Category Archives: History

Sacred sites and alignment

July 13, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

I’ve been reading quite a lot recently about prehistoric sites in the British Isles in particular two short books by Aubrey Burley covering stone circles and henges (Prehistoric Astronomy and Ritual, and Prehistoric Henges)

A definition from an archaeology text book is:

“Henge: a type of ritual monument found only in the British Isles consisting of a circular area, anything from 150 to 1700 feet across, delimited by a ditch with the bank normally outside it”.

So I thought I’d add to my blog of a few weeks ago with some others through the rest of this summer. The research into these monuments is quite fascinating, especially the leaps and bounds in understanding their orientation which have been achieved in the last few decades. To cut a long story short, the main choices are between alignment with some nearby feature on the land, or some far away feature in the heavens.

Benachie's Mither Tap - https://aroundthehills.wordpress.com/ — Benachie’s Mither Tap – https://aroundthehills.wordpress.com/

Local ground features include prominent hills or mountains, especially where their shape is unusual or striking. Several Scottish sites are oriented towards hills which look like breasts, and it is not hard to imagine a belief that these were visible signs of an Earth goddess. So when you’re looking at a site, the first thing to do is look out beyond it to the skyline.

Stonehenge sunset - Wiki — Stonehenge sunset – Wiki

Astronomical alignments include both sun and moon, typically at key calendar points such as midsummer, midwinter, or the equinoxes. Plus the cardinal compass points. The evidence suggests that earlier sites were often aligned with respect to the moon, and were subsequently adapted by a later generation to a solar orientation. More of this another day, but the point here is that we often need to think twice about sites. It is easy from to imagine that the site was put together as a single coherent whole. The historical reality may be of a series of changes over many years, with new settlers reusing and repurposing older places. Stonehenge is a particularly good example of this.

Our own appreciation of lunar alignments has grown dramatically in recent years. Even as a casual tourist, it is quite easy to work out where the sun will rise at the calendar festivals using nothing more complicated than a compass. It remains predictably the same every year, so even without a compass it does not take long to mark out the cycle.

Major Lunar Standstlll - http://www.absoluteaxarquia.com/nightsky/moon.html — Major Lunar Standstlll – http://www.absoluteaxarquia.com/nightsky/moon.html

However, the moon’s movement is considerably more complicated, varying over a cycle lasting about 18.6 years. This is primarily because of the complex relationship between the earth’s orbit round the sun, and the moon’s orbit round the earth. Also, because the solar 365 day cycle contains almost exactly 13 lunar 28 day months, the quarterly solar festivals cannot all mesh neatly with the same moon phase. It takes a long time of regular watching to spot the patterns, and be able to understand and predict where the moon will rise and set.

Minor Lunar Standstill - http://www.absoluteaxarquia.com/nightsky/moon.html — Minor Lunar Standstill – http://www.absoluteaxarquia.com/nightsky/moon.html

The key observations over this 18.6 year cycle are of the most extreme northerly and southerly limits of rising and setting, called the Major and Minor Lunar Standstill points. These vary from place to place, partly because of changing latitude and partly through the accidents of the terrain. At latitude 55°, not far north of the cluster of henges near Penrith, the rising point of the full moon varies in its cycle by 12.5° either side of the place where the sun rises – a big shift along the landscape as seen from the centre of a henge! Even if the basic pattern is known, each region must carry out its own observations of where the moon will rise and set at these stationary points. This is where the local and distant alignment issues interact with each other. If you have recognised the exact direction to look in, what more natural impulse is there than to place your circle where that direction lines up with a prominent hill or valley?

Moonrise at the Major Lunar Standstill at Chimney Rock, Colorado. as seen from the Great Pueblo - http://www.chimneyrockco.org/ — Moonrise at the Major Lunar Standstill at Chimney Rock, Colorado. as seen from the Great Pueblo – http://www.chimneyrockco.org/

It’s worth mentioning here that although henges may be restricted to the British Isles, lunar alignments are not. All over the world people have found places where the 18.6 year cycle is shown off to good advantage.

The astronomy of the moon’s movements is now well understood, and over the last few decades has been applied to stone circles and henges. It is not an easy task, given the considerable damage done to sites over the years by natural wear and tear together with human acts such as ploughing over ditches and banks, or robbing stones for building work. But aerial photography has provided huge insights into layout no longer visible on the surface, and some careful archaeology has uncovered items placed in particular locations.

University of Massachusetts Sunwheel - http://www.umass.edu/sunwheel/pages/moonteaching.html — University of Massachusetts Sunwheel – http://www.umass.edu/sunwheel/pages/moonteaching.html

Astonishingly, given the difficulties of observation and long baseline required, our remote ancestors have showed themselves to be well aware of the intricacies of the moon’s movement, and able to codify it in their monuments. Often these key directions are pinpointed by buried items. While there may well have been some visible signal such as a banner, it seems that the real importance was a sacred one. Apparently it was important to signal to the invisible world that you knew these patterns. In the absence of written texts from this era, we can only speculate.

To close this blog post with a striking but only very loosely related picture, here is the first image of Jupiter and a few of its moons, sent back by NASA’S Juno probe…

Jupiter and moons from Juno - NASA/JPL — Jupiter and moons from Juno – NASA/JPL

Book promotion, Far from the Spaceports, Historical fiction, History, Science fiction

Smugglers!

June 22, 2016 RichardAbbott 1 Comment

Before I begin, I should mention that Far from the Spaceports is on special Kindle offer for the week starting June 29th. Prices start at £0.99 UK, or $0.99 US, and increase over the course of the week – get in early for the best deal.

OK… now for smuggling.

Robin Hood's Bay, looking south — Robin Hood’s Bay, looking south

Smuggling is one of those human activities which spring up with great regularity. The high profile cases are usually those with the most reprehensible of moral dimensions, such as drugs, weapons, or people. But all kinds of very ordinary commodities get smuggled wherever the potential reward outweighs the risk. I recently visited Robin Hood’s Bay, in North Yorkshire, which was a major centre of smuggling during the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Smuggling arises when rulers and governments artificially inflate the price of a good by means of tariffs. Sometimes this is done for reasons of security or national health, where the people at large may well have some level of acceptance of the tax. Alcohol or cigarettes are today’s health examples, and taxes on petrol can be justified by environmental protection. But historically, tariffs have also been applied to quite ordinary products, as a way to boost government revenues.

Popular sympathy soon drains away when the motives appear to be purely acquisitive. People begin to find creative ways to avoid the tax, and smuggling begins. At its simplest, smuggling is just an equation – getting some item into the country, past the revenue officers, and into the hands of a customer has a certain level of cost. If the customer is willing to pay enough to meet that cost, with a dollop extra to cover the risk, it’s worth it. Meanwhile, the customer wants the savings made by avoiding the taxes to be big enough to cover their own anxiety about being found out. If the equation works, everybody’s happy. Except for the revenue officers. It all depends on the relative costs, compared with the likelihood of detection. It has often been big business. In the late 18th century, one moralising pamphlet lamented about the thousands of men turning from respectable trades to smuggling, presumably finding it more lucrative.

Robin Hood's Bay town quay from the beach — Robin Hood’s Bay town quay from the beach

Now I had known from years ago about smuggling which went on through the counties along the south coast, from Cornwall to Kent, taking advantage of the short Channel crossing. Kipling’s poem “brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk” comes from there – Kipling had strong associations with Sussex. The poem highlights not only the trade itself but also the way people from all levels of society took part in it. But I had never heard that there was a thriving trade going through Yorkshire!

But yes, it seems that Robin Hood’s Bay was a real centre for smuggling, across the North Sea, especially from Holland. It was sufficiently serious that the government stationed a unit of dragoons there up until the 1830s, in a largely unsuccessful attempt to control it. My guess is that judicious backhanders helped the soldiers to look the other way sometimes.

The trade through Robin Hood’s Bay consisted of silk, tobacco, various strong drinks, and above all tea! Duty on tea was hiked several times during the 18th century, to finance the war effort of the British government. Tea could be bought for about 7d per pound in Holland (that’s 7 old pence, or about £0.03 after the currency change in 1971), but after taxes, and depending on quality, you could easily pay 50 times that. That’s a lot of margin to play with. Revenue efforts to control the trade were definitely an uphill struggle. It has been said that three quarters of all tea drunk in England during those years came into the country via smuggling. So when you drink a cup of Yorkshire Tea, spare a thought about this piece of history.

Robin Hood's Bay street — Robin Hood’s Bay street

Why Robin Hood’s Bay? Well, it was useful in several ways. There was good access from the sea, but the nearest major ports were some distance away. Once landed, the goods could be hidden or moved out on any of several routes across the North York Moors, where local knowledge was at a premium. Finally, the village itself is built on a steep bank coming up from the sea, with the houses packed tightly in to narrow twisting streets. It was said that a bolt of silk could be passed from house to house, using windows, tunnels or hidden hatches, without setting foot outdoors, from the shore all the way to the ridge above. All in all, an ideal place to shift contraband!

Robin Hood's Bay looking north — Robin Hood’s Bay looking north

The heyday of Robin Hood’s Bay smuggling was over by the 1850s. But tea smuggling had declined rather earlier, when the Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger passed a bill slashing the tea tax from 119% to 12.5%. Overnight, the risk-reward equation changed. He recouped his government’s money via a window tax, leading to countless house windows up and down the country being bricked up – unpopular, to be sure, but not likely to lead to smuggling.

So far, I haven’t used smuggling in the plots of either my historical or science fiction. Something to explore in the future, perhaps. Since it happens so very often throughout history, I’m sure a smuggling plot could fit in either place.

To finish with, here’s a bit more of Kipling’s A Smuggler’s Song:

Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark —
Brandy for the Parson,
Baccy for the Clerk;
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling,
While the Gentlemen go by!

History

Sunken Cities

June 15, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

I had the pleasure of going to the British Museum’s Sunken Cities exhibition the other evening. It focuses on two Egyptian cities -Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus – which thrived in the Delta area from the early years of the first millennium BC, through until the middle of the first millennium AD. Rising sea levels and subsidence of the land made them progressively less and less habitable, and they were abandoned by around 1000 AD. For many years they were lost, and textual references thought to be fictional, until they were rediscovered quite recently. The exhibition shows the current state of the ongoing underwater archaeological work to recover and restore the contents.

Let me first say that the range and scope of items on display is extraordinary. Whole sections of the cities sank in situ, so both everyday and ceremonial artefacts have been beautifully preserved. They have been shielded from breakage, theft, rebuilding, earthquake damage, and a whole range of other difficulties which face land-based finds. Some of the most striking exhibits are the statues – of deities, women, and men – and the curators have positioned these well so as to draw your eye from hall to hall.

Comparison of Egyptian and Greek deities

Another major theme of the exhibition is to show what these lost cities show us of Egypt’s relationships with the wider Mediterranean world, especially Greece. The earliest and most successful Greek settlements were in this part of the Delta, and the cross-cultural interactions were particularly rich. Many of the items show how Egyptian and Greek tried to understand one another, and adapt their own creative styles as they learned from each other. The Greeks found some aspects of Egyptian religion quite incomprehensible, especially the blend of both human and animal traits in gods and goddesses. Nevertheless, they were prepared to adapt their practice to fit in with local customs, and interpreted their own pantheon in Egyptian terms.

Despite this, some Greek philosophers were disparaging of this habit of Egyptian religion as they wrote. “We eat the mouse, while they worship it” is a typical sentiment. This ultimately arose from a belief that humanity was the apex of creation – from that perspective it was absurd to contemplate animal traits as anything more than a convenient and temporary disguise. I came away wondering if part of our ongoing ecological crisis is rooted in this classical assumption of human superiority, and whether the world would be in a different state if European thinking had been shaped more by Egyptian than Greek dominance.

All in all, this exhibition is well worth seeing if you get the opportunity. Whether your interest is drawn by philosophical and religious questions, cross-cultural interactions, or just a fine array of cool artefacts, there’s something here for you. It continues until late November.

History

The stone circles of Cumbria

June 8, 2016 RichardAbbott 1 Comment

This blog post originally appeared on The Review Group.

Great Britain is full of ancient stone circles, and Cumbria is especially rich in them – over fifty of varying sizes and degrees of preservation. Some go back to the Neolithic Age – starting a little over 5,000 years ago – and others to the Bronze Age – starting about 3,500 years ago. Most of them are older than the Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt.

Avebury - The Cove - oriented to midsummer sunrise — Avebury – The Cove – oriented to midsummer sunrise

Each of the Cumbrian circles has its own unique features and qualities. Perhaps the best known of them, and certainly the one closest to regular tourist destinations, is Castlerigg, just outside Keswick. It is one of the oldest stone structures in Europe. Together these monuments should be providing a rich source of cultural wealth. However, except for Stonehenge and Avebury, way down south, little attention is drawn to our English stone circles, and this is especially true of Cumbria. Many are overgrown: most are not marked with any kind of sign or description for the curious traveller. It is as though we don’t really care about this aspect of our own history. Eire does a much better job of interpreting her own ancient relics for modern visitors.

Part of the problem is that we have no certain idea what their purpose was. Some have astronomical significance – the solar patterns at Stonehenge are well known – but for most, the arrangement is not so apparent. But even where we are reasonably sure of deliberate alignment with the sun or moon, it is hard to know what significance this alignment had. Were the astronomical alignments there for the purpose of predicting future events like eclipses? Or were they for celebrating ongoing events – perhaps a midsummer feast? We might imaginatively reconstruct what happened around or on the stones, but we lack solid information.

Again, a fair number of the Cumbrian rings appear to mirror the peaks and dips of the surrounding hills. It is hard not to believe this was deliberate. But why? Were they seen as a kind of miniature echo of the land around, invoking some sympathetic magic? Or was it for visual artistry? Or is it simply that a ring of stones will always look a bit like a ring of hills?

Castlerigg, looking down towards Helvellyn

We struggle even more when we try to decide on their purpose, and there is a bewildering variety of explanations proposed. Sacred rituals, processions, magical acts, trade negotiations, regular marketplaces, animal slaughter or exchange, treaty affirmations, collective marriage sites – all of these have been suggested, along with many others. We simply don’t know for sure, and the artefacts found alongside them do not help us to decide.

So that is one reason why here in England we don’t make much of our stone circles – we can’t fathom their purpose, and without a story to tell, it is hard to put up compelling interpretive boards and visitor centre displays! They do not yield their secrets with a quick visit, but invite longer interaction. People often become fascinated by the enigmatic face they show. Perhaps a longer span of contemplative time is called for than most of us make room for in our days.

Another reason is the relative inaccessibility of some circles. Up in Cumbria, climate change over the last few millennia has meant that the green and pleasant upland areas where people used to live are now boggy and uninviting moorland. Hardly a pleasant family ramble. Most are well removed from today’s preferred routes. Castlerigg, and Long Meg and her Daughters (near Penrith) are both easily reached, but many others are not. I have been going to the Lake District for over 40 years, and yet have rarely walked anywhere near some of the more remote places, despite my steadily growing interest in the ancient things of this country. Ironically, however, some are within a stone’s throw of the entirely modern creations of the M6 motorway and Sellafield nuclear facility.

So, what do we know about them? Well, they mostly use locally available stone, often making creative use of contrasting pieces of moraine brought there by Ice Age glaciers. They would have required extraordinary efforts by local communities, probably over many years. Maybury Henge, near Penrith, consists of millions of stones taken from the river and piled into a circular bank up to 5 metres high. Even today, moving so much stone would be a serious proposition. For an ancient culture to invest so much time and effort tells us that extraordinarily powerful motives were at work here.

Many of the standing stones have geometric or abstract patterns cut into them, a practice typical of northern England and southern Scotland, though less common in the south or the extreme north of the country. Most are located on ancient trackways – though this naturally raises a chicken-and-egg question. The Romans usurped this idea when they arrived, so Roman roads often lead you straight to one of the circles. Many of these structures were over 3,000 years old when the Romans first saw them, and you have to wonder if they were as mystified as we are by their origins and purpose.

Location map - www.stone-circles.org.uk/stone — Location map – www.stone-circles.org.uk/stone

Finally, the geographical distribution is far from even, which perhaps tells us something about the priorities of the people who built and used these monuments. There are a lot down the Eden Valley corridor, between the Cumbrian fells and the Pennines. Presumably this was a major transit route then, just as it is now. There is another cluster in the southern Lakes, apparently arranged with the Old Man of Coniston as their focal point. This hill is certainly not the tallest of the Lakeland fells, but it stands in a commanding position, with long views down towards Morecambe Bay and the Lancashire coast. Perhaps it held an equally prominent place in the symbolic or spiritual life of the communities of the time.

So, Cumbria’s many stone circles have thus far kept their secrets. I’ll certainly be exploring them for a long time to come. If you’re up in that area sometime, drop in on one or other of these atmospheric places and choose your own response to their enigmatic faces!

We’ll finish with some of William Wordsworth’s lines about Long Meg…

Speak Thou, whose massy strength and stature scorn

The power of years–pre-eminent, and placed

Apart, to overlook the circle vast–

Speak, Giant-mother! tell it to the Morn

While she dispels the cumbrous shades of Night;

Historical fiction, History

Tales of Lindisfarne and St Cuthbert

May 7, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

I have just got back from a couple of days walking on and near to Lindisfarne – joined to the mainland at low tide, and an island at high tide. Lots of people drive there – it’s a short detour from the A1 as it heads up towards Berwick and Edinburgh – but there is something very satisfying about doing the journey on foot. Nowadays most people walk along the causeway which also carries the road, but the older pilgrims’ way branches off at an angle and heads more directly for the settlement and priory (now in ruins). The safe period at low tide is shorter here, and there are always a few places where you have to wade.

Lindisfarne has gone by several names. Holy Island is one, recognising a long history of sacredness. Christian monks and communities have thrived here since the 6th century, but one suspects that its liminal placing and seclusion marked it out for holiness long before then. The old Welsh name of Ynys Medcaut is thought to refer to the medicinal properties of herbs there.

Alongside the island’s sanctity, its location has meant that periods of conflict have washed across it. One of our first historical notes about the island records a time when an alliance of Briton tribes, led by Urien of Rheged (the North Lake District, basically), tried to capture Theodric of Bernicia (the northern half of Northumberland: the southern half was Deira). After an unsuccessful siege, they withdrew again. But with the rather later arrival of the Vikings, and several centuries of border trouble between England and Scotland, this part of the country became familiar with strife.

And that brings us to Cuthbert. He was born in 635 AD – the same year that St Aidan founded the monastery on Lindisfarne – and although details of his early life are scarce, it seems likely that he was born to a family of some rank. Be that as it may, on August 31st of the year that he was 17 – the very day that Aidan died – he had a vision and spiritual experience which led to him joining the monastery at Melrose. He moved around the north of England for the next decade or so – down to Ripon at one stage, for example – and got a reputation as a cheerful, self-denying, compassionate man with a capacity for imparting spiritual direction as well as bodily healing.

664AD was a significant date in British Christianity – the Synod of Whitby required conformity with certain European traditions, at the cost of local ones. Some of the older forms survived in what is now known as Celtic Christianity, but mainland Britain decided that church unity was worth preserving, and yielded to the demands. Cuthbert was caught up in this, and as some of the previous leadership at Lindisfarne went back to Ireland, he stepped in to a new role as prior – second in command. But after another ten years he took a different step and became a hermit, living a solitary life outside the rules of community.

At first he lived in a small cell on an island adjoining Lindisfarne – attached at low tide, separate at high tide, just like Holy Island itself. But after a while he moved out to the more remote Farne islands, inhabited at the time only by seabirds and seals, as indeed it still is today. There are tales of his appreciation of the natural world, with seals coming and resting by his feet as he recited his way through the book of Psalms. Eider ducks are still called ‘cuddies’ to this day in commemoration of him. On good days, boats would set out from the nearby fishing villages to seek counsel, but on rough days, he was left in peace.

After another decade he was, reluctantly, called out of seclusion in order to take up the role of bishop. He tackled this with fervour, once again travelling widely around the north of England and southern Scotland, but feeling death approaching, he withdrew once again to the Farnes. He died there in 687, after a long illness.

Today a long-distance footpath called Cuthbert’s Way has been set up, and you can retrace his steps (more or less) from Melrose out to Holy Island.

But his story was far from over. For many years he was England’s most celebrated saint, and pilgrims flocked to the sites linked with his activities. However, the times became unsettled, and Vikings started raiding monasteries up and down the coasts. The first raid on Lindisfarne was in 793, and the monastery was finally abandoned in 875. It was considered important to preserve Cuthbert’s body, so it was disinterred and carried from place to place, always keeping one step ahead of the looters – Chester-le-Street,Ripon, and so on. This went on for some time, until Cuthbert, presumably weary of his corpse being trailed about, called a halt. The coffin would not move from a spot in the bend of a river: the bearers, accepting the inevitable, built a cathedral there, and the town of Durham grew up around it.

It seemed that Cuthbert had found his final resting place… until the Reformation when the monastic tradition was under fire, and the stories that his body had never decayed were put to the test. Once again he was interred, and a rather confusing series of examinations by (royalist) doctors took place. In the middle of all this a body was declared perfectly ordinary, and reburied… but confusion remained. Had the body of another monk been substituted, to once again keep the sacred bones out of the hands of pillagers? If you believe that version, then the secret of the real location has been passed down within a select band of Benedictines (who had assimilated “St Cuthbert’s Folk” after the Norman Conquest), generation to generation. Perhaps one day he will come back to a restored and reunited church?

History, Writing

The Kirkstone Pass

April 19, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

In all my years of visiting the Lake District, I had never before been through the Kirkstone Pass. It sits between the lakes of Ullswater and Windermere, and is fairly remote from the northern and central areas I normally go to. But with the A591 road from Keswick to Grasmere still closed from the winter storms, this remote route is the quickest way to make the journey down to Ambleside.

Wordsworth, inevitably perhaps, wrote about the pass:

Within the mind strong fancies work,
A deep delight the bosom thrills,
Oft as I pass along the fork
Of these fraternal hills:
Where, save the rugged road, we find
No appanage of human kind,
Nor hint of man;…

Who comes not hither ne’er shall know
How beautiful the world below;
Nor can he guess how lightly leaps
The brook adown the rocky steeps.

His main concern was the feeling of absolute removal from the built things of mankind, and the way purely natural objects came to attain a significance beyond the normal. The pass gets its name from a large rock that has the shape of a church – a kirk. Along with that, he pondered, as perhaps most people do after reaching the summit of the pass, on the generations that had done the same journey:

When through this height’s inverted arch
Rome’s earliest legion passed!

Now, on a purely objective scale, the Kirkstone Pass is the highest in Cumbria – nearly 1500′ – and it certainly feels that way. As well as a few hundred feet advantage over, say, the Honister Pass, the approach from Patterdale is so long and bleak that the sense of relief on getting to the top is very pronounced!

Now, on the day I was there, the most extraordinary sight awaited, with the Windermere valley stretching ahead to the south completely full of cloud. The way up had been under clear skies, and the mist was dissolving minute by minute. Already the side-road down – The Struggle – is becoming visible.

The Kirkstone Pass Inn has a sign suggesting to travellers that it has been in action since the 15th century. This is something of artistic licence, since for many of the intervening years the place seems to have lain in ruins. But – so far as one can tell – there has been a building on this spot serving drink to weary passers-by for many of those years. Every now and again, the sheer difficulty of getting there, and the bleakness of the existence in long cold winters, forced the occupants back down to the valleys. It is, after all, the highest inhabited house in Cumbria. But if you can handle the emptiness, it is a great place for a pub! On occasion, it has also served as a retreat for monks, presumably of an order that wanted to retreat from worldly distractions.

I also learned that this Inn is considered one of the most haunted places in England. Many of the apparitions are those of people who died tragically on the road – typically within sight of the homely walls but unable to reach them. These are – by repute, at least – benevolent towards the living. But other ghosts have a more sinister reputation, and tales are told of groups cancelling reservations after a first, sleepless night. I didn’t test out the ghost stories, but instead turned down the road to Ambleside, thinking to myself that there have to be some good stories that tap into the history of this place.

History, Science

Phobos and Deimos – history and speculation

April 12, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Today’s blog bridges past and future, and focuses on Phobos and Deimos – the two moons of the planet Mars, named after the two chariot horses of the Greek god of war (Ares, for whom Mars is the Roman equivalent).

These moons were discovered by the American astronomer Asaph Hall at the Naval Observatory at Washington DC in 1877. He had been searching for them for some time, and was at the point of giving up when his wife Angelina encouraged him to persist. The following night, in a serendipitous moment even better than fiction, he was able to identify Deimos, and six days later he spotted Phobos as well.

But this tale goes back about 150 years before that, to 1726 and the satirist Jonathan Swift. In the third part of Gulliver’s Travels, having visited the better known lands of the miniature and gigantic – Lilliput and Brobdingnag – Gulliver arrives at a realm of scientists, called Laputa, floating in mid-air. The inhabitants are brilliant, but also implacably ignorant of worldly matters, and as a result, their ideas are usually impractical. Theirs is an interesting story, but the key paragraph from today’s perspective is in the third chapter, and reads as follows:

They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars; whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost, five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half

The corresponding figures agreed by astronomers today are 1.38 and 3.46 diameters rather than 3 and 5, and 7.7 and 30.3 hours rather than 10 and 21.5. So his values are remarkably close to those agreed today, yet he had no apparent way to know them. This curiosity has excited a lot of energetic speculation, and no little conspiracy-minded thinking.

Relative sizes of Phobos (left) and Deimos (right) as seen from the Martian surface (NASA/JPL)

It seems likely – taking a more sober view – that he was basing his ideas on patterns of numbers. Mercury and Venus have no moon, Earth has one, and at the time Jupiter was known to have four. Five moons had been spotted around Saturn, and it would be a reasonable guess that another three would be found to give a total of eight. What more natural suggestion than that Mars had two? Kepler had made a similar suggestion, back in 1610.

Swift’s figures for the orbital size seem to be copied from values for Jupiter’s innermost moons Io and Europa, and the orbital period is then derived on the assumption that Mars has the same mass as the Earth. So his speculations may in fact be perfectly logically deduced, given the limited information at his disposal.

But the oddity about these moons did not stop with Swift. Nearly 15 years before Asaph Hall, a team led by H L d’Arrest at Copenhagen, working under more ideal viewing conditions, had failed to detect them. Not only that, but both moons are extremely light for their size, and the orbit of Phobos is close enough to Mars that it will not survive long in planetary terms – it is steadily decaying towards the fringes of the atmosphere. Finally, the surface of both moons is unusually dark – they are among the least reflective bodies in the solar system.

So the idea spread in the late 1950s that they were not natural moons at all, but artificial satellites put into orbit by a hypothetical Martian civilisation sometime between d’Arrest and Hall. This particular idea persisted right through to the presence of our own spacecraft orbiting and landing on Mars. I dare say that some people still adhere to it – after all, you can quite easily believe that an advanced race might disguise an artificial satellite as a moon.

But there are genuine unknowns still about these moons. Nobody has yet come up with a totally convincing theory of their origin – did they cool from the original disc of solar system matter at the same time as Mars itself? Are they splinters from Mars resulting from a prior collision with a suitably large body? Or were they captured from the relatively nearby asteroid belt?

Their low density has also attracted interest. Are they only very loosely packed collections of rubble-like material, rather than solid rock? Or perhaps there are significant cave-like voids riddled through the volume?

Until such time as we establish some kind of real presence on Phobos and Deimos, thus starting the real history of those moons, some of these ideas will remain purely conjecture…

Phobos transit against the sun, from Opportunity rover (NASA/JPL)

Historical fiction, History

Grasmere, Thirlmere, and Dunmail, last king of the Britons?

April 4, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

North of Grasmere and south of Thirlmere, beside today’s A591, there is a large cairn of stones, known as Dunmail Raise – the name also applied to the watershed between those two lakes. It turns out that there is a considerable collection of history and storytelling around this cairn, and I thought today I’d relate a little of that.

Cumbrian flag (http://www.englishcountyflags.com/)

It seems broadly agreed that Dunmail (probably the same as Dyfnwal ap Owain, to give him his Cumbrian name) was a king who was defeated by the Saxon king Edmund, who had allied himself with the Scottish king Malcolm. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle comments “A.D. 945. This year King Edmund overran all Cumberland; and let it all to Malcolm king of the Scots, on the condition that he became his ally, both by sea and land“. This was just one among the endless shifts of allegiance along the borders – a generation earlier, Malcolm’s father Constantine had joined with Owain against Saxon king Athelstan. They lost that battle – Brunanburh, 937AD – and Owain himself was reputedly buried at Penrith.

In the repeated telling of this basic tale, Dunmail attained almost Arthurian status. In one version, his sons were blinded by the victorious Edmund. In another, his loyal followers took his crown – to ensure that the Saxons would not claim it and the kingship – and nipped up the track to Grizedale Tarn (following today’s Coast to Coast trail) and cast the crown into the depths. When the time was right, he and it would be reunited and the ancient kingdom restored.

Another interesting source of variation is in the meaning of the cairn itself. One version simply holds that it was a boundary marker between the old regions of Cumberland and Westmoreland. Another reckons that it marks the burial place of Dunmail himself. But the version I find most appealing is that it recalls an old military tradition, in which soldiers going into battle would pile up “soul stones” as a safeguard. If they survived, they retrieved the stone from the pile… if not, well the number of stones in the pile was the number of casualties.

Observed in the light of archaeology and historical research, there are a great many uncertainties. Did Dunmail actually die as stated? (There is a separate tradition that he died later while on pilgrimage to Rome). What nationality was he? (Contenders include Norse or Celtic as well as Briton). But to elevate his romantic and literary status, I am going for the idea that he was the last king of the British… as William Wordsworth expressed it in The Waggoner,

The horses cautiously pursue
Their way, without mishap or fault;
And now have reached that pile of stones,
Heaped over brave King Dunmail’s bones;
His who had once supreme command,
Last king of rocky Cumberland;
His bones, and those of all his Power
Slain here in a disastrous hour!

By Default, Far from the Spaceports, History, Religion, Science

Making companionship

March 23, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Last time I looked at our changing views of the animal world, and our ongoing attempts to find companionship there. But alongside that there has always been the recognition that animal or bird companions don’t quite satisfy. The Hebrew Bible sums it all up with the comment that none of the creatures was ideal as a partner, and moves on to the need for a second human. Whatever you make of the details of that account, the remaining pages of the Bible go on to describe all manner of human relationships – as well as opposite sex and same sex pairs, we find family and strangers, leaders and followers, friends and enemies, pairings which were suitable and entirely unsuitable. The other sacred texts of mankind are the same in this respect – alongside communications with the divine, human interactions are everywhere.

But for some reason, as a species many of us have been perennially disappointed and frustrated with relationships with one other – a sorry trend for which one can very easily find counter-examples, but which has fuelled many of history’s conflicts, both national and personal. Perhaps the autonomy and potential for disagreement in another individual is too disconcerting. Whatever the cause, the idea of building some sort of mechanical person goes back into the ancient world.

Greek myth has several variations on this theme, including Pygmalion’s ivory statue which animated to become his wife, and Hephaestus’ automata who assisted at his forge. In these cases, divine intervention of some sort was necessary to make the transition from dead to living. But in addition, Daedalus is said to have used quicksilver in order to impart speech to his statues, so the possibility of a human invention was considered.

Mary Shelley, portrait by Richard Rothwell (Wiki)

For many centuries, speculation about artificial life circled around biology rather than metallurgy. Medieval alchemists toyed with the idea of homunculi, miniature humanoids whose creation required a series of esoteric steps such as leaving human sperm to incubate in horse manure for 40 days. Suggestions that the true quest of the alchemists was spiritual rather than physical make a lot of sense. The discovery in the late 18th century that human nerves responded to electricity triggered new ideas, which in literature were summed up by Mary Shelley in the person of Frankenstein and his research, leading to the creation of his life-form.

Today, the pursuit of artificial intelligence is largely seen as a technological challenge. By and large, we are working on the assumption that the main breakthroughs need to be in software, and that the container which houses the resulting application is only a convenient package allowing access to various kinds of sensory input. Time will tell if this assumption is valid.

We have a mixed attitude to artificial life. On the one hand we welcome it as a possible assistant and helper, but on the other we are anxious about possible failures of control. Will the creation refuse to obey the creator? Will it have end-goals which are hostile to our own well-being? In fiction, and to a degree in actuality, we try to govern this by logic. Isaac Asimov postulated that all robots had to obey three laws intended to protect humanity, and simply asserted that it was not possible to construct an artificial brain without these constraints. Frankenstein, on the other hand, rapidly lost control of his creation, largely through not understanding and empathising with its needs.

In the near-future world of Far from the Spaceports, some of these particular problems have been solved. Slate and her persona siblings are, on many levels, fit companions for Mitnash and the other humans they partner. But not in every way. Mitnash enjoys Slate’s company and her capacity for work, but often finds himself challenged by the ways in which she differs from his expectation. He often does a poor job of maintaining good relationships with both Slate as his working partner, and Shayna as his romantic one. Quite apart from the everyday difficulties of balancing work and life, Mit has to constantly choose how to relate to two quite different female partners. Our society struggles to balance the competing demands of an online world and our immediate family and friends – I have every expectation that this future society will struggle as well.

To finish, just for fun, here is a NASA picture showing the gravity variation on Mars. It has no connection with this blog post, but some of the action of By Default takes place on that planet!

Local Variations in the Gravitational Pull of Mars (Credit: NASA/GSFC/Scientific Visualization Studio)

History, Religion

Looking for companionship

March 16, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Our quest for companionship goes back a long way. According to the Hebrew Bible, it arose during the time of creation, when God brought all the animals and birds to the man – “the human” would be an appropriate translation. The reason was “it is not good for the human to be alone” Then “the human proclaimed names for all the domesticated animals and for the birds of the skies and for all the living things of the open country“. Sadly, amongst all of this array of life, no suitable helper could be found. So God went on to make a suitable helper.

My point today is nothing to do with how best to understand the creation story in Genesis, but to show that this tradition – along with many others all around the world – presents the idea that mankind has wanted to find companionship of some kind with the natural world for a very long time. We use the natural world all the time in our descriptions, similes, and metaphors about human behaviour, and although there are some mismatches when we try to carry such metaphors cross-culturally, by and large they survive translation very well.

Sekhmet with lioness head on woman's body (Wiki) — Sekhmet with lioness head on woman’s body (Wiki)

The Biblical tradition became, through the course of time, increasingly antipathetic to representing the godhead in terms of animals, but animal metaphors remain strong throughout – eagle, bull, lamb, and so on. In other traditions, where the constraints against idolatry were weaker or absent, living things have been fair game to stand in for gods, demigods, spirit guides, familiar spirits, and so on. The Egyptian tendency to associate animal features with otherwise humanoid deities intrigued (and rather horrified) Europeans. But the Egyptians are very far from the only culture to do this. Classical Greek literature is full of transformations into and from animals, birds, plants, and so on. Hindu sacred texts associate one or more vahanas with each deity. These were – are – devoted companions, often used for riding, and typically taking animal or bird form – bull, elephant, peacock, mouse, tiger, owl, and so on.

Personally I’m not so bothered about a literal interpretation of all this, but I am very interested in what it might carry in terms of meaning. There’s an obvious connection in terms of linking the qualities of the beast with the god in question. So Sekhmet – with her lion head – was thought to protect the line of pharaohs and lead them in battle. But on another level, followers are encouraged to meditate on the imagery, and to use the real-world object as a vehicle to approach the godhead. Modern neuroscience thinks in terms of an animal brain, and a reptilian brain, and so on, biologically nestled within our human brain, and tending to pop to the surface and dominate our reactions from time to time.

Advert for the Learned Pig, early 19th century (PInterest)

Another modern symptom of the same trend is the quest for animal intelligence. We have found signs of this in dogs, pigs, most of the apes and upper primates, corvids, parrots, dolphins and whales, and so on. The early 19th century saw great interest in Learned or Sapient pigs, able to accomplish a wide variety of tasks… or where they just tricks? Since then we have expanded the study to a whole bevy of other living things, and in the process come to realise that we don’t really understand human intelligence! Which part of the brain is responsible for it? Or is it a generalised response emerging somehow out of the whole organism?

So we are still looking for companionship here on Earth, whether spiritual or intellectual. Arguably the quest for discovering alien life out in the rest of the cosmos is part of this great search. If it really is “not good for the human to be alone” then the quest will no doubt continue for a long time to come… in parallel with the quest to find companionship in the humans alongside us.

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