Archaeologists began a historic dig on Monday which they hope will unlock the ancient secrets of Stonehenge once and for all. The researchers started digging a trench to examine the first stones erected at the site – the first excavation at the monument to be given the go-ahead for 44 years.Professors Geoffrey Wainwright and Tim Darvill have begun a major research excavation inside Stonehenge

Samples recovered from the pit will provide material that could allow the team to date the start of work on the landmark to within 10 years. Those leading the two-week dig believe it will provide evidence to back their belief that Stonehenge was the Lourdes of its day - a source of healing to which diseased and injured ancient Britons flocked seeking cures for their ailments.
Prof Tim Darvill, of the University of Bournemouth, said: “It is an incredibly exciting moment and a great privilege to be able to excavate inside Stonehenge. Continue Reading »

Cú Chulainn, one of Ulster’s most famous legendary characters, is the hero of this five part cartoon series. In five action filled five-minute programmes we follow his daring deeds from his boyhood to his tragic death. This bilingual series contributes to a range of learning areas across the Northern Ireland KS1 and KS2 curricula including Language and Literacy, The World Around Us, Personal Development and Mutual Understanding and Art and Design.

The great thing about this series based on the legendary hero from the Ulster Cycle, is that the programmes have been recorded in both Irish and English, so not only do they tell kids about the legends of their past but also help in keeping the Gaelic tongue alive. Continue Reading »

The famous timber circle dating back 4,000 years which was found in the sea off the Norfolk coast (England) is to return to the county in a permanent display. Seahenge, with 55 oak posts and a central upturned stump dating from the Bronze Age, was found emerging from a beach at Holme-next-the-Sea in 1998. Timbers were studied at the Bronze Age

Centre, Peterborough, then preserved at the Mary Rose Trust, Portsmouth. Next month Seahenge will go on display at the Lynn Museum in King’s Lynn.

After Seahenge was excavated, 3D laser scanning revealed the earliest metal tool marks on wood ever discovered in Britain. Archaeologists at the Bronze Age Centre, believe between 50 and 80 people may have helped build the circle, possibly to mark the death of an important individual. Seahenge became exposed at low tides after the peat dune covering it was swept away by winter storms.
Funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and Norfolk County Council has been provided for the Seahenge Gallery project at the Lynn Museum which will house the timber, displayed in its original formation. Continue Reading »

Kenneth Mackenzie, also known as Coinneach Odhar or the Brahan Seer, was a legendary Scottish clairvoyant. Tradition dates his birth to the early 17th century in Uig, on the island of Lewis. This is the northernmost island of the Outer Hebrides, a chain of islands to the west of Scotland’s northern coast. Legend has it that he came into his talent after napping on a fairy hill and finding a small stone in his coat, which allowed him to view the future.

The fey stone with a hole in it, aremarkably reminiscent of the seeing stone in the Spiderwick Chronicles, is traditionally full of power. Predictably, legend has it that he was eventually burned to death as a sorcerer by being immersed in a barrel of burning tar. Before his death he forespoke the doom of the noble Mackenzie family who had him executed: the last male heir of this line would be deaf. In the 19th century this came true, as the last of the Mackenzies lost his hearing in his youth.

He is inevitably compared with Nostradamus. However, unlike Nostradamus, many of predictions attributed to the Brahan Seer are very straightforward and literal, instead of being cloaked in word games, riddles and allegory. For instance, a typical prediction is that a specific church roof would collapse when a magpie made a nest in it for three years running. There are predictions of the birth of a two-headed calf, a boulder falling over, and the plaintive death of a French expatriate in the Isles, mourned by a local woman. Other reputed predictions were of “a chariot without horse or bridle”, and “fiery chariot[s]” which could interpreted as a premonition of railroads or automobiles, and “hills strewn with ribbons”, which sound like powerlines, but this is about as futuristic as he gets. Unlike Nostradamus, none of his predictions are about geopolitics, global war, or the distant future.

He predicted the Caledonian Canal.

One day ships will sail round the back of Tomnahurich Hill.

This is a remarkable prediction - firstly, there was already a passage for shipping - the River Ness, on the opposite south side of Tomnahurich Hill from today’s canal - and the only choice for boats in the Brahan Seer’s day. To say that ships would sail round the opposite side of the hill from the river seemed highly illogical to those who first heard the prediction. But the prediction came true.

He predicted the demise of the MacKenzies of Kintail and Seaforth.

The day will come when the MacKenzies of Fairburn shall lose their entire possessions; their castle will become uninhabited and a cow shall give birth to a calf in the uppermost chamber of the tower.

In 1851, the now-ruined tower was being used by a farmer to store hay, and a cow gave birth in the garret. It is believed that the animal, following a trail of hay, entered the tower, climbed to the top, and got stuck. Both the cow and the calf were taken down five days later, allowing enough time for people to come and see the prophecy fulfilled. This was one of four prophecies by the Seer regarding Fairburn, at least three of which are reputed to have been fulfilled.

He predicted that when there were five bridges over the River Ness in Inverness that there would be worldwide chaos.

In August 1939 there were five bridges over the Ness and on September 1st the same year Hitler invaded Poland. He said that when there were nine bridges that there would be fire, flood and calamity. The ninth bridge was built in 1987 and in 1988 the Piper Alpha disaster happened.

References:

Scottish Myths and Legends

The Brahan Seer Home

Wikipedia

The Brahan Seer

The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer, Alexander Mackenzie, 1899 - Sacred Texts

There was one time a woman named Colloo in Close-ny-Lheiy, near Glen Meay, and she had a child that had fallen sick in a strange way. Nothing seemed wrong with him yet crosser and crosser he grew, nying-nyanging night and day. The woman was in great distress. Charms had failed, and she didn’t know rightly what to do. It seems that, about a fortnight after birth, the child, as fine a child for his age as you would see in a day’s walk, was left asleep while the mother went to the well for water.

Now Herself forgot to put the tongs on the cradle, and, when she came back, the child was crying pitiful, and no quatin’ for him. And from that very hour the flesh seemed to melt off his bones, till he became as ugly and as wizened a child as you would see between the Point of Ayre and the Calf. He was that way, his whining howl filling the house, for four years, lying in the cradle without a motion on him to put his feet under him. Not a day’s res’ nor a night’s sleep was there at the woman these four years with him. She was fair scourged with him, until there came a fine day in the spring that Hom beg Bridson, the tailor, was in the house sewing. Hom is dead now, but there’s many alive as remember him. He was wise tremenjus, for he was going from house to house sewing, and gathering wisdom as he was going.Well, before that day the tailor was seeing lots of wickedness at the child. When the woman would be out feeding the pigs and sarvin’ the craythurs, he would be hoisting his head up out of the cradle and making faces at the tailor, winking, and slicking, and shaking his head, and saying

“What a lad I am!”

That day the woman wanted to go to the shop in Glen Meay to sell some eggs that she had, and says she to the tailor: “Hom man, keep your eye on the chile that the bogh [poor dear] won’t fall out of the cradle and hurt himself while I slip down to the shop.” Continue Reading »

A bit delayed (I normally like to get the episode on to the site and feed at 00:00 GMT on the day of release) but the new episode is here! You can find the Shownotes for this episode here and you can listen to it online here. It should soon be appearing in your feeds for iTunes and other podcatchers as well. The next main task is to get the forums up and running so that we can all chat to each other again.

We hope you enjoy the story!

A form of Welsh popular belief as to the whereabouts of fairy-land corresponds with the Avalon of the Arthurian legends. The green meadows of the sea, called in the triads Gwerddonau Lion, are the Green fairy islands. Many extraordinary superstitions survive with regard to these islands. They were supposed to be the abode of the souls of certain Druids, who, not holy enough to enter the heaven of the Christians, were still not wicked enough to be condemned to the tortures of annwn, and so were accorded a place in this

romantic sort of purgatorial paradise. In the fifth century a voyage was made, by the British king Gavran, in search of these enchanted islands; with his family he sailed away into the unknown waters, and was never heard of more. This voyage Is commemorated in the triads as one of the Three Losses by Disappearance, the two others being Merlin’s and Madog’s. Merlin sailed away in a ship of glass ; Madog sailed in search of America and neither returned, but both disappeared for ever.

In Pembrokeshire and southern Carmarthenshire are to be found traces of this belief. There are sailors on that romantic coast who still talk of the green meadows of enchantment lying in the Irish channel to the west of Pembrokeshire. Sometimes they are visible to the eyes of mortals for a brief space, when suddenly they vanish. There are traditions of sailors who, in the early part of the present century, actually went ashore on the fairy islands - not knowing that they were such, until they returned to their boats, when they were filled with awe at seeing the islands disappear from their sight, neither sinking in the sea,nor floating away upon the waters, but simply vanishing suddenly. The fairies inhabiting these islands are said to have regularly attended the markets at Milford Haven and Laugharne. They made their purchases without speaking, laid downtheir money and departed, always leaving the exact sum required, which they seemed to know, without asking the price of anything. Sometimes they were invisible, but they were often seen, by sharp-eyed persons. There was always one special butcher at Milford Haven upon whom the fairies bestowed their patronage, instead of distributing their favours indiscriminately.
The fairies inhabiting these islands are said to have regularly attended the markets at Milford. They made their purchases without speaking, laid down their money and departed, always leaving the exact sum required, which they seemed to know, without asking the price of anything. Sometimes they were invisible, but they were often seen, by sharp-eyed persons. There was always one special butcher at Milford Haven upon whom the fairies bestowed their patronage, instead of distributing their favours indiscriminately.

The Milford Haven folk could see the green fairy islands distinctly, lying out a short distance from land: and the general belief was that they were densely peopled with fairies. It was also said that the latter went to and fro between the islands and the shore through a subterranean gallery under the bottom of the sea. That isolated cape which forms the county of Pembroke was looked upon as a land of mystery by the rest of Wales long after it had been settled by the Flemings in 1113.

A secret veil was supposed to cover this sea-girt promontory; the inhabitants talked in an unintelligible jargon that was neither English, nor French, nor Welsh; and out of its misty darkness came fables of wondrous sort, and accounts of miracles marvellous beyond belief. Mythology and Christianity spoke together from this strange country, and one could not tell at which to be most amazed, the pagan or the priest.

Source: British Goblins: Welsh folk-lore, fairy mythology, legends and traditions.

Author: Wirt Sikes

Published: 1880

A new fansite for the works of Mary Stewart, perhaps the most famous of Romantic authors, has been started by two sisters with a passion for passion. As a resource for information about Mary Stewart’s works it is superb and it is there that I found details of all five of Mary Stewart’s Arthurian books (only 3 of which I have read!). Mary Stewart is one of those authors that leaves a nostalgic ring in my head - throughout my childhood, I seem to remember my mother carrying about books by either Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt or Anya Seton.

The five Arthurian novels are:

1. The Crystal Cave

2. The Hollow Hills

3. Last Enchantment

4. The Wicked Day

5. The Prince and the Pilgrim

The Crystal Cave

Who was Merlin? Was the famed magician of Camelot and King Arthur’s court really a sinister, all-powerful being from another world? Was he truly a Prince of Darkness? Or was he a man with the passions of other mortals? A man with unique intelligence and unusual gifts? Why was he so feared? How did he come by his occult powers? Why was the crystal cave so important to him?

The HollowHills

The Hollow Hills takes place in a fifth-century Britain fraught with superstition and fear, where no life is safe, no law is stable, and where a king risks accusations of murder and adultery to get himself an heir. For his own safety, the boy Arthur, rejected as a bastard by his father, is long kept ignorant of his parentage.

The Last Enchantment

Merlin, whom men call “enchanter,” is the narrator of this magnificent and haunting novel of Dark Age Britain, which begins with Arthur now King by right, having drawn the sword Caliburn from the stone. He instantly plunges into fierce warfare against the Saxon enemy, fighting to achieve the “small miracle” of unity and independence that Britain alone attained among the dependencies of a crumbling Roman Empire.

But Merlin’s story focuses on a different kind of warfare against more subtle and dangerous enemies. Of these the chief is Morgause, rose-gold witch and half-sister to Arthur, whom she snared incestuously to her bed, an act resulting in the birth of a son, Mordred, who will be the most dangerous of all. In fact, the book begins with the desperate and bloody attempt to find and murder this child. It fails, and one by one Merlin’s other prophecies are realized: the passion and grief of Arthur’s marriages; his betrayal by friends and kinfolk; Merlin’s overpowering but short-lived love.

The Wicked Day

The Wicked Day is the gripping story of Mordred, bastard son of King Arthur by incest with his half-sister Morgause, witch-queen of Lothian and Orkney. Morgause sent the child to the Orkney Islands to be reared there in secret, in the hope that one day he would become, as Merlin the Enchanter had prophesied, the doom of her hated half-brother.

When Mordred is taken from his rude life as a fisherboy in the islands and suddenly thrust into the full panoply of the High King Arthur’s court, he learns of his true parentage and rises to a position of trust in his father’s kingdom. But, as the plots and counterplots of the last part of Arthur’s reign unfold, Mordred is drawn into the tangled web of tragedy that is the climactic drama of the Arthurian legend.

The Prince and the Pilgrim

The prince, our hero, is named Alexander. He is but a tiny infant when his father, Prince Baudouin, is brutally murdered by the King of Cornwall in a remote corner of England. Aided by a trusted servant, Alexander’s mother escapes the same fate by fleeing with her son to a safe and secret haven. When Alexander comes of age he sets out to Camelot to seek justice from King Arthur and avenge the death of the father he never knew.

Kelly Heckart, one of our favourite authors, has a piece included in the collection of faerie stories called “In the Gloaming” which you can find outmore about at her site. She ahs appeared as a guest blogger on the Romance Junkies blog where she tells us about her passion for Celtic Men. It is a fun blog to read and she does come up with avery interesting point about channeling aggression, when she says:

If modern Celtic men with pent up fire burning inside could walk around with big swords sheathed in leather at their sides, and engage in a cattle raid or two, they might not get into so much trouble if they could divert some of that passion..

It does make you wonder.. Celtic tribes would live ‘next door’ to each other and raid each other quite happily. Raids would test the mettle of their young men and women and this practice went on for centuries without serious internecine warfare.

She then tells us about the Fianna, who as wandering mercenary bandsm perhaps typified the Celtic ideal better than anyone by saying:

My favorite of the ancient Celts were the warriors of the Irish Fianna who were fierce mercenaries with the hearts of poets. In fact, one of the requirements to be part of the Fianna was to be a skilled poet. The most famous of these warriors is Fionn mac Cumhail. The king could call upon the Irish Fianna, or Fianna Eireann, in times of conflict. When not fighting, they lived apart from society as hunters in the forest. Mysterious…hmmm. Sounds like rock star material to me.

It’s well worth a read, and you can find it here.

The cat, whether wild or domestic, is sacred to the Goddess in Celtic tradition, appearing in Irish, Welsh and Breton folklore. But it is in Scotland that is found a particularly powerful connection. A number of Scottish clans held the cat as their totem animal: those of MacIntosh, MacNeishe and MacNicol the domestic cat, and the MacBain the wild cat. The cat-people, a Pictish tribe known as the Kati, lived in Caithness, the ness or promontory of the cats, and in Sutherland in Gaelic is the Cataobh - cat country.

In Ireland and almost certainly throughout the Celtic world, the skin of a wild cat was used by warriors. An ancient Irish bard speaks of Talc son of Trone, who is called the cat-headed chief since his battle-dress included the skin of a wild cat, with its head attached to his helmet. The Irish Yellow Book of Lecan describes warriors wearing cats’ heads, one of whom was noted as a Gaelic champion and one of the Irish kings was called Cairbar cinn chait - Carbar of the cat’s head. Although the cat was used by warriors, as was the boar, raven and bear, to invoke the avenging and protective power of the gods, it was still considered an animal associated with the Goddess and the feminine. For this reason both positive and negative attributes of the cat can be seen in folklore and tradition. As an animal clearly of the Goddess and in close contact with the spirit-world, the cat has been the victim of extraordinary persecution and cruelty. Her ability to see and work in the spirit-world makes the cat an ideal ally for any shaman and it was due to the Church’s fear of such powers that many thousands of cats were tortured and put to death by burning in baskets in both Britain and France.

The cat as a creature of the Goddess was often perceived as somehow ‘unholy.’ It was considered unlucky to see a cat as the first animal of the year unless you were a MacIntosh or of the clan Cattan (whose chieftain is called The Great Cat). The goddess Brighid, who is known in Irish tradition as ‘the daughter of the bear,’ had a cat as a companion. In Welsh tradition the goddess Ceridwen in her manifestation as the great sow Henwen gives birth to a wolf cub, an eagle, a bee and a kitten. Unfortunately this last grows into the Palug Cat - one of the Three Plagues of Anglesey - that is killed by King Arthur and Cai only after a lengthy struggle.

Another tale that shows the fierceness of the cat and its role as a guradian can be found in the Irish Voyage of Maelduin, one of four spiritual tales called immrama, meaning mystical voyages. In this tale, the Druid Nuca teaches Maelduin how to build a magical boat in which he plans to avenge the murder of his father. He and his companions almost reach the murderers’ island but winds blow them out to sea and they are lost for three days and nights.

They then come to a series of islands, many of which are presided over by animals. The first is the Island of Giant Ants, the second the Island of Many Birds and so on until they reach the tenth - the Island of the Cat. There they discover a ‘noble hall, a king’s fit dwelling.’ Food and drink is in copious supply and there are soft beds and golden benches for them to rest upon. In this great hall lies treasure: silver brooches, gold-hilted swords and wide torcs. But no one is present except a ‘quick, hungry cat poised on a pillar.’ Against Maelduin’s wishes, his foster-brother tries to steal a gold necklace but in a moment his body is turned to a pile of ash by the ‘fiery paw of the wondrous cat.’ The cat is seen here in her role as guardian of Otherworldly treasure.

The cat teaches respect and caution. She is sensual and will accept affection only on her terms. She is proud, independent and capable of observing both this world and the next…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellas_Cat