First Hummingbird Hawk moth I've seen this year. They really are extraordinary little insects that look so much like a hummingbird. This one is feeding on hardy plumbago flowers growing outside the house. Those lovely orange underwings! Beautiful 💙 🤎

There's always some prick who thinks Weychester was built from a plan within the Bible. That the Weychester Cathedral zodiac reveals twelve sacred gateways. It when they go from burbling about holy geometry and Joseph of Arimathea to sacrifices we have to worry. – #DICallaghan

Goodnight from Bobby Neck, holding offshore in his skiff till he’s sure he’s got permission from the King-Under-the-Sea to submerge his latest cargo. Goodnight from Toby Horner, too ale-addled to realise he’s being watched by eyes that blaze like burning coals. Goodnight from Hookland.

It’s Sunday and it’s 8pm so it must be time for #WildflowerHour! 🥳 Please share your pics of the wild and naturalised blooms you’ve spotted from across Britain and Ireland in the last week!

This is not London! Here is a photo from a circular walk from Hawkshead to Latterbarrow and back this morning. The mountains told me they have missed me. Off to get lost & swallowed by this land 💚 #landscapephotography #mountainscape #photographersunited #PhotographersofBluesky #lakedistrict

Occasionally, one finds a street where time flows a little slower or a mews that remembers its former horses in discarnate sounds of hooves clipping its cobbles. For not all hauntings are psychic stain of violence. We are just as likely to be haunted by absence. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts

It is Hookland. There is no ‘spooky season’. Spooky is the county’s default setting because it is the English gothic, the English strange. The weird is not a costume to be warn only once a year.

'Sunset, near Cley, Norfolk.' (1910) Like John Ruskin, Albert Goodwin responded to landscape with an almost religious fervour and understanding; he interpreted it with greater eclecticism in the style of Whistler, Ruskin’s great adversary in the field of aesthetics.

Goodnight from Kim Redmayne, noticing the dark hells that dance in-between the razzle-dazzle of Zero 9 discotheque. Goodnight from Ruthie Mapleton, unsettled by the way the sodium orange streetlights always seem to wink out when she walks under them. Goodnight from Hookland.

Sunrise at Stonehenge today (20th September) was at 6.50am, sunset is at 7.09pm

#ArtDD2025 Rain over Jura Sitting in a cemetery, amongst a forest of gravestones, waves lapping the beach beyond the wall, I watched the rain sweep in with the dusk over Jura. @saocousins.bsky.social @stevecobbin.bsky.social @holnicotenh.bsky.social @andykaitken.bsky.social @indikon.bsky.social

Swans heading south

Give me the ghost of the glass. Give me the phantom locked in fused silicon dioxide. The spectre who whispers to vandals about stones and freedom. The temporal shade who peers through windows is a friend of mine. – #CJosiffe 1982 #Ghosts

"M Zola ... is determined to show that, if he has not genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds!" - Oscar Wilde, 'The Decay Of Lying'. (Ouch!) #BookWormSat #Naturalism #OscarWilde #Zola

'Der Blaue Weiher (The Blue Pond)', by Hugo Henneberg, linoleum cut on four plates on Japanese paper, 1904.

‘I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness.’ ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground. @racheldeering.bsky.social here, consciously and otherwise, for the rest of #BookWormSat

First page of 18th century Basque-Icelandic dictionary. A Basque-Icelandic pidgin was spoken between locals and Basque whalers from ~1600 including the well-known expression "Fenicha for ju" meaning F**k you! en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque%...

Deer costume, C14th.

'The heavy, grey sky weighed on the world. A thick, layered fog reaching from the ground to the upper atmosphere, exerting that heavy burden like an immovable melancholy, a sadness without end. For days, everything remained dull and dark.' -Stijn Streuvels 🎨Ernst Ferdinand Oehme #BookWormSat

....thereby dating them to the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age. The figures may have served as offerings, perhaps to deities or ancestors. 🧵 3/3

...wooden artifacts, including several warrior figures crafted from yew wood and with quartzite eyes, a wooden box, and a serpent-headed boat. The figures, which range from 35 to 41 cm in height. Through radiocarbon dating, the figures have been determined to be around 2,600 years old, ...🧵2/3

The Roos Carr figures are dating to the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age. They were inadvertently unearthed by laborers during ditch maintenance at Roos Carr in 1836. Approximately two meters beneath the surface, the workers discovered a collection of well-preserved...🧵1/3 📷 me #archaeology 🏺

"And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky and in the mind of man;" - William Wordsworth #BookWormSat

‘Seeing an Earl as an owl on a mantelpiece, and having part of one’s face removed by a cat, both on the same morning, can temporarily undermine the self-control of any man.’ ~ Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake. #BookWormSat 🖼️ Steerpike surveying Gormenghast, Charles W. Stewart, 1973.

‘I feel as if I am an ad
for the sale of a haunted house: 18 rooms
$37,000 I'm yours
ghosts and all.’ ~ Brautigan for #BookWormSat 🖼️ Angela Deane

‘When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, ‘He was a man who used to notice such things?’ Afterwards Thomas Hardy 1917 #BookWormSat 💙📚

'His mother's tenderness and devotion had given him a vicious streak of egotism; he thought that he loved whoever felt sorry for him and caressed him, though in reality he lived apart, buried in himself...' -Émile Zola @signemaene.com welcomes you to #BookWormSat. 🎨Gustave Caillebotte

Goodnight from the Salvation Army soup kitchen on Ashcourt’s Hop Street, where rumours of the Iron-toothed Vampire are more plentiful than the food. Goodnight from Annabel Kidd, clutching her swan-bone charm in hopes her wishes reach the realm of the dead. Goodnight from Hookland.

The longer you spend in the county, the easier it is to recognise a Wood Sprite's home tree. Even without offerings, there's a palpable sense of being watched, an atmosphere of potential ambush. What some Hooklanders call: 'an air of ancient unease'. – #MattAdams

It wasn't lost on us Children of The Hum that pylon meant gateway. That's what they were for us. Each transmission tower was temple, each pylon a portal into the electric ley of the land. Thousands of giant doors to wonder. – Tattoo Labyrinth Dave, ex-Pylon Person

Rainham Marshes and Rutland Water show the richness of birdlife and the wonder it brings. These Ramsar sites SSSIs are vital for nature and for local communities. #ProtectNature #SSSI

There are some lithic lookouts, some grave guardians in Ashcourt Necropolis that radiate a palpable sense that no trespass will be tolerated. Their swords may be broken, their armour pockmarked, but they remain stone engines of dread. Provoking them is beyond unwise. – #CLNolan

The Weekly Actual Rothko, one of the Seagrams in Tate Modern

#FindsFriday: A #Roman amber flask, from Aquileia, dating 1st/2nd c. AD. Aquileia's position at the end of a main amber trade route resulted in its becoming a centre for the carving and distribution of Baltic amber across the Roman Empire. 📷: Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Aquileia

Kimika Hara, contemporary Japanese embroidery artist #WomensArt #September

One of the places that most creeped me out as a kid reading #ghost books was Hermitage Castle, #Roxburghshire. For one thing it just looks so GRIM. But its ghosts, that of an evil sorcerer called Lord Soulis and his nasty little familiar, Redcap, are particularly unnerving. #PhantomsFriday #folklore

In a Flemish folktale a group of boys stumbled upon a pig while they walked home. The pig changed into a flame when they chased the animal. It was believed to be a ghost. In other tales, ghost pigs are said to rattle with chains and bang on pots and pans. 🎨Bill Mayer #PhantomsFriday

Windsor Great Forest is famously haunted by Herne The Hunter, a ranger during the reign of Henry VIII who, #legend has it, practised strange (pagan?) rituals under an oak tree, from which he was later found hanged. The tree sometimes appeared as a ghost, too. #PhantomsFriday #FolkyFriday #folklore

Two phantom black dogs were reported to wander Pill Lane in Little Compton. They are believed to be the ghost of a Mrs Pardington. No information in my sources about who Mrs P. was but nearby there is a field called Pardington’s Close. #PhantomsFriday #SpectralHounds

"There are so many #ghost stories out there to discover!" Please feel free to add them to the #PhantomsFriday feed tomorrow. Use the hashtag to post anything ghost-related, be it #folklore or recent accounts; art; poems; fiction or non-fiction. #ghosts #legend #legends #supernatural #paranormal

Mrs Tulliver and her pet cat Seamus are among the ghosts that haunt the Snickleway Inn in York. Mrs Tulliver is sometimes seen sitting quietly at the bar and Seamus the cat is felt rubbing his way among the legs of unsuspecting customers. #BookologyThursday #PhantomsFriday 📸 Kenneth Barker

Just a reminder that this exists.

'Speechlessly, they stared at the wondrous tableau of the setting sun in a golden splendour of clouds. Then they became aware of the blissful poetry of things.' - Cyriel Buysse Tomorrow #BookWormSat shall celebrate Cyriel Buysse's birthday with the theme Naturalist Literature. Do join us!

Palaeolithic flint hand axe that was found at South Cerney, near Cirencester in Gloucestershire. The axe is part of the collections at the Corinium Museum in Cirencester, and is around 250,000 years old! 📸 My own. #FlintFriday #Prehistory #Cotswolds #CoriniumMuseum

At the top of Dollar Glen in the Ochils is Maiden Castle, a fairy hill. A piper was taken inside the hill to play to the gathered assembly. They welcome him, he plays all night, then finds himself alone by the dark silent hill. He returns home a stranger- 100 years have passed. #PhantomsFriday

Goodnight from Weychester railway station, whose phantom bookstall owner still cries out: “READ MORE! LEARN MORE!” Goodnight from Mark Greenwood, the dark in his blood whispering as he passes the point where the Wayland’s Cross gibbet used to stand. Goodnight from Hookland.

For #RomanFortThursday a carved pedestal from the headquarters building of the legionary fortress at Mogontiacium, present-day Mainz, depicting two #Roman legionaries. Dating 2nd half of the 1st century AD. On display at Landesmuseum Mainz. 🏺 📷 me

Members of the Marsh Ape Research Society (MARS) cannot decide whether their observation tower on the Restal Waste was was vandalised by an actual Marsh Ape or by their sworn enemies, the Empress Eel Research Society (EERS).

I approve of language being haunted. There are two related words in Hookland dialect of which I am fond. Gastgate – a door one instinctively knows leads to a ghost-troubled place and gastboden – a tingling across the psychic skin foretelling a coming of phantoms. – #CLNolan #WOTD

Hookland remembers – or more accurately mythologises – its Saxon centuries more than other counties. This may be explained by its long resistance to Norman invasion. It may be explained by its surfeit of Saxon phantoms. Ghost bears and spearmen do much to focus the mind. – Dr. M. Benn