Wales: Ancient burial sites on Anglesey

 As the map below shows, the island of Anglesey is richly endowed with prehistoric sites.

We recently visited one of the best of these: Bryn Celli Ddu, in a field a few miles west of Menai Bridge, indicated on the map by an orange pointer.

   It is a burial chamber dating from the Neolithic period, about 4000 years ago. There is a mound with an entry at the eastern end,  

from which a short distance bent double brings you to the central chamber, where there is room for half a dozen people to stand upright.

The roof has been supported by concrete beams. There is what appears to be an upright monolith, but we were told it was actually a petrified tree trunk.

  Who built Bryn Celli Ddu and the other ancient constructions on Anglesey? Nobody knows.

Philosophy: "A Priori" Reasoning

 I saw on television the other day the Russian ambassador to the United Kingdom being interviewed concerning alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine. I was treated to a classic example of "a priori" reasoning from the ambassador: that is, deduction from first principles rather than from observed data. His fundamental premiss was that "Russian soldiers do not bomb civilians, nor do they loot, rape or murder; and it therefore follows that they have not committed such crimes in Ukraine, and that any evidence to the contrary must necessarily be fake." The logic of this argument is impeccable, but  it depends for its validity entirely on the truth of the premiss. The interviewer, by contrast, challenged the ambassador by citing evidence, some of which, he said, he had seen himself; and from this he put forward an inductive argument that war crimes had probably been committed. Not surprisingly, there was no meeting of minds.

Cricket: Bradman's last great innings.

 

 Don Bradman's 1948 touring team swept all before them, winning the first two test matches comfortably, with the third match drawn after interruptions by rain. In the fourth test, played at Headingley, Leeds, between 22nd and 27th of July, the England captain, Norman Yardley, had to attempt to force a win to stand a chance of squaring the series.

   The weather was fine throughout, and the pitch excellent for batting. The first three innings produced a high-scoring game; the scorecard at the start of the final day being as follows:-

   England (first innings): 496 (Washbrook 143, Edrich 111)

   Australia (first innings): 458 (Harvey 112, Loxton 93)

   England (second innings): 365 for 8

Yardley then declared the England innings closed, setting Australia to score 404 in a day's play, and hoping that his bowlers could extract some help from a worn pitch. The Australians would have had every incentive to bat defensively, but instead they decided to go for the runs!

  Jim Laker's off-spin, which was to prove lethal to Australian batsmen on later occasions, was ineffective, and the main threat appeared to come from Denis Compton bowling chinamen (left-arm, back-of-the-hand spinners). He took the first wicket to fall, bringing in Bradman to join Arthur Morris, the left-handed opening batsman. The two of them then decided to hit Compton out of the attack: several chances went down, and Compton was taken off, finishing the match with 1 for 82 off 15 overs. Yardley tried no fewer than seven bowlers, even including a few overs from Len Hutton. It was later suggested that if Yardley had held his nerve and England held their catches, Compton might have finished with figures in the region of 6 for 180 and England would have won. As it was, Bradman and Morris added 301 for the second wicket, including 171 between lunch and tea. With victory imminent, Bradman deliberately batted out an over so that the young Neil Harvey, playing in his first test, should have the honour of hitting the winning run.

  The final scorecard read:-

Morris    c. Pollard b. Yardley         182

Hassett   c. & b. Compton                 17

Bradman       not out                        173 

Miller     lbw b. Cranston                  12

Harvey          not out                            4

Extras                                                 16                                                

Total     (for 3)                                  404    

Nothing like this could happen today, for a simple reason. When we examine the bowling figures, we discover that England contrived to bowl no fewer than 114 overs in less than a day's play! This shows that even when it must have been clear that England had no chance of winning the match, Yardley had made no attempt to thwart an Australian triumph by simply wasting time. The Australians were thus able to progress to victory without undue haste, scoring fewer than four runs an over. 

   The England bowlers must have bowled 20 overs an hour throughout the day. Why the do test teams nowadays struggle to bowl even 13 or 14 overs in an hour? That question remains unanswered, and it is clear that spectators in the past had far more activity to watch in a day's cricket.

Bradman's innings meant that his test match batting average now stood at over 100. But in the final test at the Oval, he was bowled second ball by Eric Hollies for a duck, thereby reducing his average to 99.94! Even so, this figure is unlikely ever to be surpassed: Bradman's record as the most productive batsman in the history of cricket looks secure. 

Toba: the Supervolcano

 Lake Toba is on the island of Sumatra, part of Indonesia. It is a very unusual lake: 100 km by 30 in area, with a large island in the middle, extremely deep, and with the steep slopes above containing large deposits of ash. Such a lake could not have been formed by normal geographical and geological forces, but is rather a huge hole blasted in the earth's crust. Deposits of similar volcanic ash have been found from Saudi Arabia to China, dating from about 75,000 years ago, and coinciding with massive quantities of sulphur dioxide found in ice cores in Greenland.

All of this points to an enormous volcanic explosion, with power equivalent to over 4,000 megatons, ten times the destructive power of the Tambora eruption in 1815, which resulted in a "year without a summer" and widespread famine in Europe and North America. The Toba eruption must have been by far the biggest in human history; perhaps one of the biggest ever. Perhaps 1,000 cubic kilometres of magma would have been released, in a column many miles high, with pyroclastic flows lasting two weeks or more, leaving a vast hole a kilometre deep. Any animal life within thousands of miles would have instantly choked. Enormous quantities of sulphur dioxide released into the atmosphere would have cut off the sunlight over much of the earth, leading to the death of plants and then of animals. Evidence of tiny molluscs in sea cores point to a fall in sea temperatures of 5 degrees. The eruption could thus have resulted in a thousand years of climate cooling; perhaps a mini-Ice Age. 

   The effects on the world's human population remains a matter of academic debate. At this time very few humans would have lived anywhere except in Africa and along the northern shores of the Indian Ocean. Scientists have long been aware of a genetic "bottleneck" around the time of the Toba eruption, suggesting very few people survived; but on the other hand, it has been suggested that the human population of Africa was not greatly affected by Toba. It is possible that the different so-called "races" of mankind resulted from just a few survivors remaining in small scattered communities, with consequent inbreeding. The biggest question, however, must be: could something as devastating as Toba happen again, and what would be its consequences? Is human civilisation merely something which has been able to develop in the interval between supervolcanic eruptions?   

The last man to be hanged in Shropshire: a true story

On the morning of October 8th, 1960, a horrific sight was found in a house on Westland Road, a respectable street in Shrewsbury. The owner of the house, Adeline Mary Smith, a widow aged 62, had been battered to death.

   A neighbour, George Riley, was arrested for the murder, and that evening he signed a confession at the police station. In it he stated that he had come home very drunk in the early hours of the morning and realising he had no money he decided to rob Mrs Smith. She woke, and he killed her with a blow. 

  Riley was an apprentice butcher, aged 21. He came from a respectable family, his father being a Cadet Corps instructor at Shrewsbury school; but he and his brothers had a bad reputation around the town, getting into fights and being banned from dancehalls. At his trial he attempted to withdraw the confession, but he was nonetheless convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Many local people, including the lady who first told me this story, believed George Riley was innocent. It was pointed out that, although there was a great deal of blood at the scene of the murder, none was found on Riley's person or on his clothing. Furthermore, nothing had been stolen; Mrs Smith's purse and money being found untouched in a drawer. Questions were asked in Parliament by opponents of the death penalty, but the Home Secretary, R. A. Butler, said that he was "satisfied that there was no miscarriage of justice and no need for an inquiry". But if Riley was innocent, why did he confess? Was he coerced into it by the police, who might have been prejudiced against him by his violent reputation? Or could he have been trying to shield someone; perhaps his brothers? 

  George Riley was hanged in Shrewsbury prison at 8 a.m. on February 9th 1961. There was a noisy demonstration by his supporters outside the prison. The case has remained controversial in Shropshire ever since.

   Shrewsbury prison today is a museum. The bust above the gateway is that of John Howard, the great prison reformer. The prison was built in 1793, after Howard's campaigns had made people aware of the squalid conditions and gross corruption existing in the older prisons. 

 

"They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:

 The whistles blow forlorn,

 And trains all night groan on the rail

 To men that die at morn."

 

(A. E. Housman: "A Shropshire Lad")

Halley's Comet 1066

 April 24th 1066, and Halley's Comet was visible in England, as recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry. It was seen as an omen of great portent. King Harold was quite right to be alarmed!

Theology/ Poetry: Dante's Limbo

 In Canto IV of the "Inferno", Dante and his guide the Roman poet Virgil have been taken across the River Acheron by Charon the ferryman and have enterd the first circle of Hell, known as "Limbo". Dante is surprised to find there no tormenting demons and only sighs of disappointment rather than screams of agony and despair. Virgil explains the nature of this particular circle. Only baptised Christians, Dante is told, could enter Paradise, and this obviously excludes all those born before the time of Christ (including, of course, Virgil himself), or those living in very remote parts of the world. To inflict torment on such people, when they have themselves lived virtuous lives, would be unjust, so they are spending eternity here. They sigh because they know that Paradise is forever beyond their reach.

   To place this idea in context, the "12th century renaissance" had occurred a couple of generations before Dante's time, when educated Europeans had rediscovered the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, via translations from the Arabic in Moslem-ruled Spain, and had been enthralled by what they read. Attempts were made by Thomas Aquinas and others to reconcile Aristotle with Christianity. The poets of ancient Greece and Rome were also read and admired. It seemed impossible to someone like Dante that such great minds should suffer eternal torment for not being Christians when that was obviously an impossibility.

   Therefore, Dante creates for us in Limbo a kind of Elysian Fields, where he finds a vast array of figures from classical antiquity, ranging from Plato, Aristotle and Euclid, through Cicero and Julius Caesar to the Homer and the heroes on both sides of the Trojan War. He never appears to wonder whether such famous men could be considered virtuous in their own lives; he merely assumes it! 

   Interestingly enough, three famous Moslems are included: Avicenna and Averroes, philosophers from Spain, and Saladin. Such men obviously did have the opportunity of choosing Christianity, but The first two were responsible for introducing Aristotle's ideas to western Europe, whereas Saladin was admired for his chivalrous conduct in his wars against the crusaders. It is all rather illogical, but humane.

 

A plan of Hell. Limbo is the first circle at the top.

  The great poets and philosophers in Limbo.