Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
There's nothing quite as lasting as stone. It lasts much longer than organic matter that decays away, and is much less likely to be pilfered and melted down by enterprising thieves than metal or even plastics. No, a rock is forever. And its this perceived everlastingness that make rocks comprise the eldest of all of our historical artefacts; but it is also their mundaneness and opacity that make them number among the most mysterious too. Here are some rocks I think are interesting from British history.
1: Standing Stones
Many outside (and tragically inside) this country think British standing stones start and end with Stonehenge, but in reality stone circles, standing stones, and other miscellaneous megalithic structures are scattered across Britain at a sometimes alarming density. They mostly exist in the "forgotten places", like the moors of Devon or Yorkshire and the Highlands of Scotland. On Dartmoor alone there are two dozen stone circles and hundreds of individual standing stones. As with many pieces of prehistoric evidence these have undoubtedly undergone severe "survivor bias" culling, where all of the more accessible megaliths in the habitable and fertile plains have been moved either for construction or in order to plough over. There's nothing to say that the whole island wasn't once as densely packed with such signs of bronze-age (and earlier) relics. And that's the thing, despite hundreds of years of study, nobody can tell you what these structures were for, or under what context they were erected. Hell, for the vast majority of them we don't know if they were erected 2000 or 8000 years ago. To me such extensive construction points to a much more populous and industrious Britain than is classically portrayed. As more and more evidence of bronze-age habitation are discovered through the advanced analysis of earthworks from satellite imaging, the popular idea of a sparse, wild and lonely pre-Roman Britain is quickly becoming untenable. In many parts of Britain (in the aforementioned survivor bias locales) Bronze Age population estimates comfortably exceed even the current populations for those regions; which, even if assuming 100% of the population were non-urban ruro-agriculturals, leads us to a total British population of around five million people, higher than even those attested in the mediaeval era. While personally I am drawn more to the strange, forgotten standing stones that you come across by accident occasionally, the most impressive I have seen are surely those at Avebury, where a mediaeval village was built nestled inside an enormous stone circle. Also at Avebury exists an even more enigmatic structure and the focus of the next section: Silbury Hill.
2: Mounds
Great earthen mounds are not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when you think of rocks, covered in soil and grass as they so often are, but most of Britain's ancient earth mounds are in fact made of heaps of stone (which is obvious when you think about it structurally). Silbury Hill at Avebury is one of the more impressive of such mounds (google images of it). Standing at a huge 130ft (about the same as a 12 storey building) its a structure that was built contemporaneously with the similar (albeit taller) structures in Giza, and likewise reaches heights that would not be exceeded until well into the mediaeval era. These structures are so imposing that they were continuously used as fortifications by successions of people and cultures. One such mound is the great earthwork of Old Sarum (Old Salisbury) which has, through the ages, seen a Brittonic settlement, two Roman imperial encampments, a Norman castle, and even an entire mediaeval cathedral. In fact is was so important the (by this point uninhabited) hill had two MPs until the reign of Victoria, as well as being used as the geographic start point for all cartographic endeavours undertaken by the Ordnance Survey. The point is that these mounds, unlike the standing stones of part 1, retained their inherent usefulness for millennia, but nonetheless were not surpassed in their sheer scale for a very long time. One should not underestimate the ancients.
3: Hill Figures
If earth mounds are too practical for you, then you may find the practice of carving figures into hills to be of greater artistic merit. A strangely common sight when travelling through the downs of Southern England, "hill figures" are created by carving a giant drawing into the ground, usually using white rocks such as chalk for emphasis. The two paramount examples are the Uffington White Horse in Berkshire, and the phallic Cerne Abbas Giant of Dorset. Both are of unknown age, but are at least pre-Norman. The problem is that if left unkept, vegetation quickly overgrows the lineart (there are no stable arid canvases like the Nazca people of Peru had for their so-called lines), and as such the hill figures need to be "rescoured" every decade or so, a practice which the people of Uffington have amazingly kept up for potentially thousands of years. But due to their relative transience, many hill figures have undoubtedly been lost forever, and most of the ones you see today are in fact recent creations (19th or 20th century). But such is the living nature of art. I think its beautiful we can participate in such a practice without needing to understand the original intentions. One truly ancient one that was recently discovered to have existed right up until the 1600s is a figure of "Gogmagog" found on Plymouth Hoe, the supposed site of the slaying of the last British giant; but that's a story for another time.
4. Coronation Stones
While such megalithic structures may be awe-inspiring, only one rock has a pivotal role within the constitution of the United Kingdom; and that is the "Stone of Scone". Most recently rolled out just last year for King Charles, the stone is an important part of the coronation ritual for British kings, with every King of England/Britain having been coronated while sitting atop it since Edward II. But the origins of the stone go almost ridiculously further back. Before being the stone of English coronation it was the stone of Scottish coronation, having been "translated" from the old Scottish court on Dunsinane Hill (of Macbeth fame) down to Westminster by Edward Longshanks in 1296. Before that it seems to have served a very similar role for the Scottish Kings as it does today. But it is not a Scottish stone. It first arrived in Scotland from Ireland some time in the fifth century, being taken from the "Hill of Tara" in County Meath. The Irish seem to have also used the stone to crown their high king on top of, with the Hill of Tara being a great earth mound surrounded by stone circle. There still exists the rest of the stone atop Tara, our Stone of Scone being seemingly just a block off the top of a much larger monolith. The Irish claim that this stone was brought to Ireland in the 6th century BC by the prophet Jeremiah while fleeing his divine calling to prophethood. Before that it was used as the stone of coronation for the Kings of Israel, being originally the stone upon which Jacob laid his head as God showed him the vision of Jacob's Ladder. It is interesting how our mysterious and beautiful stone circles are bereft of a concrete mythology, while a simple misshapen boulder can have such a complex one. Another stone in this vein is the "King's Stone" in the (possibly) eponymous Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey. This stone was the coronation throne for the Saxon Kings, possibly being shipped over with the West Saxons from Saxony, and being used in the coronations of the first English Kings spanning from Alfred and Aethelstan up until the invasion of King Cnut of Denmark in 1016 and the turmoil leading up to 1066. Its their longevity that make stones perfect for such roles: a physical item one can touch and feel a connection to ancestors from unimaginably long ago.
Rocks are cool.
