There’s a lot of interest in the Norman Conquest just now, what with the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings approaching. So I thought I’d post about a loosely related event up in the Lake District, in the adjoining valleys of Buttermere and Rannerdale. Today’s Buttermere is a quiet and peaceful spot, with only a small scattering of houses set along the valley. Rannerdale itself is entirely unpopulated.
Buttermere and Crummock Water from below Fleetwith Pike
Back in the 11th and 12th centuries, however, they are said to have been a centre of Cumbrian resistance to the Norman invaders. Northern England tried to prevent assimilation into Norman rule, and suffered very considerably by way of reprisals. Cumbria was at this time considered part of Scotland – this lasted until the mid 1200s – and its population derived heavily from Viking stock. It seems that there was no appetite for submitting to William the Conqueror or his representatives here.
So – allegedly – resistance focused around a man called Jarl Buthar, who established for himself a secure defensive position (some say that the name Buttermere is a corruption of Buthar’s Mere). It’s a good place to defend – if you don’t know the area, or you’re trying to move in with a substantial body of troops, there are not many options. You can come round the outside of the Cumbrian fells, requiring a long march and exposing your supply chain to endless harassment. Or you can try coming over what we now call the Honister Pass, a difficult and rugged journey which again leaves you at the mercy of those who know the land better. The side walls of the valley containing Buttermere and Crummock Water are out of the question.
From Buttermere towards Haystacks
So there Buthar dug himself in and conducted a guerilla war for the better part of 50 years. The Domesday Book of 1086 says nothing about the area, and we have to presume that it remained at liberty. Norman nobles tried several times to break in, but the region was only secured and subdued in the 12th century
Rannerdale from Whiteless Breast with Crummock Water beyond
Which brings us to Rannerdale (Ragnar’s Dale). As I mentioned, today it is a quiet offshoot from the main valley, nestling under the slopes of Whiteless Pike and Grasmoor. It is best known for a spectacular crop of bluebells, which unusually grow out in the open here rather than in woodland. But according to rumour it was the place where Buthar lured a group of Normans led by Ranulph les Meschines and then slaughtered them in an ambush. The bluebells originated from the blood of the fallen.
How much of the tale is truth and how much legend? It has to be said that archaeologists are sceptical of the account, largely through lack of supporting evidence, and a common idea is that it is a romanticised version of the last stand of the Cumbrians against the unstoppable Normans. Be that as it may, it has triggered at least two work of fiction – The Secret Valley: The Real Romance of Unconquered Lakeland, by Nicholas Size in 1930, and Shield Ring, by Rosemary Sutcliff in 1956.
When you have finished exploring it, there are the more sedentary delights of Buttermere Village, including Syke Farm with its splendid icecream and other menu items…
Today is another look at prehistoric monuments in England, and in particular the way sites were reused and reinterpreted by later generations. My main focus is going to be religious or sacred use – obviously some houses and forts stay in use for many hundreds of years, but this doesn’t usually involve much change of purpose.
The modern stereotype is that later religious groups are implacably hostile towards earlier ones, violently trying to erase all signs that things were ever different. Certainly this happens from time to time – the attempted destruction of Palmyra is a glaring recent example – but actually, quiet assimilation of a site is very common.
Let’s look first at Stonehenge. Before the raising of the giant stones which are most people’s association with the site, there was a true henge there. The earliest part of the whole structure is a circular bank with an entrance facing compass point. There was also a ring of wooden posts, including a series set at intervals across the entrance, and a few outlying marker stones picking out specific angles from the centre.
Stonehenge building stages (from http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/)
Now, like most henges of its era, it was built around lunar alignments. The centre of the entrance, the postholes across it, items buried at particular places in the ring – even the main outlying stone called the Heel Stone – all of these pick out significant events in the lunar cycle. Now, since a full cycle takes 18.6 years, and it would take a few such cycles to be sure of the observations given inconveniences such as clouds, this already represents a huge summary of embodied knowledge. But let’s move on.
Time passed, as did the original builders, and the site was reused by new people with new beliefs. They didn’t just put up new stuff – like the stones – they repurposed the whole place. The entrance was widened, but asymmetrically, so that the midpoint was now angled to accommodate a solar orientation. You have to wonder if the newcomers were aware of the previous lunar settings and making deliberate changes, or if they just thought the earlier inhabitants had built it wrong. Even in very recent years, we’ve certainly not understood the builders’ purpose.
Stonehenge I and II (Burl, from Prehistoric Astronomy and Ritual)
Whatever the level of knowledge and the motives of the new users, the end result was to rebrand Stonehenge as a solar monument. The great majority of visitors since then have seen only this more recent, more obvious configuration, and the rediscovery of the older focus on the moon has been slow to emerge.
We know nothing about the transition from lunar to solar beliefs. Was it a peaceful and gradual shift, or a sudden and more violent one? Did the circle remain in regular use throughout, or was it abandoned for a while? It seems to me that the fact that the same site was reused, whether after a gap or not, must say something. It would be all too easy for the new solar-oriented worshippers to simply ignore the very obvious bank of earth and wooden posts, and erect their own monument nearby. Yet they chose to carry on in the same place.
Knowlton church inside the henge (English Heritage)
Such reuse of an older sacred place by later generations is very common. Many springs and pools held sacred to the traditional religions of the British Isles were adopted by the Romans, Saxons and Normans, often ending up linked with Christian saints and having churches built there. Knowlton church, in Dorset, was situated within the ring of a much older henge, and most of Avebury village is inside the huge extent of the monuments there. In Karnak, part of the Pharaonic temple was used as a Christian church, and subsequently a mosque.
Karnak Temple showing church and then mosque
What motivates this reuse? Does it represent a kind of spiritual conquest, in which the new element needs to purify the old? Or is it a way to legitimise the new by means of linking it with a place long held to be sacred? Is it simply that people are already used to going there, and this is a way to set up your pitch where there are already crowds of worshippers? Or is it that some places on earth really do have a heavier weight of sacredness than others, and some sensitivity to this motivates the builders of places of worship?
For the monuments I am thinking of, we will never have historical records which might explain the motives. All we have are enigmatic questions, and the clear signs that religious sites changed their focus over the generations as the original purpose became less important.
Looking forward in time, I wonder what might happen if we encounter signs that alien races have built sacred monuments elsewhere in our solar system or further afield? Will we set up our own shrines among the stones and stellar alignments, and in doing so continue our millennia-old habit of reuse? Right now we have no clear signs of extraterrestrial life of any kind at all, still less life that is sophisticated enough to reflect on the universe and build artefacts in holy places. One day, perhaps.
Saturn’s rings, with Enceladus and Tethys aligned (NASA/JPL)
I was going to do another post in the series on British prehistoric monuments this week, but that’s not ready yet.
So instead I thought I’d post up the descriptive blurb for the forthcoming Timing. There’ll be more about this over the next month or two as release date approaches.
Mars (NASA/JPL)
Timing is set approximately a year after Far from the Spaceports. Mitnash and Slate have stopped off at the Scilly Isles on their way back towards Earth from a rather dull short-term assignment on Callisto, one of the moons of Jupiter. While they are there they hear some news which changes their plans radically.
Timing takes our spacefaring duo from the Scilly Isles down to Mars and its larger moon Phobos, and then back again as they pursue a new arrival on the fraud scene.
Without more delay, here’s the blurb:
___ When quick wits and loyalty are put to the test
Mitnash and his AI companion Slate, coders and investigators of interplanetary fraud, are at work again in Timing, the sequel to Far from the Spaceports.
This time their travels take them from Jupiter to Mars, chasing a small-scale scam which seems a waste of their time. Then the case escalates dramatically into threats and extortion. Robin’s Rebels, a new player in the game, is determined to bring down the financial world, and Slate’s fellow AIs are the targets. Will Slate be the next victim?
The clues lead them back to the asteroid belt, and to their friends on the Scilly Isles. The next attack will be here, and Mitnash and Slate must put themselves in the line of fire. To solve the case, they need to team up with an old adversary – the only person this far from Earth who has the necessary skills to help them. But can they trust somebody who keeps their own agenda so well hidden?
____
The cover is currently in preparation, and I’ll be sharing that before too long.
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/
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
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
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
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/
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
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…
A few weeks ago I wrote about software development and hacking, and this is a loose follow-up. The image of hackers presented in films – Swordfish is a fair example, or GoldenEye – is of rather scruffy individuals who type incredibly quickly with keyboard at arms length, undeterred by all kinds of enticing distractions around them.
But most often, a successful hack is the result of careful analysis into some existing code, and a good dollop of insight into what kinds of precautions developers forget to take. In that, it shares a great deal in common with my own trade of QA. Effective software testing is not really about repeating hundreds of test cases which regularly pass – there are automated ways of dong those – it’s about finding the odd situations where proper execution fails. This might be because some developer has copied and pasted the wrong code, but it’s much more often because some rare but important set of circumstances was overlooked.
Trojan horse illustration (Wiki)
Missing values, extra-long pieces of text, duplicate entries where only one was expected, dates in weird formats – all these and many more keep us QA folk in work. And problems can creep in during the whole life of a product, not just at the start, Every time some change is carried out to a piece of software, there is the risk of breaking some existing behaviour, or introducing some new vulnerability which can be exploited by somebody.
It has been said that a great many of these things persist through laziness. One particular hack exploit – “SQL injection” – has been around for something over 15 years, in essentially unchanged form. You would think that by now, defences would be so automatic that it would no longer be an issue. But it is, and systems still fall prey to a relatively simple trick. I have worked with a lot of different computer languages, and find that pretty much the same problems turn up in any of them. As computer languages get more sophisticated and more robust, we expect them to do more interesting and more complicated things,
Estimated cost of data breaches in Germany (Wiki)
QA and hacking are at different parts of a spectrum, and a fair proportion of hackery goes on specifically to help firms and charities find weaknesses in their own systems. The legal distinction of when an activity crosses a line has to do with intention of malice, though a number of governments take a much stricter line where there own systems are concerned.
What has this to do with fiction? Well, Mitnash and Slate spend a lot of their time tracking down and defending against hacking in the area of finance. Their added complication is that the physical locations they travel to are scattered all around the solar system, with journey times of weeks or months, and signal times of hours. It is interesting to think about how hacking – and the defence against it – might evolve in such a situation.
In Timing, due for release in the late summer or early autumn, they are first sent to Jupiter to resolve a minor issue. It doesn’t seem very interesting or important to them. But then a much larger and more serious matter intrudes. To their dismay, the hackers – malicious ones in this case – have designed a new form of attack which our two heroes don’t really understand. They need help, and aren’t very sure they can trust their new-found helper.
To finish with, I can’t resist adding one of NASA’s pieces of artwork concerning the Juno probe, now successfully in orbit around Jupiter. It’s a great achievement, and we can look forward to some great science emerging from it.
I have had major broadband problems this week as BT have struggled to get their equipment working properly. So today is just a short post, mainly to say that Far from the Spaceports is on Kindle countdown offer for the next few days.
Meanwhile, I am preparing the sequel Timing for release later this year, probably in the early autumn, and here is a short extract to be going on with.
Rydal opened her door just as we turned into the little access corridor down to her door. Slate had signalled Capstone, presumably. Like a lot of the entrances I had already passed since the dock, the approach was decorated with murals. She had chosen a butterfly theme, and I touched the delicate blue wings of one as I passed.
My greeting was awkward, and whatever words I chose didn’t sound at all fluent, but she didn’t appear to notice. It finally occurred to me that her anxiety about the coming crisis was back in the ascendant, and she didn’t have much emotional space left to be attuned to my problems. She hugged me in a sisterly way, and turned back inside.
“You’re a bit earlier than I thought, Mitnash. Come in for a few minutes while I finish getting ready.”
We went in. She had suspended gauze in loops and strands from the ceiling to soften the bluntness of the original drilling. For some reason it gave the sense of being in woodland. She gestured towards the back wall.
“You go and talk to my pets for a while. I won’t be long.”
The idea of pets intrigued me. I thought of the parakeets that flocked around the St Mary’s market area, and wondered if she had a couple of those somewhere.
There was a clear panel, floor to ceiling, separating the living room from a separate, much narrower chamber. At first all I could see was vegetation, lots of leafy stems with exotic flowers. It was all too small and cluttered for parakeets, and I was perplexed.
Then something moved. I had thought it was a flower, but it had wings, and with an abrupt internal shift I realised that it was a butterfly. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see more in there, a couple of dozen, of several different varieties. Most were resting, others were eating some sort of syrup. All at once, with no signal that I could see, two of them took flight, wings alight with colour as they danced around the chamber for a while before settling again.
“So how do you like my little friends?”
Rydal had come back while I had been fascinated by the pair. I kept watching, hoping to see another one in flight.
“I have never seen anything like it. They are quite extraordinary.”
I caught my breath as another pair took to the wing and circled each other for a while.
“It must be difficult keeping the environment just right for them.”
I didn’t know much about butterflies, but I had heard that ones this large needed a lot of heat and moisture. She moved close to the glass, watching the pair flit about. I looked at her reflected face, peaceful in contemplation of flight.
“Not very different to us humans, when you compare it to what’s outside of here.”
She gestured towards the ceiling. The first time I had been on the Scilly Isles, I had been disturbed by the thought of airlessness so close. It had seemed different to the experience on board a ship, in some visceral way I could not explain. That had changed, and I was now unphased by the thinness of the skin which kept me safe here. Instead, I was captivated by her words, and was imagining us as human butterflies, straying out of our inner system home, moving away from the sun which had overseen our birth.
She turned suddenly, to catch me looking at her, and the spell was broken. Her anxiety and my shame resurfaced.
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
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.
Jamaica Inn sign, Wiki
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
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.
Yorkshire Tea (Wiki)
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
Castlerigg, looking towards Skiddaw
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.
Castlerigg, looking towards Clough Head
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.
ong Meg and (some of) her daughters
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
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!
Today I thought I’d write about coding. Not in a technical manual, how to do your first “Hello World” widget kind of way, but just to give a general sense of how it’s done, and how things have changed over the years. This was prompted by the passages I have been writing for Timing recently, in which Mitnash and Slate have been crafting a fix for a particularly unpleasant hacking threat. The plot is all wrapped up in blackmail and personal relationships, but their ability to code is what gets them sent here and there. But first, let’s look back in time.
Colossus being operated at Bletchley Park (WIki)
Not so many years ago, computers were relatively simple things to work with. They didn’t look it – all the complexity was visible by way of valves and a spider’s web of cables connecting them. But the range of things you could tell them to do was quite limited. The available options were limited, and they were essentially isolated from each other. Today’s computers are almost the opposite – they look simple on the outside, but they have a hugely expanded range of capabilities, sensory inputs, and ways to communicate with nearby devices.
The art of the coder has changed along with that. Once upon a time the programmer had to do everything. If you wanted to draw a blob on a screen you had to know exactly which bit of memory to poke with which binary digit. You needed to master a whole range of disparate skills in order to accomplish quite modest tasks, and oftentimes you needed to deal with the innards of the machine’s firmware. Porting the results to a different machine was a serious challenge.
Neuframe (I worked on this, long ago)
Times have changed. If you need graphics animation, or remote communication, or artificial intelligence, there’s a library for that nowadays. Today’s coder relies on standard modules and frameworks, pulling in this one and that as the need arises. Moreover, he or she is insulated from the nuts and bolts of the device, so can write essentially the same program to run on a high-end server, a regular desktop or laptop, and any one of hundreds of different mobile devices. That is enormously liberating, but brings in a whole raft of new problems.
Does the borrowed code actually do what you want, neither less nor more? Do you trust the library writer with the innards of your system and, what is usually more precious, the data it contains? Does it already come with adequate security against hacking, or do you need something extra? On one level, the coder is freer than ever to be creative with a wealth of open source material, but to offset that, there’s a long and rather dull checklist to work through.
Some while ago I made the transition from pure development to testing and QA: it’s a decision I have had no cause to regret! I still get to write code, but it’s behind the scenes code to validate, or sometimes to challenge the work of others. QA has changed over the years alongside development. Once upon a time there was an adversarial relationship, where the two teams were essentially pitted one against the other by commercial structures, with almost no rapport or dialogue. That has largely gone, and the normal situation now is that developers and testers work together from the outset – a collaborative effort rather than competitive. There’s a lot of interest in strategies where you write the tests first, and then code in such a way as to ensure they pass, rather than test teams playing catch-up at the end of a project.
Coding and hacking are central to the plot of Far from the Spaceports, and its successor Timing. Hacking, then and now, isn’t necessarily bad. It all depends on the motive and intentions of the hacker, and the same techniques can be used for quite opposite purposes. Some of the time Mitnash and Slate are hacking; some of the time they are defending against other people’s hacks.
I have taken the line that the (future hypothetical) work of the ECRB, to – protect financial institutions against fraud and theft, would need a freelance coder more than a policeman. Moving from place to place around the solar system’s settlements takes weeks or months, and even message signals can take hours. It seems to me that it would be much more efficient for ECRB to send someone who could actually identify and fix a problem, rather than someone who might just chase after a perpetrator.
On one level, Mitnash has it easy. He can pass all the necessary but time-consuming work of testing, validating, and productionising his code to somebody else. If I ever worked with him, I’d get frustrated by his cavalier attitude to the basic constraints of working in a team, and his casual approach to QA. But then, he gets to travel out to Mars and beyond, and has Slate as his team partner.
Artist’s impression: Dawn, Ceres and Vesta (NASA/JPL)
