Saturday, July 28, 2012

Aylesbeare Common

Anyone who has been around this blog for long enough might remember this tree, photos of which I put up here back in 2009. The tree, being right on the skyline of Aylesbeare Common, was used as a marker for navigational purposes by the sailors of old and was known as The Lone Pine. It died a long time ago but remained standing for many years and was planned to be felled, then a note was found attached to it stating that the person who felled the tree would be cursed. The note was signed at the bottom by The White Witches of Aylesbeare. The tree fell of its own accord a few years ago, leaving this tall and lovely guardian stump, reminiscent of a solitary standing stone.

Certain plant species become dominant each year, depending on what happens with the weather. This year we had about two or three months of continual rain and these particular cotton grasses have done very well and are scattered across the common as occasional white clouds.
This photo shows some of how wet it is up here. The heath has become boglike in places and this amount of water coupled with the fact that much of the common is divided by an electric fence to contain cattle in a grazing experiment means that paths are blocked, so I have to turn around and back many times and I also get very wet feet. I stopped off here a few weeks ago and it was pouring with rain, but by then it had rained so much and so often that I got to the point where waiting for the rain to stop became pointless, and things had to be done whether it was raining or not.

Unfortunately I have become suspicious of the rain now and it isn't such a pleasant experience to be out in it as it used to be. I was working outside in the rain in the weeks after the Chenobyl disaster in 1986 and the government and the news were saying everything was ok and that there was nothing to worry about. I could see on the weather forecast which way the wind was blowing but what can you do about it? I pulled my hat further down over my face and turned the collar of my coat up.

Many trees have just been taken from Higher Peak and this is my first glimpse of it since the felling. We'll go up there in a bit and see what the view is like. It hasn't been seen for about sixty years or more and I'll be interested to see if there are any alignments visible from there.

13 comments:

P2P said...

love the anecdote of the old tree and the white witches of aylesbeare. I guess it demands a certain level of superstition for that kind of a note to serve its purpose - up here I bet it would not work. or, maybe I have a city-person's perspective on the matter...

some time ago my mother was reminiscing what a great harvest of wild mushrooms she and my grandmother had in the fall of '86. later both of them developed breast cancer, and now in retrospect she was wondering whether there was a link there. it's still recommended not to eat fish from the inland lakes daily. there's variance between species, too - one of the biggest freshwater fish in f-land, northern pike, is recommended not to be eaten more than twice a month.

I am leaving for the north today, 600km up to where my mother grew up and where our family from her her side's lived for quite some time. it's by a lake that's 78km2 in size. it's connected to another big lake through a tiny rapid, a lake that has 253 islands in it according to wikipedia.

about half an hour boat ride from our lot my mother knows an island, inside of which there is a swampy area. a great place to pick up berries. I was there the last time three years ago, and in two or three hours picked ten liters of blueberries and lingonberries. I want my freezer full of them again, berries we have here are of great nutritional value - no cesium-137 in them...

john said...

Hi P2P. One of the problems is that it's difficult to pinpoint exactly what might have caused a particular cancer but I think that these nuclear accidents would greatly increase the prevalence. This difficulty in finding a cause gets the nuclear industry off the hook and there is also the nature of the long term effects. I think that there seems to be more cancer around today than there used to be. The nuclear industry seems to have a lot of power, if you pardon the pun, and there is much promotion of the industry in this country with EDF supposed to be building a new generation of plants, whether we want them or not. There is no mention of the option of thorium, in fact there are no options presented here at all.

john said...

The journey up north and the island sound wonderful. That is a fantastic amount of berries picked in that time. There are well worth picking though aren't they? We do well on the weight of sloes we can get but the whortleberries are very small here but still well worth gathering. We too freeze some of them. Have a good one.

john said...

I'm pretty sure that hardly anyone from Devon visits this blog but other people might want to see this local guys radiation level counts. I don't have any particular reason to doubt him. he says he doesn't know where it's coming from (and how could he) but he also mentions about deliberate venting from nuclear plants which is something I've not heard about. See what you think.

http://www.youtube.com/user/RadLevelsEngland

P2P said...

that video is distressing. I have a friend up here with a geiger, I'll send her the link and ask her if she'll take hers out after the rain to see if we get similar results from the hoods of bmws up here.

I feel physically sick when thinking about this.

I somehow remember I linked this documentary to you either here or then maybe I posted this to the haiku blog. it's a good documentary - one gets the sense of how lost and powerless we are when faced with the challenge of our waste, even as we try to be as rational as possible with it.

http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2011/05/26/what-happens-to-nuclear-waste-into-eternity-documentary/

kenny has a good post up about oppenheimer. I didn't know he, too was into bhagavad gita. himmler was heavily into it also, he's said to have carried a copy with him wherever he went.

the hindus see time symbolized by a bull. there's four ages like there is legs on a bull. after each age, the bull loses one leg until it stands on just one, and that's when humanity is in kali yuga, the age of dissolution. according to hindu scholars we've been in kali yuga for at least a couple of thousands year already. so, maybe in the last kali yuga before this run in time our predecessors possessed nuclear power and destroyed their world with it?

the first thing I came across that hinted to me personally that the history taught to me in school might be faulty was in early 2000s when I read a novel by a finnish author, in which the protagonist was looking into ancient maps. the most remarkable of them was the piri reis map. most remarkable thing about the map is the detailed coast-line of antarctica:

"The official science has been saying all along that the ice-cap which covers the Antarctic is million years old.
The Piri Reis map shows that the northern part of that continent has been mapped before the ice did cover it. That should make think it has been mapped million years ago, but that's impossible since mankind did not exist at that time.

Further and more accurate studies have proven that the last period of ice-free condition in the Antarctic ended about 6000 years ago. There are still doubts about the beginning of this ice-free period, which has been put by different researchers everything between year 13000 and 9000 BC.
The question is: Who mapped the Queen Maud Land of Antarctic 6000 years ago? Which unknown civilization had the technology or the need to do that?"

http://www.world-mysteries.com/sar_1.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piri_Reis_map

when we were in the forest looking for chantarelles, my mother began to tell how she and my grandmother, around '86, had found mushrooms they had literally never seen before - neither of them, which is remarkable because they've been going into the same forests to pick berries and shrooms for decades. odd, all in all.

I tend to think positively, so, to turn things to that end in relation to fusion, here's a documentary I came across yesterday. physics has never been my strong field, but I do know people conspiring for their own benefit. also, this death-wish by some into such things as bhagavad gita would become just a wish if we'd turn the tables around on our use of resources.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FilflaqbVI

john said...

Agreed P2P, it is distressing. I would be interested to see what readings other people are getting. The guy in south Devons readings do fluctuate a lot but this would be expected I would think. This is another part of science that I am really quite ignorant of and have had to find out about. if that was the documentary about the tunnels in Finland I did watch that from the link you left a while back. It was interesting to see that in Finland the problem of waste has actually been addressed unlike in this country which lives in denial about so much. Apologies if it isn't that documentary, I'll have a look in a bit. I remember that it was also rather beautifully shot, with views of forests in Finland that looked fantastically still and cold.

"I have become destroyer of worlds" was that the quote? It was something like that. Interesting that it was in the plural I think, as if unseen worlds were also destroyed. William Burroughs said that one of the secrets of the atomic bomb was that it was a soul destroyer, in that he believed the soul to be partly some sort of an electric/magnetic field which the atom bomb destroyed. I read somewhere about the connection of some of the nuclear scientists to black magic and the nuclear bombs would fall under that category for me. There was also a story about someone, possibly Fulcanelli, shortly before the discovery, turning up and giving a warning about splitting the atom and the unleashing of such terrible forces, all of which went unheeded of course.

john said...

I think the maps were written about by Charles Hapgood in the book Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, not a book I've seen a copy of yet. I heard about it in a book by Rand Flem'Ath (bonkers name) The ancient maps also used a complex form of projection. There is plenty of evidence of ancient surveyors who traveled the world. There is much evidence in this country, a small part of which I have discovered myself. Some of the giant earthworks are aligned in quite an obvious fashion. Even taking into account natural climate change it has always struck me as odd that the earliest sites of habitation in this country are on the highest hills, far away from rivers, making water collection very difficult. I have wondered why this early civilisation would leave so many markers on the tops of hills as and have taken it that this might have been a warning for the future that these places were safe. They certainly made a large effort to build these structures to last.

john said...

One of the things I have been looking into very recently are the enormous stoneworkings of old, like the stones at Baalbek in Lebanon. Curiously some of the other sites around the world such as Cuzco in Peru seem to have been made about 650 years ago. Maybe this was the last work of these ancient masons and surveyors. If we look at the legends of Atlantis it seems that the place was destroyed by using an energy system that turned out to be very destructive. I read somewhere that they had used a form of potential energy such as is contained in seeds, but I can't remember very well now. Thanks for the links, I'll have a look at those in a bit.

john said...

Here's a link to the Fulcanelli story;

http://www.triad-publishing.com/stone12a.html

P2P said...

so many interesting links and openings! I will return to all of this once I have time, now I am frantically reading articles from 'the stone' you linked to - found many headlines that intrigue me too greatly in considering I will find myself asleep soon. I wish I could speed-read.

this is especially worth a read, in case you haven't stumbled to it yourself yet,

http://www.triad-publishing.com/stone20c.html

P2P said...

weird times we live in - so called synchronicity keeps pounding a rhythm to things read and perceived, as if various sources would run to the same pond. I read samuel sagan's 'awakening the third eye' first time in years while up north and sri aurobindo that came up there comes up again in an article on lucid dreaming in 'the stone.'

the exercises in the book mentioned are recommendable, being relatively easy and well explained. the only time I've tried a 'throat friction' something resembling an acid flashback took place...

should exercise more and read less, note to self.

http://www.expozium.com/Awakening_Third_Eye.pdf

on lucid dreams: http://www.triad-publishing.com/stone20d.html

P2P said...

this conversation, in part, kinda got me on a quick-track of catching up a lot of threads that had been left hanging free, mainly for my ADD. a week has it been?

I hope you had a clear sky during the perseids. we did, and the night of the 12th was magical. in the last image of my latest post, there is a flock of lights in the sky that I did not see when taking the image. I took several of the same spot, to minimize the chance of getting a shaken image with the shutter speed I was using. the flock of lights is in all of the images I took. first I thought it was reflection from the city lights to the lens, but I doubt it for the pattern of them.

I quite openly tell anecdotes of my spiritual experiences in real life, but writing about them online is another thing. I've disguised some of my experiences to stories for the dyslexic, because in stories I can try to communicate the feel as well as the message. anyway - I reached a personal height in my spiritual practice and saw the light for the first time.

and that's not to say much.

there is a curious canadian woman I found a couple of days ago from youtube. I've listened to several hours of her talks and have yet to find anything wrong with her.

http://www.youtube.com/user/MaNithyaSudevi

john said...

The weeks go quick and much is left undone sometimes. No clear sky for us here for the perseids. I did have a look at the photo of the lights but I will pop back and download it for a better look. It's odd that you didn't see the lights when you took the photo but they might have been quite faint. I know that long shutterspeeds at night reveal all sorts of unnoticed or unseeable detail so it shouldn't be too surprising I suppose.

Many subjects are difficult to talk about on the internet for a number of reasons. Sometimes these things are almost impossible to describe and make sense of to others. I'll check the link out later thanks. I get a bit behind with things. Cheers for now.