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...

They needed a starting motor for the choir practice

Made a pilgrimage today to Twyford Down - the chalk downland torn asunder for a road scheme in the 1990s. Looking down on the scar left by the M3 cutting hurts. The (vandalised) memorial stone recalls the Tory ministers who ravaged this land; a defiant sticker on the fence reads ‘Twyford Rising’

The juxtaposition of book and balls was done in January 2018... Only today have I realised what might have inspired this - Emblem 141 (Eternitas) from Henry Peacham's Minerva Britanna (1612), featuring a very Melusinian-looking form holding two orbs, and she has 17 stars on her!

Troll-faced flint on Bronze Age barrow

Happy to have it confirmed independently by two archaeologists today that this is indeed a flint core. One of them suggested it could be a sign of settlement. As there's a spring 100 ft from our door that seems quite plausible. Mesolithic/Neolithic or later. Given details for reporting it to the PAS

Didn't expect to find this in the Fiction section of a National Trust bookshop 🧐

Never seen clouds cast shadows on a blue sky before

Managed to get Old Winchester Hill and Beacon Hill in the same shot. Taken from Wheely Down, while trying to view a ploughed out barrow (out of shot). The green mass of Beacon Hill peers out from the trees on the right. Distant OWH is to the left of the central stand of trees #HillfortsWednesday

For #TombTuesday the suspected Bronze Age cairn and Bronze Age cremation remains found at the ancient circular churchyard of St Melangell with its old and massive yew trees (mid Wales).

Lived here for 30 years but only noticed this stone on the flower bed yesterday. Signs of repeated working? A lithic core? #FlintKnapping #WorkedFlint #lithics #Palaeolithic #Mesolithic #Neolithic #Archaeology

Help Historical Materialism publish Hans Hautmann’s *History of the Austrian Council Movement 1918–24* (*Geschichte der Rätebewegung in Österreich 1918–24*).

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...

Gorgeous, pouting sarsen stone at Bramdean, Hampshire. Part of a group from which a fragment was found at Stonehenge, 51 km away. Mwah! #StandingStoneSunday

Mindful of Hinton Ampner's haunted reputation, I sought the book, Haunted Homes and Family Legends, opening a door upstairs to find a pigeon staggering from the hearth. In a movement parallel to Hinton Ampner's dove, it must have descended the chimney thegrammarofmatter.wordpress.com/2025/07/24/t...

A descending dove seen in Hinton Ampner yesterday. Today I found a pigeon had descended our chimney. It must have been in the room a long while. A 50-mile round trip to the animal rescue, but sadly, too far gone to be saved. Returning home, 'The Lark Ascending' plays on the radio. Strange symmetries

"Honey swarns where mellisponds. Will bee all buzzy one another minnies for the mere effect that you are so fuld of pollen yourself" - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake Bee emerging from Trumpet Vine flower, Hinton Ampner