We've now got a News section set up on the Fields of Time site where I'll try to post fairly regular updates: fieldsoftime.cmackenzie.net/news/2026-02...

An improved Irish Townland and Historical Map Viewer with new features is available online. Please note: the old URL is no longer functional. Explore the new viewer: experience.arcgis.com/experience/b...

iPlayer has the Mrs Merton Show. Germaine Greer and PJ & Duncan on the same show. Incredible stuff

The ship's long sailed but I still can't get over the fact that we're Team GB and not Team UK

I'll spare you the pic but it will come as no surprise that Restore Britain's logo qualifies for #youmissedabit

Link here www.facebook.com/share/p/1AbF...

This is a great project, imagine if all the parishes of Orkney (and elsewhere) did something similar !

I like how Sportscene is now providing Gaelic translations.

The sacred lime tree of Visdievai (the name means 'all the gods' in Lithuanian) in 1999

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Sheena and I will be on Radio Orkney this evening talking about the Fields of Time project fieldsoftime.cmackenzie.net

The result of a lot of playing about trying to get the best type of centroid for field-name grid references in QGIS: gridSquare(0.01, pole_of_inaccessibility($geometry, 1)) Trying to do it live in the browser was a long trip down a dead end

#WorldHippoDay 🦛😀 "hippopotamus", "equestrian", "zebra", and "alfalfa" from Proto-Indo-European *h₁éḱwos: "horse" www.aidanem.com/word-family-...

the paper is Terry Gunnell's Masks and Mumming traditions in the North Atlantic, the reference is on page 292 www.academia.edu/16232771/Mas...

One of the things that inspired this current Malky Dungeon story was reading about possible guising rituals in Orkney that appeared to have stopped due to WWI, the thought of war ending not just people's lives but entire generations of traditions and culture as well felt very poignant.

1940 Irish language scif-fi book Manannán by Máiréad Ní Ghráda It is the first Mecha Robot outside of Japan and mention of a Gravity assist in fiction. It was never republished or translated.

This works for me: www.academia.edu/107875464/Th...

Damn, “we should learn to speak in a language that rich people who don't dream can't comprehend” has some serious hands

Can anyone see how to access this? ledijournals.com/ojs/index.ph...

Robins are red, Dunnocks are blue; Word meanings change, Colour terms too.

Tell it not in Ruthwell - publish it not in the streets of Kirkcudbright Thomas Carlyle's take on 2 Samuel 1:20

Why's Billy Connolly the Big Yin? I've only heard 'wan' in Glasgow (and switched to it from my Galloway 'yin' while I was there). Did Glaswegians used to say 'yin'?

Free entry in February! Very much recommended if you're there.

#FindsFriday The Cairns Character! Discovered in a pit at the #IronAge #Broch site of The Cairns on the island of South Ronaldsay, #Orkney. He or She was carved from a beach pebble around 2,000 years ago. 📸 mine

Over the past six years I've been pulling together a corpus of 21st century Scots writing, three and a half million words from over 600 modern Scots writers. Among this 3.5 million words are about 140,000 distinct unique words spellings, and not one writer used the word "hurkle-durkle".

I enjoyed this

Kirkwall's 30 February gravestone

Blessed by the algorithm youtu.be/EWO1-WE4oNw

sigh

Càite bheil Sealtainn? #youmissedabit

An interesting wee cluster of Crimean War field-names from South Ronaldsay

Today I finally managed to view a VHS tape documenting the Isbister / Tomb of the Eagles excavations and concrete cover house construction in 1997-88. Quite an eye opener in terms of reconstructing the site! Thanks to staff at HES for making it happen!

omg everybody go draw a horse this is what the internet was made for gradient.horse

....and here we have another Routin Linn with a Brig (bridge.)

Wigtown Poetry Prize taking a zero tolerance approach to AI www.wigtownpoetryprize.com/poetry-compe...

Matrix theory James Joseph Sylvester introduced the term matrix in 1850, using the Latin sense of “womb” or “source” to describe an array that gives birth to determinants.

Matrix = 'womb' is new to me

Orcadian in the linguistic landscape: Tattie Salad

MOE in the 1611 KJV gets updated to MORE. Scots also makes a distinction between MAE 'more in number' and MAIR 'bigger, greater, etc'. It's not an active part of my dialect but it's used in Trotter's 1901 Galloway Gossip

Interesting project about house names by Ragnhild Ljosland being discussed on Around #Orkney this morning! www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

North Ronaldsay's sheep are renowned for their unusual diet of seaweed—but their eating habits aren't a new phenomenon 🐏 By analysing over 100 Neolithic sheep teeth, archaeologists have shown that sheep in Orkney were grazing on seaweed over 4,500 years ago: www.digitscotland.com/the-archaeol...

Pleased to discover that Lilly Wood & The Prick sound great live youtu.be/pvTa-2s54C8

'Kirkwall Fair.' (1888) Although Arthur Melville was not regarded as one of the Glasgow Boys, he was seen by them to be a kindred spirit. A year after painting this work on Orkney, he left Edinburgh and settled in London, although he often returned to Scotland to paint.

Today, 2 February, is Candlemas. As well as being a Christian holy day, it is one of the four Scottish Quarter Days, when rents were due. The Scots #poem “At Candlemas” by Marion Angus (1865–1946) is a typically unsentimental look at how swiftly youth turns to old age:

I'd not thought of the etymology of grizzled before. Nice to see it's one of those Germanic-via-French words

Ĉu mi aĉetis terpomojn nur pro la nomo? Certe JES, ili estas Skywalker. #terpomoj #starwars

ever since I first heard about it I found the Dwarfie Stane on Hoy really evocative so couldn't resist putting it in my comic

"And Iacob sod pottage", Genesis 25:29 Sod's the past tense of seethe 'to boil, cook'. It's hidden in plain sight in sodden

Dorothée Pullinger AngloFrench #automotive #engineer awarded MBE aged 26 for #WWI work. Early member of @wes1919.bsky.social she #engineered the #Galloway car, designed for women & built by a female workforce for Arrol-Johnstons in #Kirkcudbright d. #OTD 28 Jan 1986 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doroth%...