Things to do on the Autumnal Equinox

[Matt]

So, today, at about 1:54 is the Autumnal Equinox. That's got to be worth raising a glass to! However, equinoxes are slightly unstable things and for the last couple of years, they've fallen on the 22nd. So yesterday, finding myself with the unexpected luxury of a totally free afternoon, my thoughts eventually turned to visiting a nice megalith to suitably celebrate the Equinox that I'd got in the habit of thinking fell on the 22nd.

The Medway valley boasts some of the earliest megaliths in the country, while none of them are quite up to Stonehenge, there are a few beauties and one that I hadn't yet visited since moving to the area was this:



The oddly named 'Kit's Coty house'. This looks to be a corruption of an earlier word or phrase that has evolved over the years. Traditionally the burial place of Catigern, who died fighting Horsa nearby, which offers one possible root.

However, this was in the fifth century BC, around three thousand five hundred years after this little fragment of the early neolithic period. However, this little megalith is actually the last remaining part of a seventy yard long long barrow which, while it was still visible in the thirties, but has now been ploughed into invisibility. The perfect place to bury the fallen son of a king. However, the Celtic word for forest was kaitom and tomb is Cillin. The downs were heavily forested until we cut them all down to farm and build a navy...





It's hard not to be moved by the thought that this rudely defined dolmen was once the dark and silent heart of a long barrow and home to the dead of the local tribe, then the last resting place of a dead prince. It's all a bit evocative! So naturally, I stuck a watch in front of it and took a few pictures.



However the remaining stones, while once the centre of the burial chamber at the far end of the barrow, now do a good impersonation of the sort of standing stones found in a typical henge. In fact the whole area does a good impression of a henge, this time, not a standing circle, instead a standing triangle with the vertices defined by three separate megaliths. Kit Coty's house is one of three megaliths separated by less than a mile.

Carry on down The Pilgrim's Way, take a left along the side of a field and you come to the next cromlech: Little Kit Coty's house. This time, a late seventeenth century letter tells us what this jumbled pile looked like before it collapsed: "13 or 14 great stones, 7 standing all covered with one large stone". It's a pity that this monument so nearly made it to the point at which the state would have begun to protect it. Another lovely feature is the imprecision of the number of stones in the letter, for Little Kit Coty's House is one of a number of megaliths in the UK that are traditionally considered to be 'countless stones', that is, sites in which it is impossible to accurately count the number of stones. I made it twenty.



But I may have been distracted...



As you can see, in fairly heavy rain, the Borgel is living up to its waterproof designation. There was no subsequent misting and I'm really rather impressed!

I don't have a picture of the final megalith as, by the time I got to the third site, following the contours around the hill and through a lovely vineyard with ripe grapes hanging everywhere, rain was belting down. While the Borgel might well be waterproof, the iphone I was using certainly isn't and I was starting to feel a trifle damp despite the waterproof gear.

However, there were two other interesting finds along the way, both wonderfully coloured. The first was a delicate smudge of primrose yellow that caught my eye from thirty yards :



Initially I thought it was a moth orchid, but checking this picture against the internet I didn't find a match. It's definitely an orchid, but I'm not sure what. If there's any experts here, I'd be delighted for a hint or two.

The other is one of those classic things that could be nothing at all or something very very exciting indeed. It's a little known fact that people of the neolithic actually moved and traded widely, with four thousand year old Syrians found in graves around Stonehenge, flints from Sussex found in Malta and Welsh gold found everywhere!

So, about two hundred yards from Little Kit Coty's House on the edge of a ploughed field, while stomping along trying to loosen the five inch balls of mud around my boots I saw a flash of the most remarkable cobalt blue in the mud. Picking it up, and rubbing the mud off I found this:



A little under three centimetres long and about a centimetre thick, with a smoothly polished clear top surface, all the other surfaces being fractures apart from a bit of the bottom which has an uneven oily iridescence which plays havoc with my focus:



Here's less effect, but better focus:



*Edit* I've edited to correct a couple of errors and add these images which is the best I can do to capture the effect. The more I play with it, the less it looks like any glass I've seen */*

If it's glass that means that it is almost certainly a relatively modern artefact, although I'm damned if I know what. It's also clearly been damaged by repeated ploughing, with scratch marks even on the shattered surfaces.

However, there's another possibility. The photo above was taken of the glass sat on a picture of naturally occurring blue obsidian and it's exactly the same colour. It's also incredibly rare, but it exists and there are certainly artefacts made of it in the British Museum; I've seen them and I'm acutely aware that ancient societies prized all the colours of obsidian and went to astonishing effort to turn them into mirrors and balls with smooth surfaces. My favourite example, in black, is Dr Dee's Mirror:

http://www.britishmuseum.org/researc...40529&partId=1

http://www.northernrenaissance.org/n...-aztec-mirror/

There's also a superb series of short radio documentaries about Shakespeare that followed the legendary 'hundred objects' documentary series and features the mirror:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ghc4h

The fact is that obsidian was about as highly prized as thing can be to the neolithics - it was a harder, sharper version of flint and obsidian was made into a huge range of practical, aesthetic and ritual objects. Blue obsidian objects would be exactly the sort of thing that would end up being grave goods and finding something like this within a triangle formed of three ancient barrows really does fire the imagination - I think I have yet another project! I can't win really, if it's modern then it's nothing, if it's neolithic then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasu...and,_and_Wales

That's the problem with priceless things...

Anyway, Merry Mabon and may this cross quarter day see you relaxing with satisfaction.

In an hour and a half...

[Raza]

You can stand an egg straight up today.

EDIT: Wrong equinox.

Sorry, this was for the West Wing fans:

https://youtu.be/iDCj9_Iz4nQ

[OhDark30]

Great piece, Matt!
The spread of ancient goods and people is fascinating - look forward to seeing Kit ‘s Coty House when I do the Pilgrims Way (long planned, finished the Thames Path this month)

Researching finds like your blue stone can feel like the ground shifting beneath your feet, as what we thought was our past swirls and changes focus. Love reading your stuff.


Meanwhile on this equinox day I was exploring another ancient monument, London’s BT Tower, 851’, built 1964

35,000 people applied to visit it in this year’s Open House ballot: 800 of us got tickets
Took lots of (film) photos :-)

[Matt]

That's two lots of very cool indeed. That path wanders through my old stomping ground as a kid, either on a bike, kayak or motorcycle - don't forget to go back and do Mapledurham again now that the trees are changing, I've even impressed Canadians with that, and never miss the opportunity for a pie at Sweeney Todd's, via a short diversion onto the Kennet and Avon... If you want to borrow a foolproof inflatable kayak to do a bit of it, just ask

As for the Tower, I've wanted to do that forever. My father worked for the GLC back in the day, so I've managed to worm my way into all sorts of stuff over the years, but I never got up that. My only issue with it is it just looks French. I can't explain it, but I've always thought it. I'd love to get up it.

Back to the blue thing, an old friend thought it looked 'typically Roman' a small local museum thought the same thing and the big local museum, after telling me that 'they didn't offer that service' went on to look at it and tell me that they'd never seen Roman glass that colour. It went downhill rapidly from there.

No one thought it was obsidian. So I think I'll pull back from that. However, google tells me that cobalt glass with the lustre I can't really capture was popular with very posh Romans - the only problem is I can't find anything that chunky and Roman, because posh Roman stuff tends to be ridiculously wafer thin. The other interesting thing is that someone else pointed out that while a little bit of cobalt tends to go a long way, this seems to actually have a low concentration and, at some angles looks virtually transparent. This is unexpected, because glass is technically a liquid and so shouldn't be displaying crystal like behaviour. It's all very odd.

Anyway, It's almost time to actually do some work again so...

[skywatch]

I love walking through numenous places with a sense of deep history. I'm rather fascinated by that colored stone as well. You should have an expert take a look perhaps?

My Autumnal Equinox was spent playing a concert in Brooklyn, NYC in an Episcopal church built around 1850. We had a capacity audience, and the architecturally mapped digital visuals looked amazing. This sort of big event is very rare for me, and I am still a bit buzzed from the success, now that I am back home on the west coast.

[Matt]

I love walking through numenous places with a sense of deep history. I'm rather fascinated by that colored stone as well. You should have an expert take a look perhaps?

My Autumnal Equinox was spent playing a concert in Brooklyn, NYC in an Episcopal church built around 1850. We had a capacity audience, and the architecturally mapped digital visuals looked amazing. This sort of big event is very rare for me, and I am still a bit buzzed from the success, now that I am back home on the west coast.

Wow! that looks amazing. Can you throw up a bit of video? There's nothing like the acoustics of e decent church.

The most expert expert I know was the 'typically Roman' chap. I'm all busy for a while, but I'll get to it eventually. That's what usually happens.

The best wander through deep history I've done this century is this one:

https://forums.watchuseek.com/f20/to...ex-254055.html

You don't get much deeper or history-er

[tribe125]

The most expert expert I know was the 'typically Roman' chap. I'm all busy for a while, but I'll get to it eventually. That's what usually happens.

Go back and find the rest of it - that should help.

[skywatch]

Wow! that looks amazing. Can you throw up a bit of video? There's nothing like the acoustics of e decent church.
The most expert expert I know was the 'typically Roman' chap. I'm all busy for a while, but I'll get to it eventually. That's what usually happens.
The best wander through deep history I've done this century is this one:
https://forums.watchuseek.com/f20/to...ex-254055.html
You don't get much deeper or history-er

I don't have any video yet, but I hope to have some in the next week. There were several cameras documenting the event, and they said they would send me an edit in a week or so. i followed your link to the Valley of the Kings - what a treat! I enjoy your narratives, and share your love of history.

[Matt]

Go back and find the rest of it - that should help.

Im certainly planning to have a look. I haven’t even told you about my bridge excavations...

[Matt]

So it was a near perfect autumnal afternoon and I've been doing a bit of research and so, rather than go hunting for blue glass, I went here:



Just for once I wasn't really thinking about watches and so it was the turn of a wildly unsuitable vintage dive watch which I promptly covered in mud. This was mostly because, having snagged something cool the other week I couldn't resist having a little scavenge around the edge of the recently ploughed field. I found something interesting of course:



It's the thing sat on top of the fencepost. Nope, I haven't got the foggiest. I assumed it was some sort of ploughshare but not according to the internet, so given my current form for wild speculation, it's either a robotic T-Rex tooth or a Rolex. It's metal, heavy and rather enigmatic.

Now Coldrum isn't, as it suggests above, a stone circle. It's a rather large barrow that's missing all the earth that went on top. The 'stone circle' is just the outer walls and the inner chamber, which forms the centre. However, while it's not quite the Rollright Stones (which I bet would look great from a helicopter) it's still enough to give you goosebumps. It's also blessed with one hell of a backdrop:



If only I could focus on it...






It's turning out to be a really beautiful autumn...