Canadian Connections…..Fungi…..Walking & Learning At The Ness Of Brodgar… Pics of Scotland…
by Bernie Bell - 09:30 on 10 June 2023
Canadian Connections….
From our house we can see the marine ‘traffic’ to and from Kirkwall across the water. Wednesday morning we noticed a ship with ‘Adventure Canada’ on the side and wondered…..
I ‘Googled' - it was the ‘Ocean Endeavour’….
https://www.adventurecanada.com/ships
…and I wondered, would the passengers be calling by Clestrain? Turns out they were given guided tours by Andrew Appleby – President of the JRS…
https://www.johnraesociety.com/
Continuing Canadian Connections!
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Fungi..
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again….I likes fungi…
I apologise for the dominance of the ads. in the New Scientist article – nothing I can do about them.
My own ramblings re. fungi…. https://theorkneynews.scot/?s=Fungi+Bernie+Bell
And….. https://frontiersmagazine.org/fungi-the-good-the-bad-and-the-edible/
Someone else likes them too….. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64251382
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Walking & Learning At The Ness Of Brodgar…
https://www.nessofbrodgar.co.uk/ness-2023-scifest/
Archaeobotany? Not exactly – just some thoughts….
http://www.spanglefish.com/berniesblog/blog.asp?blogid=16200
Co-incidentally, Mike is reading ‘Weeds‘ by Richard Mabey, and he showed me this…
“When the worked-out chalk quarries at Pitstone were being transformed into a nature reserve, the warden Graham Atkins discovered a barn full of topsoil, which had been scraped off the land before it was first quarried in the 1930’s. The intention at that time was to fill up the pits once the extraction was finished (probably with rubbish), then spread the stored soil back on the land and return it to agriculture. But different land-use priorities had emerged in the half-century since. The land was to be given back to nature, not farming, and the topsoil was redundant. But Graham Atkins realised that it had been removed before the introduction of chemical weedkillers, and was in all likelihood a living fossil, a huge seed-bank of the exuberant cornfield weeds of an earlier generation of farming. So he spread it on a patch of the reserve instead. The following spring the field burst into bloom, with an explosion of weeds that had not been seen in the area for decades. Blue cornflowers, purple corncockle, yellow corn buttercup. The long comb-like seed pods of shepherd’s-needle. The purple and yellow pagodas of field cow-wheat. And a handful of the long-straw wheat variety they had once grown with.
These few decades of lingering vitality are nothing compared to centuries that have been recorded for some weed seeds. Dock seeds still geminate freely after sixty years. Fat-hen’s have sprouted after being recovered from deep within an archaeological site 1,700 years old. But even they are trumped by the weld (dyer’s rocket) that appeared after the excavation of a Roman site at Cirencester nearly 2,000 years old. Dormancy is an insurance policy, the botanical equivalent of savings put away for a rainy day.”
Re. ‘use’ of animals at the Ness – some proper archaeology, and some of my ramblings……
http://www.spanglefish.com/berniesblog/blog.asp?blogid=16030
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Pics of Scotland…
From the 2nd to the 9th of June 2023…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-65809762
Sharanna Findlay’s Harris bus stop reminded me of a bus stop we saw near Uig…
https://theorkneynews.scot/2018/06/09/the-western-isles-or-there-and-back-again-xii/
And, Lynn Winpenny’s abandoned phone boxes reminded me of this….
https://theorkneynews.scot/2020/04/25/walking-out-from-the-house-again/
Tho‘ the one near us is still, in theory, functioning, we never see anyone using it, and it has things growing in it too!
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Here’s one I made earlier…. https://theorkneynews.scot/2021/07/22/bits-pieces-at-the-ness/
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