Donna Nook

Took Sam to see the Grey Seals giving birth to their pups on the RAF Donna Nook bombing range on the Lincolnshire coast. I've never seen seals so accepting of humans, and there are more than a thousand youngsters already. Another month and they'll all be gone to sea.
It was almost dark but the Canon G11 coped at ISO1600 in a colourless landscape.
Todays count by Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust was 1082 seal pups, 975 cows and 331 bulls.

Dinosaur feet

Dusk and driving rain - sheltered in a small beech hanger - surrounded by Dinosaur feet.

Round Barrows

Aldbourne Four Barrows was used as a cemetery from 2500 to 1500BC, but apparently the bones have been moved to the British Museum, so the round barrows are not too spooky to stand on. Canon G11 1/30th at f2.8 in a howling wind.

Aldbourne

Fence post remnant of ancient field system dating back to when tractors were small and grey and only 35 horse power. (Canon G11).

So Long Ago

I found Wansdyke on the map and went to have a look, but never imagined the richness of pre-historic monuments to be found on a 3 mile walk on the Pewsey Downs. I started at the bottom of Knap Hill (above and below) a hilltop causewayed enclosure from about 5700 years ago (BP), where Stone Age folk would meet periodically to celebrate and renew tribal loyalties or deal with their dead.

Then comes Adam's Grave, a chambered tomb (long barrow) of about the same age on it's spectacular hilltop dominating the Vale of Pewsey (below)

A glimpse of Silbury Hill in the distance is unexpectedly through a gap in Wansdyke, made by a farmer to get his tractor through (or perhaps a horse and cart).

Wansdyke shocks. How much labour and determination did it take to dig out this massive snaking bank and ditch? It originally stretched from Savernake Forest near Marlborough deep into Somerset and maybe to the River Severn. One bet is that Ancient Britons built it in the 5th century AD (after the Romans left) to protect themselves from the invading Saxons, but nobody seems sure. If so it obviously didn't work. Perhaps like the Maginot line the enemy just walked around it! Alternatively it could have been to establish the boundary between two tribes.

Then it's onto Pewsey Down itself; magical moss green tentacles of chalk sliding down into the vale.

Across a valley is Rybury (or Rybury Camp), an Iron Age hill fort (5-700BC) built over another Neolithic causewayed enclosure, at least 5000years old, and there long before the first Egyptian pyramid was built at Djoser.

Met some nice friendly chaps - Welsh Blacks?

They gathered to watch two men mending the fence round Alton Barnes White Horse (cut in 1812 or thereabouts) . Perhaps the grass looked greener over the fence.

Back down towards the car, and the present, and Knap Hill had changed colour in the last of the evening light.

Upper Paleolithic Cave V Modern Newbury Car Park

Drying out slowly

Jarvis Cocker

Went to a free three day gig under a railway arch, where the audience could wander in off the street and lounge on scatter cushions, and Jarvis Cocker invited anyone who turned up with an instrument to join in the jamming. The music sounded nothing like Cocker's usual stuff, but just whatever a gaggle of great musicians made up on the spur of the moment, incredible long riffs getting more and more intense, exploding almost into white noise. A twenty minute improvisation on The Who's The Wall (It was the anniversary of the demise of the Berlin Wall) was the only time that Jarvis sang. Miho Wada wandered in with her flute and is in several of these pictures.

The Guardian said "With endless stories predicting the imminent death of the music industry, he also wanted to explore the idea that music could return to simply being an art form."

There was a single light over the players, so most of these were at full aperture and ISO6400. Not bad! The scatter cushion picture was the recombination of two exposures prised from a RAW file, such was the difference in the light on the musicians and the audience. Remember the good old days of film? No thanks!

Windmill Hill

Walking up on Windmill Hill near Avebury today I'm the only human for at least a mile around. After a time the mind starts going back to times and places that haven't surfaced since I was a child, but then a memory is suddenly elusive; half there, then lost again, leaving a feeling that something important has gone, but I'm still back in north Lancashire treading the fells in a bitter wind all those years ago.

The bell barrow is Bronze Age (1600BC give or take a century), but on a site much older; a 5700year old Causewayed Enclosure, where people may have come to celebrate, or may have come to lay out their dead for Ravens to pick clean the bones. It's almost hidden by time. This faint indentation in the ground curving from bottom right to top left is all that can be seen of the inner of three ditch and bank circles (below).

On leaving, a strange fingered cloud formation points like a dervish back down the track as if as a reminder that this is a place belonging to another people and another time.

Some favourite signs.

Chalk Horse

My son's favoured place seems to be the whiskers of the Uffington White Horse. It's just off the Ridgeway and dates back to the Bronze Age (about 1000BC). On Thursday he stood entranced, looking out across Oxfordshire for fifteen minutes; last time we came it was twenty, but always standing on the whiskers, and always, seemingly at peace. One's requested not to stand on this ancient monument, but he's been dealt a raw enough deal in life without denying him such a simple pleasure.