This other Eden (1): Swindon

West of London and east of Bristol in Wiltshire (South West England) is Swindon. Three miles west of its centre, on the edge of town is Lydiard Park.
In 244 acres of parkland are the eighteenth century Lydiard House, its walled garden, an exceptional church and close by a kids’ adventure play area. Bought by the [...]

Read Full Post »

This other Eden (beginning)

When I was a child, I’d leaf through books and dream about visiting exotic places.  Nepal, Peru, Russia, Botswana.  Everest, Machu Picchu, Red Square, the Okavango.  Never the UK.  Never England.  Never Scotland.  Never Wales.  Never Northern Ireland.  Never the UK.  Never, as Shakespeare put it about one of these countries, ’this other Eden’ (Shakespeare, ‘Richard II’, Act II, Scene [...]

Read Full Post »

77 years young

Reports out today that a 77 year old Nepalese man has scaled Mount Everest making him the world’s oldest person to do so.  That’s ‘wow-news’.
Having stood at the bottom of the thing at around 19,000ft feeling a bit like how I thought a 77 year old would feel, I doth my fleece hat to him.
Not [...]

Read Full Post »

No new thing under the sun and all that

Yesterday, we uploaded information on Cirencester Roman Ampitheatre: http://www.picturetheuk.com/uk-tourism/attraction/roman-amphitheatre-843.html.  One of the mental notes when doing so was, ‘what happened there, was it a Colosseum in Rome mini-me?’  Did they fight to the death for entertainment?
There’s a great quote from the writer Kurt Vonnegut: ‘One of the few good things about modern times: If you [...]

Read Full Post »

Red soil and pink sheep

The story so far.  Fish with prototype legs crawl out of the water onto land at roughly the time Dartmoor is first forming.  Later (a lot later), continents collide to form a supercontinent.  The UK is in the centre of this continent and what is now Devon is a dome of rock under which hard granite is forming.  [...]

Read Full Post »

And the answer is: fish with legs

That’s what Professor Richard Southwood writes on p73 of ‘The Story Of Life’.
So, when Dartmoor first started forming 400 million years ago (http://www.fossilwalks.com/dartmoortors1/formation1.htm), ‘we’ and, indeed, mammals were hundreds of millions of years in the future and fish were crawling out of the seas, evolving into the forerunners of amphibians.
The Dartmoor National Park we see [...]

Read Full Post »

YouTube and many millions of years ago

Just set up a new YouTube account to publish footage taken around the UK.  It’s under http://www.youtube.com/user/picturetheuk if interested and we’ll be adding thousands of videos during 2008. 
Fancying a break, I thought I’d write about Dartmoor National Park.  Why it looks like it does, how old it is etc.  So, have been looking through six piles of [...]

Read Full Post »

Milton’s Mulberry

Four hundred years ago, a Mulberry tree was planted in the Fellow’s Garden at Christ’s College, Cambridge Univeristy.  Later in 2008, a sapling from this tree will be planted in Drover’s Wood which is close to Hay-on-Wye in mid-Wales.  The genius poet John Milton used to write under the tree in Cambridge.  Hay-on-Wye is famous [...]

Read Full Post »

Hyenas

‘In the nineteenth century, workmen digging clay for bricks at Fisherton, near Salisbury, found hundreds of bones.  These bones were the remains of animals that had lived in the river valley between 250,000 and 10,000 years ago.
There were many animals living in the area that are not found in Britain today.  They were attracted here [...]

Read Full Post »

Ten o’clock

Why do attractions such as the British Museum or National Trust properties open at ten o’clock?  Presumably it’s a cash thing, not wanting to pay people for the extra hours?  Sure, if it’s an excellent but slightly out of the way place such as Battle Abbey in East Sussex then fine but the British Museum?  Central [...]

Read Full Post »