Chysauster Iron-Age Village

Thursday 20 August 1992. Continuing our week's holiday in Cornwall, after visiting Land's End (first and last public toilet in Britain...) we headed for a totally different experience altogether. Chysauster is the site of an Iron Age village.

Mum and Dad got in as pensioners despite falling short of the age limit - in Mum's case she was short to begin with! The village is approached through a fogou. This would have been an enclosed tunnel but now the roof has fallen in and it is more like a narrow but fairly deep alleyway.

The huts here were still occupied as recently as during Roman times and are between 1500 - 2000 years old. Each had several rooms around a central courtyard and some had gardens at the back.

The courtyard of this hut has a water channel (to the left of Dad). The family's animals would have lived here. The water must still run along the channel as can be seen from the darker patch of grass at the bottom of the picture.

Looking from Hut 6. The hillside was covered in glorious purple heather. We all waved at a helicopter making it's way to Penzance. Whether they saw the crutch or thought perhaps that we were lost I don't know - but they circled round for another look!

Hut 4 had either a rather large hearth, or maybe it was the smallest room???

The afternoon was drawing on. As it starts to go dark we reach St Agnes model village and theme park.

We thought this was very funny but some Germans who were walking round behind us were not amused - especially when I offered them the twig so they could take their own photos...

Cornwall 1992 Holiday Index

Long Meg and Her Daughters Stone Circle

On Tuesday we had a day out and motored up the A6 through Lancaster, Carnforth and Milnthorpe, up Shap to Penrith and then north on the A686, turning off to the tiny but quite pretty village of Little Salkeld and then up a tiny road that turned to a dirt track running right through the middle of what we had come to see.

This is Long Meg and Her Daughters. Long Meg being the large red sandstone monolith on the left and her daughters being the large stone circle she inclines towards.

The circle is one of our larger ones at 328 feet (100m) on the longest axis of its slightly flattened shape. 57 stones still exist with 27 still standing. It is thought there could have been up to 70 stones originally. Let's have a wander around the circumference, taking care to avoid the many cowpats, some of which are rather fresh and somewhat chokingly ripe... Luckily we found the field free of cows themselves!

A distinct lack of atmosphere I found, though of course atmosphere is easily brought with you and can be very personal to you. The weather also influences it and what we had expected to be a sunny day was starting to slide towards dark and dismal as I got further away from the car...

Not all of the stones of the circle are the same colour. The bluish stones are thought to be of significance - marking solstices or sometimes most northern/southern moon rise or set. Other stones are thought to have such purposes too, though with so many stones it would be almost impossible not to be able to find alignments with all the combinations of stones to choose from!

I'm now approaching part of the circle closest to Long Meg herself.

The skies are clouding quite well... is the circle going to treat me to a bit of spooky atmosphere?

Long Meg is the only sandstone block. She stands over 12 feet high (3.8m). She is said to resemble a witch from a certain viewpoint. That is, if you think of witches as twelve feet high and all flat sides and corners... We passed an old direction signpost from Ministry of Works days pointing to "Long Meg and Her Daughters, Druids Circle" on our way here.

Someone obviously wants to carry on some sort of tradition! There are not enough records of the Druids to know what they did really - the Romans were that appalled by them that they strove to wipe them from history. We have fictional accounts of horrible tortures, naked priests showing their flabby bums at opposing armies to frighten them, and those rather strange though mostly harmless white-robed figures chanting at Stonehenge at solstice times. Very little evidence of what they actually got up to.

The stone has some ancient carvings and marks, cup and saucer marks, spirals and more. Atmosphere? Not yet...

Wait... wait... can you sense that...? Miss Franny exclaims and sets off determinedly back towards the car! Yeow! Midges! Loads of them!

I'm made of stronger stuff however and... no I'm not... I'm off towards the car too, but the midges do seem to be concentrated around Long Meg herself.

Close by the monolith are two portal stones, set just a little outside the circle and forming an entrance.

I arrive back at the road that dissects the circle. Further on is a farm and the track continues a little way until it peters out having allowed the farmer access into the last field before a forest that stands above the River Eden.

There wasn't much point in following it and I did a U-turn and we headed back down towards Little Salkeld after a final look back at the circle and the guarding figure of Long Meg. As we headed away from the circle the first spots of rain hit the windscreen. "Come back soon," Long Meg was saying, "I can do atmospheric..."

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The Oracle and Temple to Apollo, Didyma

25 May 2012. After we left Miletus we motored for a short while admiring the rain before arriving at Didyma. Here are the remains of a massive Temple to Apollo which, although never fully completed, would have rivalled that of Artemis, not too far away that was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The original temple was run by the Branchidae family claiming descent from Branchos, a youth loved by Apollo. The wooden steps were quite slippery from their soaking and Fran was not best pleased I stopped her and expected her to turn round for a photo! In ancient times, once at the temple, a High Priestess answered questions in an unknown tongue which was translated by the Branchidae family members. This gave the family a certain degree (i.e. total) of opportunity to influence the advice given by the oracle!

It was the main temple of Miletus and was reached from there via a 17km Sacred Way, which had ritual waystations and statues of the Branchidae family including their animals. They were making sure of their franchise...

The marble has been badly marked by fire - hence the blackened state of the remains. The Persians under Darius invaded in 493 BC and presumably having had unpalatable advice offered by the Oracle promptly threw a wobbly and kicked out the Branchidae family and set fire to the place saying things like "Stuff your Oracle!" and "From now on we'll go to Delphi...!"

Once a visitor had climbed the steps and puffed themselves out, they then found themselves breathing in the heady fumes of incense mixed with certain other additives that left them feeling, shall we say, a touch light-headed...

On a high they were then directed down a narrow steeply sloping passage that was not only dark but narrow, the steep marble flooring requiring them in their befuddled state to reach out to touch both walls in the dark to keep their balance.

Arriving here in an enclosed temple space, but open to the sky, they then had to climb back up the steps shown at the far end.

If they were breathing heavily before, by now they were positively gasping and therefore drawing in yet more of the intoxicating fumes. At the top of these steps they found the room of the Oracle. A High Priestess, also somewhat off her head, wailed and garbled whilst members of the ever accomodating Branchidae family ("An offering? How kind!") translated the utterances of the Oracle out of the goodness of their hearts and to the growth of their purse.

Alexander the Great captured Miletus in 334 BC and began a restoration of the temple and started the tradition of the Oracle again. It was said that the sacred spring which had dried up a couple of hundred years before the Persians burnt the place, started to flow again once Alexander had visited. He probably made sure of it by digging...

There was by now a 160 year gap in the Oracle's tradition. Luckily someone was found who knew how to wail incoherently and someone learned to interpret this. Just over 600 years later, Rome was leaning heavily on the Christians and in 302 AD Galerius urged Diocletian to step it up somewhat.

Uncertain, Diocletian asked the Oracle for guidance. At Didyma the Oracle's utterings were given in written form. At Delphi they were merely spoken. The record shows that the response was interpreted as in favour of the persecution, marking the beginning of what has become known as the Great Persecution of 303, lasting for ten years.

You may get slightly biassed guidance from a High Priestess of one religion if wondering whether to persecute another... A few people from our party climbed the steps expecting to find themselves able to simply walk down the steps of the temple on the other side. And as the Oracle's rooms are no more they would have been able to do that had they been willing to jump the 12 feet or so to the floor of the first platform.

Instead we had to climb up the steep passage again. I've brightened the photo considerably, it was very dim in there. Miss Franny blinked at the wrong moment - it wasn't so dim that she could see just as well with her eyes shut...

A couple of gorgons' heads sculptures are displayed here but most of the sculpture including some statues from the Sacred Way have been removed to the museum. A few of the Sacred Way statues are apparently to be found in the British Museum in London. By the way, although we were told they were Gorgons' heads, I think they just had wavy hair - those are not snakes...

Once back at the ticket office, the current High Priest came looking for an offering...

We say goodbye to Didyma and Apollo and head back to the ship which is next to Princess Danae and a Saga Cruises ship.

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Istanbul's Basilica Cistern

Thursday, 19 August 2010. We are back in James Bond territory again.

In From Russia With Love our intrepid hero is taken by Kerim Bey, Head of Station T for Turkey, down into this huge underground water reservoir to spy on the Russian embassy via a submarine periscope hidden behind a mousehole.

In real life the periscope would have to be a very sophisticated version because the Russian embassy is nowhere near this place...

Since 1963 when the film was made the water level has been reduced to a few feet only and a huge amount of silt removed to make the apparent size even more impressive. A walkway has been constructed so that visitors can walk about the vast area without the need to ferry them about in boats as was necessary before.

With the removal of 50,000 tons of silt and mud between 1985 and 1987 two fabulous Roman Medusa head carvings were found to have been used as bases for pillars. The one shown is placed upside down and the other is on its side. There are two possible reasons for this. It was one way of stopping the image of Medusa from turning people into stone. Or placed this way they were just the right height needed to support the pillars...

So here are a few facts from the excellent, if quaintly worded, information pamphlet, seemingly translated from Turkish into English by someone who had little experience of either language, (but probably just showing how lucky I am to have been brought up to speak English instead of having to learn it later). In fact why is everybody else so much better at learning foreign languages than us Brits? Because they have to learn the most complicated language where the same letters have lots of different sounds - ough... ie though, through, bough, enough, cough...

The cistern was built between 527 and 565 AD. Not long after the period in which King Arthur was supposed to be chasing Saxons out of Britain and five centuries before the Normans arrived to show their descendants what it felt like to be invaded. It is 140m long by 70m wide with the roof supported by 336 columns of 9m height arranged in 12 rows of 28 columns. It held 100,000 tonnes of water.

There are some (bloody big!) fish swimming about down there...

In fact, let's finish with my favourite bit from the official information pamphlet and I salute the translator who decided this slightly sinister phrase would tempt us down the 55 steps from street level to see the undoubtedly wondrous place where all those (thankfully absent) rats chased James Bond after he blows up the Russian Embassy. It reads...

"The visitors melt into disappearance when they are here in the cistern to see the Medusa head, in accompany of fish and a smoothing music."

Fantastic!

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