Oil Drum Lane

  This weblog  isn't a diary or a diatribe. Rather, it is  a scrolling collection of notes  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; books, articles and (thanks to the British Library) academic papers.  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. ( AI is helpful for quick checks on dates, etc. You can tell that I don't use it for much else by the typos!). Why Oil Drum Lane?  The boomers among you might recall the TV comedy 'Steptoe & Son'.  They w...

Britain's hillforts are not the prehistory you see in museums. They are the kind you can climb on. It is the difference between meeting the King in real life, or in Madame Tussauds.  John Constable said that his painting of Stonehenge was intended to capture something in the air that "carries you back to beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period". That is where I wanted to go, so  I visited dozens of them, waded through dense archaeology papers in the British Library (did you know that fossilised snail shells were used to date these things!),  scaled a mound of local landscape history books and tiptoed into the prehistory nerd websites.  Stonehenge: Constable: 1836  This is a  much-revised version of an earlier post I wrote  to accompany my notes on the chalk hills and my bike routes on pootler.co.uk. In it, I prioritised their individual histories and characteristics over the wider story, and my snapshot descrip...

Intro  This post covers five journeys around the legend and idea of Avalon.  S horter is better on a phone, so it comes in two parts. This one covers the Avalon of legend, and the second records the story of an ancient continent named after it. It’s a strange entanglement of old Brythonic myth and the volatile history of early Earth 1. A Journey to Glastonbury. It takes a long day’s walk to cross the Somerset Levels in either direction. Wikipedia says they cover 650 sq km. Being near to the Bristol Channel and below sea level, they frequently flood, so you might sometimes need to swim or paddle as well.  Link to Full Map  At their heart is Glastonbury, a small town built on higher ground and overshadowed by the ‘Tor’, a wonderfully improbable hill, topped by a ruined church and visible from miles around. When the Levels are flooded, it is the highest of several islands.  Flooded Levels, Tor in centre The eponymous festival is actually held some 10km away,...

  Intro   Please keep in mind that this is an attempt to give you a sense of the story of Avalonia, not an academic account of geology or palaeontology. I t is hard to get your head around the technical vocabulary and astronomically large numbers involved , so, for my own sake as well as yours, I will avoid both and include as few dates and labels as possible. Honest. But there ha ve to be a few. 1. In the Beginning  The Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. For a long time, it had been a hellhole, bombarded by meteorites with belching volcanic lava fields and no meaningful atmosphere. But over time it calmed down.  This tale starts relatively recently, a mere 500 million years ago. By that time, sea levels were much higher than they are today and the sealife was rockin' and, in the shallow seas in particular, increasingly anti-social and unfriendly. I am not going to dwell on it here, not even the animated bath mats, but a general lesson for the next half billion y...