In Issy's footnote each initial letter of three hexasyllabic sentences spells, in triplicate, ALP’s initials: Apis amat aram. Luna legit librum. Pulla petit pascua. Translated, it reads: ‘The bee loves the altar. The moon reads a book. The foal seeks the pasture’. northernearth.co.uk/the-foal-see...

"This plan of Thomas Spence, for restoring to Society the real blessings of the social compact, by parochial partnerships in Land, truly declares, that all persons are by nature born equal..." mstdn.social/@skatterling...

Against the Grain is an audio essay exploring the friendship between Thomas Bewick and Thomas Spence who met in 18th century Newcastle. It presents both men as innovative artists; one whose legacy was protected, the other whose ideas were obliterated www.ruthewan.com/against-the-...

I believe it is painted, with yellow ochre and charcoal pigment. Is it a kind of 'toy macehead' contemporary with the 'Neolithic' finds? An imitation of an Iron Age glass bead of the Meare type, known for opaque yellow decoration? The latter would hugely extend the timescale of lithic activity here

I believe it is painted, with yellow ochre and charcoal pigment. Is it a kind of 'toy macehead' contemporary with the 'Neolithic' finds? An imitation of an Iron Age glass bead of the Meare type, known for opaque yellow decoration? The latter would hugely extend the timescale of lithic activity here

Not sure what to make of this stone, found in the garden a few years ago. Two yellow stripes applied to a darker pigmented area, leading to a drill hole, or completely 'natural'? A confirmed flint core and probable hammer stones have been found here too. How would 'paint' not degrade? #FindsFriday

A piece of flint picked up last week. Later, I noticed a subtle red vein through the grey matrix, breaking the surface at one point as a band of crystals. If it's a flint core, I wonder whether the distinctive crystalline redness governed the choice to strike flakes and blades from it millennia ago?

Two flint spheres deposited at a Roman shrine to a water deity, and two flint spheres juxtaposed with a book on André Breton's Arcane 17, his invocation of water nymph, Melusine. Two ‘positional acts’, vastly separated in time, yet mutually implicated thegrammarofmatter.wordpress.com/2025/07/25/m...

“... by the 1970s, movements stopped demanding things of politicians and bosses and instead turned to each other and said, “Let's take it all!” For a while, it looked like they might.” Forthcoming August 2026 from @illwill.bsky.social store.illwilleditions.com/products/let...

A retrospective realisation from an old diary entry. A family visit to Beacon Hill, near Warnford, Hants, on 11 April 1976, after church, may have been a Palm Sunday observance. Probably my Catholic mum's idea, it seems to tune in with widespread traditions of gathering on hilltops on that day

PDFs of Olive-Drab Rebels and Harass the Brass freedomarchives.org/Documents/Fi...

I was prompted to write this blog post by a post on the Surrey Medieval site this morning. In the course of composing I noticed I'd first shared this image with accompanying commentary on the old 'Bird site' on 7/2/2019 - exactly seven years ago today thegrammarofmatter.wordpress.com/2026/02/07/s...

Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and John Heartfield modernismmodernity.org/articles/hak...

On Franz Wilhelm Seiwert churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the...

When I first saw this image of Littywood moated manor (Lvtiude in 1086), I thought, "Henge!" David Horovitz, in his survey of Staffordshire place-names (2003) thinks it may have developed from a prehistoric earthwork. Focus for an array of church and manor alignments, its name is 'puzzling'

First ring-necked parakeets I've ever heard at Southampton Common today. Didn't see any, though. Already seen in the last year at Riverside Park/Woodmill and Mayfield Park

Rhyme "describing" local vilages believed to be written by Shakespeare after he’d lost in a drinking contest at Bidford: Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston, Haunted Hillborough, and hungry Grafton, With Dodging Exhall, Papist Wixford, Beggar’s Broom and drunken Bidford. #FolkloreSunday

Guerilla Birdsong (Feat. Ronnie Ronalde) www.youtube.com/watch?v=xikS...

Applying historical materialism, ‘the conceptual expression of the objective social structure of capitalist society’, to non-capitalist societies naturalises capitalist social relations, mistaking purely historical categories (the economy) for ‘eternally valid ones’ www.academia.edu/39882309/Awa...

Merry Christmas and happy new Gemeinwesen www.endnotes.org.uk/dossiers/jac...

‘As Adorno saw it, Surrealist art had been compromised by postwar conditions: made of “world-rubble”, the montages of Surrealism created only “nature morte”; “After the European catastrophe the Surrealist shocks lost their force.”’ Hal Foster on Surrealism v. fascism: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Liminal topographies: the guide post at Wheely Down which may have inspired the eponymous Richard Thompson song and the nearby Bronze Age barrow, implicated with UFO landing sites and an epic cross-country trip of Fairport Convention. In Northern Earth, Issue 182 northernearth.co.uk/product/nort...

T. W. Adorno likened his encounter with Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia (Geist der Utopie), to his memory of reading a grimoire as a child. Reading this piece offers other implications to Adorno's concept of mediation: for every mediation a medium! brill.com/view/journal...

To be the midpoint of triple Nature, to move all things, You attach the soul and diffuse it through adapted members; and Soul, cut in two, has globed its motion in two orbs, goes forth to return to itself, turns about the depth of mind, and curves the heavens to a like pattern - Boethius

…and another photo of this stone with the rest of the stone row (towards sunset this evening) #StandingStoneSunday

Tallest stone of the Waen Oer stone row looking out over Cardigan Bay to the distant mountains of the Lleyn Peninsula. An odd-shaped stone with odd cigar-shaped natural markings for #StandingStoneSunday

"Maass! But the majik wavus has elfun anon meshes. And Simba the Slayer of his Oga is slewd" (FW 203). ‘maji’, ‘wavu’, ‘elfu’, and ‘simba’ are all Kiswahili words, meaning, respectively, water, net, a thousand, and lion/warrior - elfun anon becomes 1001 artefactsofwriting.com/2020/10/10/f...

For #StandingStoneSunday, I was going to post one of Clarissa Miles' photos from Stonehenge in 1901. She was the photographer during architect Detmar Blow's operation to straighten Stone 56, and William Gowland's excavations, but instead, here's a passing shepherd and his sheep on the (1/2)

'For all its apparent celebration, the narrative of ‘Cloudbusting’ recounts the repression of utopianism: #WilhelmReich would die in prison within a year of his arrest, his machines destroyed and writings burned by the US government' #KateBush’s Hounds Of Love, 40 Years On buff.ly/B1GSAn1

#HillfortsWednesday Castell Henllys is an archaeological site near Nevern in north Pembrokeshire, #Wales. The Iron Age hillfort has been the subject of an ongoing excavation since the start of the 21st century, accompanied by an exercise in reconstruction #Archaeology #History

Taking heart from this, they carried on through the snow until they reached a farm near Stow where a farmer allowed them to lodge for Christmas charity. ‘The Christmas bells were ringing and the snow stopped, and the little white Kit-Cat was gone’ thegrammarofmatter.wordpress.com/2025/09/13/i...

Spotted this first edition today

Nice little pebble feature at work

These are the two menhirs on the Ile-de-Sein (Finistère) known as Les Causeurs (The Gossipers) possibly because they are set close together and one leans slightly towards the other. This card by Boelle in Brest pre-1904.

My newt, in comparison

A cow’s jawbone placed beside Stonehenge’s south entrance and dated to the monument’s very beginning in 2995 to 2900 BCE. Evidence for the longevity of drove roads from Wales, linked to Stonehenge (and on to London). Talked about this stuff for years thegrammarofmatter.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/a...

A cow’s jawbone placed beside Stonehenge’s south entrance and dated to the monument’s very beginning in 2995 to 2900 BCE. Evidence for the longevity of drove roads from Wales, linked to Stonehenge (and on to London). Talked about this stuff for years thegrammarofmatter.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/a...