although whether it was tamed or domesticated was not indicated. The Rooksdown specimen, however, showed a different pattern: possible areas for its origin include Devon and Cornwall, Wales, parts of northwest England and Scotland, or even parts of the Continent. The investigators note that similarly distant origins have been documented for humans buried in the Stonehenge area, although almost two millennia older than the Rookswood horse.

“The data show that horses were moved over great distances,” they conclude, “evidence for long-distance movement perhaps through trade or exchange.”

Archaeometry 51: 140-150.

All photographs and text from the Guardian.

A male great bustard makes a courtship display. Great bustards disappeared from the UK in 1832 after game shooters made it extinct. This emblem of Wiltshire and the heaviest flying bird in the world (it can weigh up to 20kg) was reintroduced to Salisbury Plain in 2004, with eggs rescued from farmland in Russia. Great bustards need open grassland and arable fields where they feed on grasshoppers and cereal seeds; Photograph: Erich Kuchling/Rex Features

A beaver swimming in a Scottish river. Beavers were hunted to extinction in the UK by the end of the 16th century for their fur, glands for medicine and because their building of dams interfered with other land uses. Proposals to reintroduce this famous wetland engineer to Knapdale Forest in Scotland began in 1994. This was turned down in 2002 and again in 2005. A licence was granted in 2007 and the first beavers to return to Scotland for 400 years will be released this spring. Other proposals for reintroduction in England and Wales are being considered. The first beavers arrive in Scotland for the reintroduction programme that has started at a secret location. The beavers have all been electronically tagged; Photograph: A.Good/Rex Features

It’s been over 400 years since a wild beaver roamed an English river, but freedom will probably be short-lived for the lone male still at large after escaping – along with two rapidly recaptured females – a few weeks ago from an enclosure in Devon.

Unlike some parts of Europe, where beavers have been reintroduced by being chucked out of the back of a van, the return of once-extinct wild animals to the British countryside is treated with Byzantine feasibility studies, public consultations, legal wrangling, interminable arguments and meticulous planning. For example, it has taken since 1994 to reach acceptance on beaver reintroduction to Knapdale Forest, in Argyll and Bute, Scotland, with the first releases due this spring.

Ecologist and beaver reintroduction specialist Derek Gow, from whose enclosure the three beavers escaped, says: “It has been a long and tortuous process, and the success of reintroductions of beavers will be because of the ability to manage the species and habitats. We are involved in a feasibility study with South West Water. Beavers could help water filtration, removing pollutants and conserving water supply to reservoirs. They are ideal for ecosystem engineering, and they bring real environmental benefits.

“That’s how you sell the idea of reintroduction and persuade landowners. It’s all very well talking about conservation in cosy meeting rooms, but any landowners think conservationists are a devious lot. If we can’t engage with landowners and show them the benefits, reintroduction will be dead in the water. Nature conservationists have to get gritty and realistic.”

Also preaching realism is Tim Coulton, professor of population biology at Imperial College London, although he’s talking about probably the least realistic of the reintroduction targets: the wolf. “The reason for our report [a joint UK and Norway report on wolf reintroduction in Scotland for the Royal Society in 2007] was to look at the effect of wolves on the deer population of Scotland by simulating what had happened elsewhere. The debate on wolf reintroduction had been driven by anecdote and we wanted to inject some science to provide a more informed debate.”

Coulton appreciates that the motivations of many who support animal reintroductions may be aesthetic or romantic, and he does not believe that, even with economic subsidies, there will be strong enough support from sheep farmers for the reintroduction of wolves. However, he does see reintroductions as an important means to an end. “We have to decide what we want from our open spaces – large fields or diverse ecosystems, tourism, water quality,” he says. “Reintroductions can be a tool to achieve these ends. I suspect science rarely drives reintroductions, but it’s the role of science to provide data for a debate and raise warnings, not to decide. That requires a wider public platform.”

Steve Carver, senior lecturer in geography at Leeds University and a coordinator of the Wildlands Network, agrees. “Reintroductions must have grassroots support and cannot work as an authoritarian, top-down process,” he argues. “The reintroduction of the white-tailed eagle on Mull [in Scotland] has developed an industry around wildlife watching. People need to see the benefits of re-wilded landscapes.” He says different landscapes need different policies, with subsidies for restoring habitats.

The current reintroductions, and many of the candidates for a future return, do not require landscape-scale ecological restoration for their success. For example, the red kite has the highest population for 200 years in the UK. White-tailed eagles too can float over the existing landscape without its modification, while wild boar have introduced themselves to the English countryside very successfully, and great bustards like Ministry of Defence grassland and arable fields on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire.

The most iconic candidate for reintroduction, the lynx, could also arrive without any landscape restoration. This big cat seems happy to live in broadleaved woodland or conifer plantations, and it is estimated that the Scottish Highlands could support a population of 400 lynx. Its selling point is that it would keep down roe deer numbers, as well as foxes, the notorious predators of ground-nesting birds.

Carver says: “The reintroduction of lynx will depend on the success of the beaver, so I’m hopeful that, within 10-15 years, they may be reintroduced. Personally, I’d be happy going to my grave knowing they were back.”

Behind the reintroduction and the re-wilding agenda there is an important shift going on in the conservation world. “Traditional conservation has potentially seen its day,” Carver claims. “The old guard was focused on sites and species, and managed reserves for one species, not the whole landscape. There’s a reason for rarity. If we lose a few species, does it really matter if they’re common in other locations? The new paradigm in conservation is about habitats, landscapes and whole ecosystems.”

Facing a list of 1,149 priority wildlife species and 65 priority habitats that need concerted action to save them, the government’s chances of fulfilling its commitment to stop the loss of biodiversity before 2010 is hopeless. A new target of 2020 is being proposed, but that is likely to be just as hopeless. As traditional conservation becomes more difficult, with less money available and less public support in the current financial climate, the reintroduction of charismatic fauna offers conservation bodies a chance to engage with the public in ways that obscure species of plants and invertebrates in isolated nature reserves unfortunately don’t.

Defining moment

As well as this utilitarian approach to the value of animal reintroductions as economic tools, and the enhanced products and services of ecosystems, Andy Evans, head of the RSPB’s terrestrial research section, says: “There is a moral imperative to correct anthropogenic harm and a moral obligation to maintain habitats, and to improve them from damage caused by, for example, agriculture. Conservation, which has always been scale-dependent, is facing a defining moment.”

Ecologist and author Peter Taylor says: “The reintroduction of charismatic species is also a way of re-wilding the human mind, engaging people with nature on a deeper psychological level. But these reintroductions won’t happen unless all the community is involved, including hunting, shooting, fishing and farming interests.

“This kind of conservation is not helped by the dead hand of computer simulations, government consultations and accounts of the lynx being good for eco-tourism. In early natural history, there was a spiritual connection with nature. As a scientist, I think we need to reclaim something lost from scientific conservation. The lynx, the beaver and wild boar have become iconic emblems for that.”

Comeback contenders

Lynx
The Eurasian lynx, a secretive, powerful cat, is the most likely mammal predator to be reintroduced to the UK – although many say it is already here.

A Eurasian lynx mother sits in the grass while her two pups play in their outdoor enclosure in Germany. This secretive, powerful cat with tufted ears and a short tail weighing 25kg survived in Britain until 180AD. The Eurasian lynx is the most likely mammal predator candidate for reintroduction, although many say it is already established in some areas. It is estimated that the Scottish highlands could support a population of 400 lynx, where they would control roe deer and foxes; Photograph: Ronald Wittek/Corbis

Beaver
Hunted to extinction here by the end of the 16th century. A proposal launched in 1994 to reintroduce it to Knapdale Forest, Scotland, was turned down in 2002 and again in 2005. A licence was granted in 2007 and the first beavers to return to Scotland will be released this spring.

White-tailed eagle
By 1916, this huge bird, sometimes called the sea eagle, became extinct here through persecution. It was reintroduced to Scotland from Scandinavia in 1975 and there are now 42 breeding territories there. A study is being carried out on proposals to reintroduce it to East Anglia.

A white-tailed eagle seen in Scotland. In 1700 there were 200 pairs but by 1916 this huge bird, sometimes called the sea eagle, became extinct after persecution in the UK. It was reintroduced to Scotland from Scandinavia in 1975 and there are now 42 breeding territories there. A feasibility study is being carried out on proposals to reintroduce it to East Anglia;Photograph: /RSPB

Great bustard
Last year saw the first egg laid by a great bustard – the heaviest flying bird in the world – in the UK for 175 years. It was reintroduced to Salisbury Plain in a project that began in 2004 with eggs rescued from farmland in Russia.

Pictured here is the first female great bustard to lay eggs in Britain in 175 years; Photograph: HO/AFP

Wild boar
After an absence of 400 years, they have reintroduced themselves by escaping from boar farms damaged in the 1987 storm. Now well-established in south-east England and the Forest of Dean.

After an absence of 400 years, wild boar have reintroduced themselves by escaping from boar farms damaged by the 1987 storm. There are now populations in south-east England and the Forest of Dean; Photograph: Solent News/Rex Features

Grey wolf
The last wolf in the UK was killed in Scotland in the 17th century. Experience in other countries shows that reintroduction would help to regenerate vegetation and woodland.

The last wolf in the UK was killed in Scotland in the 17th century. According to recent population modelling if wolves were reintroduced to Scotland, their population would stabilise at 25 wolves per 1,000 square kilometres. Although wolf populations would have an impact on the high red deer population, experience in other countries shows the wider effect would be to regenerate vegetation and woodland, benefiting wildlife and helping to restore ecosystems; Photograph: Robert Pickett/Pickett

Large Blue butterfly
One of the most vulnerable butterflies in the world, it became extinct in the UK in 1975, but was reintroduced to Dartmoor in 2000 from Sweden.

The large blue butterfly became extinct in the UK in 1975 but was reintroduced to Dartmoor in 2000 from Sweden. This is one of the most vulnerable butterflies in the world. It lays its eggs on wild thyme, then the caterpillars are adopted by red ants who take them into their nests, where the butterfly caterpillars become predators of ant grubs before pupating and emerging as spectacularly bright blue adults; Photograph: Emma Daniel/PA

In his readable book, ‘And Did Those Feet – Walking through 2000 years of British and Irish History’, published this year, Charlie Connelly wrote about his fairly recent walks in the British Isles that retraced the steps of famous, seminal journeys from history.  Here is an excerpt from his extraordinary journey through Lincolnshire,  -

After an hour or so of heart-pumpingly terrifying slog, I suddenly became aware that the traffic had disappeared.  There was nothing to be seen in either direction and the sudden silence was as surprising as it was welcome – I could see for a fair distance in both directions and there was no traffic at all.  Then, to my amazement, I saw two people in the road.  The only light was from my own downward-pointing torch and the faint glow of the horizon, so I could  only see them in silhouette, but there were definitely two people walking towards me.  They were actually in the road on the same side as me, so facing any oncoming traffic that might appear; a man and a woman.  I couldn’t see their faces, but they looked quite young.  He was tall, stocky and appeared to be wearing a T-shirt, she was small, wore her hair in a ponytail and had a jacket folded over her arms.  While I was amazed to see anyone out there I was also a little relieved.  Seeing other people reassured me a little, just by the fact that I wasn’t the only pedestrian on the A15 that night.  I’d started to believe that I was the first person ever to walk this stretch, yet here were a couple apparently even worse off than me – at least I was vaguely well equipped.  It was a very cold night and I was well wrapped up; my panting, frightened breath came in big clouds.  They were just in a T-shirt and a blouse.  There must be an explanation for them being out here like this, I thought.  Their car must have broken down or something.  I expected to see it down the road somewhere, hazard lights winking.

‘All right?’ I asked as they drew level.

No reaction.  Not a flicker.  We were a good couple of miles from any kind of house or even turning in either direction; you’d have thought three people in such a similarly tricky predicament would have been pleased to see each other.  But they didn’t even acknowledge me.

‘What are you doing out here?’  Again, not a flicker of reaction.  They just carried on walking in the road as if I wasn’t there, passing within six feet of me.

In the time it took me to walk on a few paces and mutter ‘Well, bollocks to you then’ to myself, I realised that I had the advantage of a map.  I knew that there was nothing in the directin they were going for a good hour’s walk at least.  If they were going for help they wouldn’t find any that way.  I turned around to call after them.

Gone.  There was no sign of them.  It had barely been ten seconds since I’d passed them.  The road was completely flat in both directions and there were fields on either side with low hedgerows separating them from the road.  There was simply nowhere they could have gone, yet they’d totally vanished.  At that point the clouds parted and a big, fat yellow full moon appeared, heaving its way into the sky and illuminating the scene briefly before the clouds joined up again and the traffic resumed with as much ferocity as before.  I walked on as the roar of the traffic battered my eardrums, but the more I thought about it the more confused I became, particularly when I didn’t pass any kind of abandoned vehicle all the rest of the way.  It just didn’t add up.  It was a cold night, yet he was in a T-shirt and she had a jacket folded over her arms.  It was so cold you could see your breath in clouds.  Which is when I realised I hadn’t seen theirs.  Then there was the fact they didn’t acknowledge my presence, even though I’d spoken to them twice.  Out there in the dark, on the road with nothing around for miles, they’d not even nodded at me.

Much later, when I got home at the end of the journey, I looked up the A15 on the internet.  That part of it on the way to Sleaford turned out to be one of the most haunted stretches of road in Britain.  Page after page detailed ghostly experiences precisely where I’d seen those people.  In the late 1990s there had even been an entire episode of This Morning devoted to it.  None of the accounts seemed to tally with what I’d seen (there were frequent tales of motorists seeing a face suddenly looming up in their windscreens out of the darkness and disappearing just before impact, a couple of ghostly horsemen and the usual smattering of Roman soldiers) but it certainly made me wonder.  There could well be a perfectly reasonable explanation.  I may well have inadvertently embellished the tale in my memory – I was, after all, in a fairly agitated state anyway – but to this day I can’t explain what I saw out on the road that night.

It didn’t get me any closer to Sleaford either, and I still had a good couple of hours of frightened trudging ahead of me.  I was out there for so long that the torch batteries began to fail and the light that saved me from the lumps, clumps and bramble trip-wires began to dim.  Eventually, to my immense relief, the lights of a town appeared in the distance, and I can guarantee you right now that nobody, but nobody, has ever been pleased to see the Sleaford Travelodge as I was.

My route had taken me slightly east of Ermine Street, but I was still following a Roman road south when I left Sleaford the next morning.  As far as I could tell it was the most direct route to London so there was still a possibility that Harold passed that way too.  By lunchtime I was making good progress towards Bourne and on a pleasant sunny afternoon passed another big church in the middle of nowhere, this time at the convergence of some tracks rather than roads.  A man was mowing the churchyard and gave me a friendly wave, and a few hundred yards further along the track I found the most extraordinary thing.  There, in the middle of rural Lincolnshire, I found a little piece of Wales.  Just off the track, in front of a line of trees was a flat-fronted standing stone, about four feet high.  A small border in front of it was crammed with flowers and shrubs, some planted, some laid by visitors.  As I approached I could see there was an oval plaque on it and, to my surprise, most of it was in Welsh.  ‘GWENLLIAN’ it said across the centre, with ‘Merch Llywelyn Ein Llew Olaf’ in smaller letters above and the dates 12.6.1282 and 7.6.1337.  Beneath the name was an English translation, ‘Daughter of Llewelyn, Last Prince of Wales’.  In smaller letters around the edge, in English and Welsh, the inscription read, ‘Born at Garthcelyn Aber Gwynedd, at 18 months old she was abducted by Edward I and held captive here at Sempringham Abbey for the rest of her life’.  Another small plaque nearby said ‘In Everlasting Memory – daffodils planted in 1996 by Boston Welsh Society’, with another bearing the legend ‘Merched Y Wawr’, which, I would later learn, is the rough equivalent of a Welsh Women’s Institute.

I was intrigued by this small piece of Wales stuck here, far from main roads, in an apparently unremarkable backwater.  As for Sempringham Abbey, there appeared to be no sign of it as far as I could see; the OS map gave no clue that there was even a ruin here.

There was a crunching of gravel and a sleek black four-wheel-drive vehicle eased to a halt next to me.  A man and a woman got out, stretching and loosening as if they’d reached the end of a long journey.  They came and stood next to me at the stone, and for a while none of us said anything.

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ said the woman eventually. ‘Such a tragic story.’  Her voice was awed, her accent definitely Welsh.

I had to confess that I had no idea what the stone was for; I’d just been passing.  When she told me that she and her husband had driven all the way from Cardiff just to see it I knew that there had to be something special about this place.

‘How much do you know about Welsh history?’ she asked.  Despite having once had a fiercely patriotic Welsh girlfriend, I had to confess that I didn’t know much.  Patiently she began to explain why there was this little monument to Welshness in the east of England.

‘Llewelyn ap Gruffydd had fought hard to become Prince of Wales,’ she began.  ‘He’d had to defeat his own brothers in battle in 1255 and then set about trying to remove the English.  Henry III had invaded Gwynedd in 1247, built castles and forced the local lords to kowtow to him.  After the battle Llywelyn appointed himself sole ruler of Gwynedd and proclaimed himself Prince in 1258.  Henry was fairly amenable to this at first and praised Llewelyn for his restraint, and eventually – in 1267, I think it was – Henry acknoweldged him as Prince of Wales.  Henry was then succeeded as King of England by Edward I, who wasn’t quite as tolerant of Llywelyn’s status.  But when Llywelyn married Henry’s niece Eleanor at Worcester in 1275, Edward gave the bride away and laid on the wedding feast.

‘However, it still rankled that Llywelyn had refused to attend his coronation and on five occasions between 1274 and 1279 he had refused to pay homage to the English king when asked.  Edward eventually invaded and Llwelyn led a fierce Welsh resistance.  Eventually, though, in the winter of 1282 Llwelyn’s army suffered a defeat in battle at Builth Wells.  Llywelyn was leaving the battle with a handful of followers when they were ambushed and he was killed.  When the English realised just who they’d got they cut off Llywelyn’s head and sent it to Edward, who had it displayed on a spike at the Tower of London, where it stayed for fifteen years.  He’s known today as Llywelyn the Last as he was the last Welsh Prince of an independent Wales.’

‘But what brings you here?’ I asked. ‘Why is this place so significant?’

‘Well, five months before he died Llywelyn had fathered a daughter, Gwenllian.  Eleanor had died in childbirth, so when Llywelyn was killed the baby was orphaned.  When she was eighteen months old she was spirited away and brough here, to Sempringham Abbey, as far from Wales and her heritage as possible.  The English didn’t want her knowing about her background and didn’t want the Welsh to have a figurehead to rally behind, so they sent her here to the nuns, where she lived until she was fifty-six.  Imagine that: living your whole life not knowing who you are.

‘This is such an important place for the Welsh now.  She could have been the continuation of our royal bloodline.  It’s such a terrible thing to do to someone, to take away their birthright, their whole life, yet few people outside Wales know about it.  The history books say that the Gwynedd dynasty, the last official independent Welsh royal family, ended with Llywelyn by actually it ended right here, it’s so unfair.’

Her tone was imploring.  Her voice was filled with injustice that echoed down seven hundred years of history.  When I explained why I was walking through this part of Lincolnshire countryside she clutched my forearm, looked pleadingly into my eyes and said, ‘You have to write about this.  Please write about this.  Promise me you’ll write about this, that you’ll tell her story.’

I promised.  She released my arm, wished me luck and they both climbed into the car.  Before they pulled away she wound down the window and called out, ‘When you walk across that little bridge there, look back at the stone and you’ll see,’ and with that the car was gone, heading back to Cardiff.

I walked the few yards to the little stone bridge across the stream that ran behind the memorial.  When I looked back at the stone I saw what she meant.  From that angle it looked exactly like a nun kneeling in prayer.

pp.114-19

From the BBC (published 18th July 2007) -

Some event, or combination of events, resulted in a huge lake breaching the chalk ridge between what is now Dover and Calais. Scars from the torrent are still evident in sonar images of the Channel floor today, presented (right) as a processed 3D perspective view.

Britain became separated from mainland Europe after a catastrophic flood some time before 200,000 years ago, a sonar study of the English Channel confirms.

The images reveal deep scars on the Channel bed that must have been cut by a sudden, massive discharge of water.

Scientists tell the journal Nature that the torrent probably came from a giant lake in what is now the North Sea.

Some event – perhaps an earthquake – caused the lake’s rim to breach at the Dover Strait, they believe.

Dr Sanjeev Gupta, from Imperial College London, and colleagues say the discharge would have been one of the most significant megafloods in recent Earth history, and provides an explanation for Britain’s island status.

“This event, or series of events, that caused [the breach] changed the course of Britain’s history,” Dr Gupta told BBC News.

“If this hadn’t happened, Britain would always have been a peninsula of Europe. There would have been no need for a Channel Tunnel and you could always have walked across from France into Britain, as early humans did prior to this event.”

Tremor trigger?

The idea of a great flood stems from scientists’ understanding of northern Europe’s ice age past.

It is believed that hundreds of thousands of years ago, when ice sheets had pushed down from Scotland and Scandinavia, there existed a narrow isthmus linking Britain to continental Europe.

This gently upfolding chalk ridge was perhaps some 30m higher than the current sea level in the English Channel.

Palaeo-researchers think it bounded a large lake to the northeast that was filled by glacial meltwaters fed by ancient versions of the rivers Thames and Rhine.

Then – and they are not sure of the precise date – something happened to break the isthmus known as the Weald-Artois ridge.

“Possibly this was just the build-up of water behind. Possibly something triggered it; it’s well known today that there are small earthquakes in the Kent area,” explained Imperial’s Dr Jenny Collier.

Re-routing rivers

Either way, once the ridge was broken, the discharge would have been spectacular.

The Imperial College and UK Hydrographic Office study used high-resolution sonar waves to map the submerged world in the Channel basin.

The images detail deep grooves and streamlined features, the hallmarks of landforms that have been gouged by large bodies of fast-moving water.

At its peak, it is believed that the megaflood could have lasted several months, discharging an estimated one million cubic metres of water per second. And from the way some features have been cut, it is likely there were at least two distinct phases to the flooding.

“I was frankly astonished,” said Dr Collier. “I’ve worked in many exotic places around the world, including mid-ocean ridges where you see very spectacular features; and it was an enormous surprise to me that we should find something with a worldwide-scale implication offshore of the Isle of Wight. It was completely unexpected.”

The researchers tell Nature that the ridge breach and the subsequent flooding would have helped reorganise river drainage in northwest Europe, re-routing both the Thames and the Rhine.

Fossil filling

The megaflood theory has been around for some 30 years; but the sonar images represent the clearest narrative yet for the story.

Previous studies of prehistoric animal remains from the past half-million years have already revealed the crucial role the English Channel has played in shaping the course of Britain’s natural history.

The Channel has acted as a filter through time, letting some animals (including humans) in from mainland Europe but not others.

And even when water was locked up in giant ice sheets and sea levels plummeted, the Rhine and the Thames rivers would have dumped meltwater into a major river system that flowed along the Channel’s floor.

Scientists can see all of this influence written in the type and mix of British fossils they find at key periods in history.

Professor Chris Stringer is director of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (Ahob) project, which has sought to fill out the details of the British Isles’ prehistory.

“The timing and method of formation of the Channel has been a long-running argument – after all, it really makes Britain what it is today, geographically,” he commented.

“The evidence presented in this paper is spectacular. It certainly explains and reinforces the picture the Ahob project has been putting together of the increasing isolation of Britain from Europe after 400,000 years ago.”

From the BBC (published 26th September 2006) -

A study of prehistoric animals has revealed the crucial role of the English Channel in shaping the course of Britain’s natural history.

The Channel acted as a filter, letting some animals in from mainland Europe, but not others.

Even at times of low sea level, when Britain was not an island, the Channel posed a major barrier to colonisation.

This was because a massive river system flowed along its bed, UK researchers told a palaeo-conference in Gibraltar.

Today the English Channel is 520km long, 30-160km wide, about 30-100m in depth and slopes to the south-west.

Even now, the bed of the Channel is incised by a network of valleys, the remains of the river system, which may have been cut by catastrophic drainage of meltwater from further north.

“It would have been an incredible barrier at times of high sea level, but it would also have been a formidable barrier at times of low sea level for populations trying to move south to north,” said Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum.

Professor Stringer presented the results here at the Calpe conference, a meeting of pre-history experts from all over the world.

The big flood

The evidence comes from the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project (AHOB). This five-year undertaking by some of the UK’s leading palaeo-scientists has reassessed a mass of scientific data and filled in big knowledge gaps with new discoveries.

Chris Stringer’s co-researchers Andy Currant, Danielle Shreve and Roger Jacobi have been studying how the mammal fauna of Britain has changed over the last 500,000 years.

During that period, animals have colonised, abandoned and re-colonised Britain many times as the climate shifted from warm to cold and back to warm.

The Channel is thought to have formed during a cold period 200,000 years ago or more.

Meltwater from an ice sheet formed a lake, which then overflowed in a catastrophic flood – cutting through a chalk ridge that previously connected Britain to France.

Changes in climate were accompanied by changing sea levels. At the height of an ice age, these would have been low. During interglacial periods, when the climate was warm, sea levels rose.

But even when water was locked up in the ice sheets and sea levels plummeted, the Rhine and the Thames rivers dumped meltwater into a major river system that flowed along the floor of the Channel.

Unusual collections

This means that once the Channel formed, there was never again a simple land crossing to be made from northern France to Britain.

“We find we’re getting only a selection of the mammals during the British interglacials that there are in mainland Europe,” said Professor Stringer.

For example, at one pre-historic site, researchers found hippopotamus and fallow deer; but unlike mainland Europe at the time, there were no horses and no humans.

“This suggests that the Channel, or the Channel river system, is acting as a filter to prevent the movement of some of these [mammal] forms into Britain,” Professor Stringer added.

Once sea levels rose high enough for Britain to be an island, the select fauna that had made it across from mainland Europe could develop in extraordinary ways.

During one warm stage, about 80,000 years ago, fossils from Banwell Cave in Somerset show Britain was populated by some very unusual animals. These included reindeer, bison, and a giant bear similar to a polar bear.

Interestingly, there are no hyena fossils at Banwell Cave, as there were in mainland Europe. Instead, it appears, their role in the food chain may have been taken up by wolves.

“The wolves were developing much larger jaws. Their teeth show incredible signs of breakage and wear as if they’re chomping bones like hyenas,” said Professor Stringer.

The mammals at Banwell seem to be the kinds of animals normally found today in cold regions. But they lived in Britain during a warm stage and seemed to be adapting to their new environment.

The team thinks the antecedents of these animals must have arrived in Britain when the climate was cold. But when conditions warmed up, sea levels rose and isolated Britain, marooning this cold-adapted fauna in a warm land.

THE HISTORY OF HUMANS IN BRITAIN Lables refer to archaeological finds -            The evidence suggests there were eight major incursions -      All but the last – about 12,000 years ago – were unsuccessful -          A number of major palaeo-sites mark the periods of influx -  Extreme cold made Britain uninhabitable for thousands of years

Graph from the BBC

From the BBC (published 5th September 2006) -

Eight times humans came to try to live in Britain and on at least seven occasions they failed – beaten back by freezing conditions.

Scientists think they can now write a reasonably comprehensive history of the occupation of these isles.

It stretches from 700,000 years ago and the first known settlers at Pakefield in Suffolk, through to the most recent incomers just 12,000 years or so ago.

The evidence comes from the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project.

This five-year undertaking by some of the UK’s leading palaeo-experts has reassessed a mass of scientific data and filled in big knowledge gaps with new discoveries.

The project’s director, Professor Chris Stringer from London’s Natural History Museum, came to the British Association Science Festival to outline some of the key findings.

What has been uncovered has been a tale of struggle: “In human terms, Britain was the edge of the Universe,” he said.

The project has established that a see-sawing climate and the presence of intermittent land access between Britain and what is now continental Europe allowed only stuttering waves of immigration.

And it has extended the timing of what was regarded to be the earliest influx by 200,000 years.

More than 30 flint tools unearthed in a fossil-rich seam at Pakefield, Lowestoft, on the east coast, represent the oldest, unequivocal evidence of humans in northern Europe.

But the story from then on is largely one of failed colonisation, as retreating and advancing ice sheets at first exposed the land and then covered it up.

“Britain has suffered some of the most extreme climate changes of any area in the world during the Pleistocene,” said Professor Stringer.

“So places in say South Wales would have gone from something that looked like North Africa with hippos, elephants, rhinos and hyenas, to the other extreme: to an extraordinary cold environment like northern Scandinavia.”

Scientists now think there were seven gaps in the occupation story – times when there was probably no human settlement of any kind on these shores. Britain and the British people of today are essentially new arrivals – products only of the last influx 12,000 years.

“Australian aboriginals have been in Australia longer, continuously than the British people have been in Britain. There were probably people in the Americas before 12,000 years ago,” Professor Stringer explained.

Dr Danielle Schreve from Royal Holloway, University of London, has been filling out part of the story at a quarry at Lynford, near Norwich.

She and colleagues have found thousands of items that betray a site occupied some 60,000 years ago by Neanderthals.

The discoveries include the remains of mammoths, rhino and other large animals; and they hint at the sophistication these people would have had to employ to bring down such prey.

It seemed likely, she said, that the Neanderthals were picking off the weakest of the beasts and herding them into a swampy area to kill them.

“In the past, Neanderthals have been described as the most marginal of scavengers, and yet we have increasing evidence that they were supreme hunters and top carnivores,” Dr Schreve told the festival.

One major piece of this great scientific jigsaw remains outstanding: extensive remains of the ancient people themselves.

What we know about the early occupations comes mostly from the stone tools and other artefacts these Britons left behind; their bones have been elusive.

Professor Stringer is confident, though, that major discoveries are still ahead.

Some of the earliest human settlements would have been in what is now the North Sea. Indeed, trawlermen regularly pull up mammoth fossils from the seabed, for example.

“There are very many promising sites in East Anglia where there is tremendous coastal erosion going on. That’s bad news for the people who live there now; and we don’t want it too happen to quickly either because we need time to get to grips with what’s coming out of the cliffs.”

Maps from the BBC

From the Bradshaw Foundation -

An extraordinary collection of mammoth remains and flint tools unearthed in a Norfolk quarry may be evidence of the first Neanderthal hunting camp discovered in Britain, scientists said yesterday.

The 50,000-year-old fossils and artefacts, among the best preserved in this country, are casting important new light on the lifestyle of Homo neanderthalis (Neanderthal man), the cousin of modem human beings that lived in these islands in the last Ice Age. A 12-week archaeological dig at a gravel pit has revealed a pile of at least seven tusks up to 8ft long, large teeth and partial skeletons from at least four mammoths, together with eight Neanderthal flint hand-axes, teeth from a woolly rhinoceros and reindeer antlers.

The close proximity of the Neanderthal tools and the animal remains – one hand-axe is actually inside a mammoth skull still attached to a tusk – suggests that the site was a hunting hide where the hominids ambushed their prey, or a scavenging ground where the kills of predators, such as sabre-toothed cats and bears, were butchered and eaten. Either way, the discoveries will help scientists to piece together new details of the Neanderthal way of life, solving puzzles about their diet and behaviour.

The Norfolk site contains a network of watering holes, which would have been an ideal spot for either activity. There are no Neanderthal bones or teeth, but their presence has been confirmed from the age of the dig and the style of the hand-axes. Andy Currant, curator of fossil mammals at the Natural History Museum, said that there was clear evidence of Neanderthal activity. “You don’t get piles of tusks like this unless someone has gathered them up,” he said. “It has to be deliberate. The hand-axe was the Swiss Army knife of the middle Palaeolithic. If you’ve got one actually in or on a skull, you don’t have to worry what else you’ve got, there’s butchery going on. I’ve never seen anything like this in Britain.” David Miles, chief archaeologist for English Heritage, which funded the dig, said: “This is as good an example of a Neanderthal kill site as you will find. This site is not just of national but of international importance.”

The best evidence for Neanderthal hunting comes from Germany, but the Norfolk hand-axes offer the strongest indication yet of such hunting in Britain, Mark White, a Palaeolithic archaeologist from Durham University, said: “It is valid to speculate that the Neanderthal had gone to this watering place because they knew they would find prey to kill.”

Bill Boismier, of the Norfolk Archaeology Unit, who led the excavation team, said that the absence of cut marks on the bones, together with large numbers of carcass beetle fossils found, made scavenging more likely, although they did not rule out a Neanderthal kill. The excavations are the first to be supported with a grant from the Aggregate Levy Sustainability Fund, which distributes money raised by a tax on gravel quarries to environmental and historical projects in such areas.

Neanderthal Man was present in Europe and Asia from about 130,000 years ago to, about 30,000 years ago, when it was supplanted by modern man, Homo sapiens. Woolly mammoth grew to about the same size as a modern Asian elephant, standing between 8ft and l0ft high at the shoulder and weighing between four and six tonnes when fully grown.

A report by Imogen Mowday on the Bradshaw Foundation website -

A bout-coupe style handaxe lodged against fragments of a Woolly Mammoth’s tusk.

These images were taken at a newly discovered Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) site in East Anglia dating from approximately 60,000 [sic] years ago. Archaeologists continue to work there and are revealing what may be the most important Palaeolithic site in Britain since evidence of Homo heidelbergensis, dating from circa 500,000 years ago, was discovered in Boxgrove in the 1990s. This new site has so far revealed over a dozen bout-coupe style handaxes, one of which is shown in photograph number one lodged against fragments of a Woolly Mammoth’s tusk. The clear association of Neanderthal handaxes with a range of Glacial animal, insect and plant species makes this site the first of its kind to be found in the U.K.

Woolly mammoth, bears, reindeer and frogs, and hundreds of flint flakes and tools. The exciting discoveries were made during the draining of a lake for gravel extraction. A local archaeologist who is a highly skilled flint-toolmaker (a knapper), was monitoring the gravel extraction to ensure that no archaeology was damaged or not recorded. The site first became clear to him when two large mammoth tusks protruded out from a layer of peat. Immediately work ceased and archaeologists began to record in fine detail the thousands of fragments of animal bones ranging from woolly mammoth to bears, reindeer and frogs, alongside many hundreds of flint flakes and tools.

A Neanderthal trap to kill or scavenge off large mammals. It has now become clear that the remains were deposited within ponds, which would have been set against a tundra backdrop: an environment containing little tree cover and perhaps a permanent layer of permafrost. These watering holes would have provided a perfect arena for Neanderthals to trap and kill large mammals, or to scavenge off the corpses of animals left by other carnivores. Future examination of all the flint tools and animal bones may be able to clarify whether the Hominids were hunting, scavenging or both. Already some bones appear to have fractures indicative of hominids smashing them for marrow extraction, as the rich fats and nutrients contained within would have been essential for survival in a cold climate.

Neanderthal behaviour

The site will undoubtedly greatly aid our understanding of Neanderthal behaviour. As David Miles, chief Archaeologist for English Heritage, expressed it: “We may have discovered a butchery site, or, what would be even more exciting, first evidence in Britain of a Neanderthal hunting site, which would tell us much about their social abilities”. Not only may we learn about the way in which Neanderthals behaved in order to obtain food, the discovery of mammoth tusks in a concentrated area may indicate that the Neanderthals used them to construct shelters or territorial markers. Therefore the site’s finds may ultimately allow us to make suggestions about the symbolic behaviour of Neanderthals and allow them to be viewed as highly intelligent sentient beings, finally removing any old views depicting them as “primitive”.

From Fathom.com -

At Lynford, a site in Norfolk, there is evidence of an association between Neanderthals and mammoths. This is a very exciting site that has only been excavated in the last few months, by the Norfolk Archaeology Unit. It has revealed wonderful remains of several mammoths, and numerous small hand axes made by Neanderthals dating from about 50,000 years ago. One of the research questions to be addressed is that none of the mammoth bones so far seem to have cut marks on them. So is this association accidental? Perhaps these hand axes were being used to butcher other animals elsewhere on the site and were then mixed in with the mammoth remains? Or perhaps the Neanderthals were indeed hunting, or at least scavenging, the mammoths. AHOB is involved in this rich vein of current research.

From the Bradshaw Foundation -

Research in East Anglia, and a new analysis of bones found two decades ago in a Somerset quarry, show that human beings have been living in Britain for up to 200,000 years longer than has generally been thought. Mankind’s ancestors may have migrated here as long as 700,000 years ago.

Until now, the oldest evidence of early human beings, or hominids, in Britain came from about 500,000 years ago, the date attributed to Boxgrove Man, a member of the species Homo heidelbergensis whose remains were unearthed at Boxgrove in West Sussex in 1993.

The first results of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project, however, indicate that the first Britons are almost certainly much older. Animal remains found at a hominid settlement on the East Anglian coast have been dated to 700,000 years ago, indicating that “Anglia Man” is at least that old. A re-examination of animal bones and artefacts unearthed in the 1980s at Westbury-sub-Mendip, in Somerset, have shown evidence of early human activity 100,000 years before Boxgrove Man.

The revised date for Westbury alone, however, is being hailed as one of the most exciting developments in British archaeology and palaeontology since the Boxgrove finds.

“The evidence is starting to mount in favour of hominids having been here for a long time before Boxgrove,” said Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum, and director of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project. “We don’t yet have the hominid fossils, as we do for Boxgrove Man, but there are firm hints that settlement goes back as far as 700,000 years.”

Andy Currant, from the museum’s department of palaeontology, said: “We are getting big surprises. The dates are massively earlier than what we thought they were, by an order of 100,000 years.”

Human remains, such as the tibia and teeth found at Boxgrove, have yet to be unearthed from older periods, but cut marks on animal bones and flints shaped into primitive hand-axes have been found at the new sites. Both are firm indicators that mankind’s ancestors were present, because no other animal could account for them. At Westbury, for example, there are bones belonging to rhinoceroses, hyenas, wolves, bison and cave bears showing straight cut marks that could have been made only by butchery with a sharp cutting implement, along with shaped flints that have been newly identified as hand axes.

The dates involved are much too early for carbon dating – effective only to about 40,OOOBC – but scientists have been able to calculate good approximate ages from the known ages of animal fossils found at the sites.

In particular, the research centres on teeth belonging to a genus of prehistoric watervole, known as mimomys. About 700,000 years ago these voles had rooted molars, similar to those of human beings, which grow once then get worn down through adult life. But by 500,000 years ago, the animals had evolved rootless molars that continue to grow – an advantage to creatures that eat tough vegetation.

The voles found at Boxgrove are from the later era, but the East Anglian ones have primitive molars, dating the site definitively to at least 700,000 years ago. Those at Westbury are of an intermediate form. “The dating still involves some guesswork, but the best estimate is about 600,000 years ago,” Professor Stringer said. Simon Parfitt, a fossil mammal specialist at the museum and at University College, London, who analysed the vole fossils, said; “We can put everything in a relative order, and Westbury could be 100,000 years earlier than Boxgrove. The Bast Anglian finds go as far back as 700,000 years.”

The species of hominid which inhabited the sites remains unknowable without direct fossils. Professor Stringer said the most likely candidate is an earlier variety of Homo heidelergensis. It was also possible they were examples of Homo antecessor, a potentially new species found at Atapuerca in Spain and the oldest known European hominid.

Homo heidelergensis, as known from Boxgrove and continental sites, had a slightly smaller skull than modern man, but was more heavily built, at about 14 stone in weight and 6ft to height “In my view, it’s a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens,” Professor Stringer said.

The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project, which was started last year with a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, is also examining human habitation in Britain since Boxgrove and aims to shed light on when, how and where hominids lived in these islands. A key question will be an investigation of a 100,000-year period in which early human beings appear to have been absent, probably because of climate change.

The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain study has brought together researchers from many different disciplines with the aim of building up a comprehensive history of human habitation in England and Wales. As well as archaeologists and palaeontologists, it involves geologists, geographers and specialists on fossil mammals. Geological data, for example, gives a good guide to dates and to local temperatures during particular epochs, while mammalian remains can be important for judging human lifestyles.

From the BBC (published 4th June 2002) -

The discovery of stone tools and animal bones in Eastern England has made scientists think humans may have been present in Britain 200,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Research at two coastal sites, one of them at Happisburgh, Norfolk, showed humans could have settled in the country 700,000 years ago.

Experts previously thought the earliest humans arrived 500,000 years ago.

The animal bones show markings which could only have been made by human chopping activity.

Human evidence

Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum, said: “The evidence is being examined by a lot of people… but it’s building into an exciting picture.”

Further analysis at Westbury-sub-Mendip in Somerset, where animal bones and teeth were discovered in the 1980s, now shows evidence of human activity 600,000 years ago.

The finds form part of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) project which began last November.

It combines specialists from universities and museums but also relies on the work of amateurs in local areas.