Oil Drum Lane

  This weblog  isn't a diary or a diatribe. Rather, it is  a scrolling collection of notes, in no particular order, on offbeat places, real and imagined, and the events and people that shaped them. The content wanders but has a London & South Eastern bias. My gaff, my rules. It is formatted for reading on a phone, so I try to keep the word count in the 2000-3000 range.   To see if there is anything that interests you, check the 'Contents' index above; all the posts are linked from there.      A note on methodology. I read a lot, and spend a lot of time in the British Library. I use online material, especially original research, when it is available, and AI only usually comes into it when I want to check facts like dates etc.  If there are conflicting theories, I usually go with the most popular or credible one, as the word count does not allow me to explore alternatives. I try to incorporate new evidence when it becomes available. ...

A Preface If you're not a Palaeogeography geek – and odds on you are not – then you probably struggle to make coherent sense of what you know of early Earth.  The story plays out over billions of years and, while geologists have helpfully sliced it into Aeons, Periods, Epochs and Ages, there is constant change within each. Can you place the birth of the moon, snowball Earth, and Jurassic Park within this? Do you want to? It seems to be like a four-dimensional Rubik’s cube, where each little cube represents a slab of the Earth’s crust which can change its position, shape and colour.  There are YouTube videos of the movements, but while pretty, they are often contradictory, confusing or just wrong. Part of the problem is the labelling. Do you need to know that synapsids and sauropsids were on the rise in the Permian, late in the Palaeozoic era of the Phanerozoic aeon? I suspect not.  For my part, I am happy to leave this type of detail to geology’s trainspotters and to peop...

  Brass Point nr. Beachy Head More on the chalk country I introduced in the previous post. This is a continuation of the story of why the landscape came to look like it does, but also some more impressionistic notes.  Geologically, England has a long strip of chalk  running from Dorset to the Yorkshire Wolds. The purest, white stone underlies the  rolling green 'Downs' surrounding London, the Thames Valley, and alongside the Channel coast.  These are  the primordial 'bleached clean bones of old England', and the name comes from  the Old English 'dūn', which simply means hill .   Chalk Hills & Streams Nowhere else on Earth has as much chalk countryside, and it is wo nderful stuff. I f you are walking, it is usually dry and springy underfoot. On foot or on a bike, the slopes are merciful. Moulded through time, the chalk shapes our landscape.  William Blake was living in Sussex when he asked, "And d id those feet in ancient time....Walk upon...