The Evolving Treasure of Oak Island

 

(courtesy of Bing Image Creator)

This is basically a sequel to last week's post, about the way certain "fringe" topics evolve and adapt to changing times. There's another link to the previous post too, in the form of Britain's most fortean free-to-air TV channel, Blaze. This is home to Ancient Aliens, which prompted last week's musings, and The Curse of Oak Island, which set me thinking about this one (both shows originated on America's History channel, then came over to the UK's subscription-only Sky History, before ending up on Blaze where cheapskates like myself can enjoy them).

Wikipedia has a fairly substantial entry on the Oak Island mystery, which begins as follows:

The Oak Island mystery is a series of stories of buried treasure and unexplained objects found on or near Oak Island in Nova Scotia. Since the 18th century, attempts have been made to find treasure and artifacts. Theories about artifacts present on the island range from pirate treasure to Shakespearean manuscripts to the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant.

As cool as that sounds, the legend of Oak Island isn't widely known, even in Canada (my cousin in Montreal said she hadn't heard of it until I asked her yesterday). Probably most people who have heard of it did so through the TV show, which is now in its 11th season. In contrast to Ancient Aliens - which is hugely entertaining, but ultimately mostly nonsense - The Curse of Oak Island is a really great show. I can see why some viewers are cynical about it (because it's a TV show first, and a serious archaeological project second) but this really doesn't bother me. I find it fascinating to watch them digging up the island's history even if, treasure-wise, it's mostly all dead ends. On top of that I really like all the participants, who strike me as much nicer people than the cast of most TV shows (several of them remind me of the sort of people I've worked with over the years).

Browsing through various online forums, I get the impression some viewers think the Oak Island "treasure legend" was artificially created for the series, simply because the people behind it own the island and wanted a premise for a reality show. But I was aware of the Oak Island mystery long before the TV series hit the airwaves in 2014. I first encountered it in the 1990s, either in a talk that Lionel Fanthorpe gave at one of the Fortean Times Unconventions, and/or his short-lived but fondly remembered Fortean TV series. It also features in a book I've got by Lionel and his wife, Mysteries and Secrets of the Templars (2005), as well as another book I read around the same time. That was when my then-work colleague (and subsequent co-author on Random Encounters on the London Tourist Trail) Paul Jackson lent me his copy of The Secret Treasure of Oak Island by D'Arcy O'Connor.

So I can vouch for the fact that most of the speculative theories (as well as historical snippets, such as the fact that future US president F D Roosevelt took part in an Oak Island dig in 1909) that crop up in The Curse of Oak Island were around long before the show started. Of course, there's nothing intrinsically fortean about a legend of buried treasure, but what makes Oak Island so fascinating is the sheer number of theories associated with it. While none of these are really far-fetched - nothing paranormal or involving aliens or other dimensions, I mean - several of them are sufficiently fringy to make them interesting. To paraphrase a list from the Fanthorpe book, here are some of the explanations put forward to explain Oak Island's elusive treasure vault:

• Constructed by the British during the American war of independence to protect their army's payroll;
• Built by Sir Francis Drake and his men to hide gold they'd seized from the Spanish;
• Dug by William Kidd or some other pirate in the 17th century;
• Designed to house precious manuscripts, possibly ones proving the true authorship of the plays commonly attributed to Shakespeare;
• Constructed by ancient Celtic or Norse sea rovers as a burial place for a great chief;
• Built by the Knights Templar to protect the secret treasures they'd uncovered beneath Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

What jumps out is that some of these theories are more exciting than others. To be specific, the first three (which personally I'd class as boring) could comfortably fit inside the scope of accepted history, while the last three (all of which I find a lot more interesting) are way outside it. Not surprisingly, the TV show gives more prominence to these "exciting" theories - as do the Fanthorpes in their book, where they firmly align with the Templar hypothesis.

The thing that worries me slightly (and the main point I wanted to make in this post) is that the exciting theories came into existence after the boring ones. The earliest speculations and "legends" were solely about pirate treasure (yawn), with no Templars, Celts or lost manuscripts in sight. As the Wikipedia article says:

According to the earliest theory, the pit held a pirate treasure buried by Captain Kidd; Kidd and Henry Avery reportedly took treasure together, and Oak Island was their community bank. Another pirate theory involved Edward Teach (Blackbeard), who said that he buried his treasure "where none but Satan and myself can find it".

So the rational part of my brain tells me that, if there's any truth at all behind the Oak Island treasure, it was probably nothing more dramatic than a pirate hoard. On the other hand, my mystery-loving side insists it could have been the Templars' secret hiding-place for the Holy Grail, or the Ark of the Covenant, or something equally spectacular!

Half-way through writing this post, I realized it could do with a picture of the two books I mentioned. The only problem was that one of them belongs to Paul Jackson, who lives 60 miles away. But thanks to the miracles of modern technology, he'd taken a photo of it and I'd saved it on my computer within 3 minutes of me asking him for it! So here's Paul's copy of The Secret Treasure of Oak Island, alongside my copy of Mysteries and Secrets of the Templars:

The Changing History (and Geography) of Lemuria

A peculiarity of certain fortean topics is the way the details develop and change over time. To pick an example, there's the legend (which, as we'll see, didn't even start out as a legend) of Lemuria. As lost continents go, it's far less well known to the general public than Atlantis, but just as intriguing to those in the know. It's been featured in at least a couple of Ancient Aliens episodes, in "They Came from the Pleiades" (2020) and "The Mystery of Mount Shasta" (2021).

In the first of these, we're informed that Lemuria was a now-sunken continent located in the Pacific, which Hawaiian folklore links to benevolent visitors from the Pleiades star cluster. In the later episode, we're told that survivors from Lemuria may still be living inside Mount Shasta - one of California's best known UFO hotspots. As with most things on the show, these ideas are wonderfully entertaining, and surprisingly credible-sounding if you restrict your knowledge of the subject to what you're being told by Tsoukalos, Pope, Childress et al. But as soon as you do a little independent research, things get a lot murkier (the Pleiades, for example, didn't even exist until the Earth was billions of years old and swarming with Cretaceous-era dinosaurs - so hardly a likely home for ancient astronauts).

My first encounter with Lemuria was probably in the Marvel Comics adaptation of Lin Carter's Thongor stories, though I've subsequently read the original 1965 Wizard of Lemuria novel, pictured above. A much more controversial novel was Richard Shaver's I Remember Lemuria (1945), which purported to be based on fact rather than fiction. My copy (edited by Ancient Aliens regular David Hatcher Childress under the title Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth) is also pictured above, together with a novel I've previously mentioned on this blog, Ron Goulart's Hello Lemuria Hello (1979). Also featured in the picture is the album Lemuria (2004) by symphonic metal band Therion.

In the lyrics of that album's title song, the name Lemuria is used interchangeably with Mu - as indeed it was on Ancient Aliens. But originally Mu and Lemuria were completely separate, and disentangling them involves going quite a way back into history. An excellent source in this context is the final book pictured above, Lost Continents (1954) by L Sprague de Camp. Best known as a fiction author, he turns his hand here to non-fiction - and does his background research far more conscientiously than Ancient Aliens ever bothers to.

The surprising fact, as I mentioned at the start, is that Lemuria didn't start out as a legend, whether in Hawaii, California or anywhere else. It began as a short-lived scientific hypothesis, developed in the latter half of the 19th century, to explain similarities between Mesozoic fossils found on the Indian subcontinent and in south-east Africa. The idea was that there used to be a land-bridge joining these two regions, stretching right across the Indian Ocean. Now mostly sunken, all that remained would have been the island of Madagascar - famous for its lemurs, from which the land-bridge got the name Lemuria.

You'll notice a couple of significant features here - first, that we're talking about a time millions of years before humans existed, and secondly that we're nowhere near the Pacific Ocean. What's more, we don't even need this hypothesis any more, because we know that, back in Mesozoic times, India was attached to southern Africa instead of being in its current position.

But instead of going away, the idea of Lemuria adapted and evolved. And it did so in a way that was peculiar to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In those days, the notion that sensitive individuals could pick up valid information by psychic means - by going into a trance and "channelling" messages from spirit entities - was well accepted in certain quarters. And that's how a lot of the key facts about Lemuria came down to us.

One strand to the Lemurian story lies within the realm of Theosophy, whose complex and confusing teachings were largely derived through psychic means. In this context, here's a passage from de Camp's book that clearly foreshadows Ancient Aliens:

Beings from Venus, which had already developed a high civilization ... guided faltering humankind to the point where the Lemurians became capable of individual immortality and reincarnation.

Most Theosophists were content to leave Lemuria in its original setting of the Indian Ocean, but several American writers of the time endeavoured to move it to the more familiar (to them) locale of the Pacific Ocean. An important development in this context came in the form of a book, A Dweller on Two Planets (1894). A cynic might describe this as a work of fiction, but it's actually presented as the channelled autobiography of a spirit entity called Phylos the Tibetan. Here, too, the second planet in question is Venus, but Lemuria is now indisputably located in the Pacific - and the connection with California's Mount Shasta is also made for the first time.

The final step towards the modern "legend" of Lemuria came in the 1920s and 30s, with a series of books by James Churchward concerning a sunken continent called "Mu", which he proposed as a counterpart of Atlantis in the Pacific. Churchward's arguments were based (albeit shakily) on the interpretation of purely physical evidence, in contrast to the earlier mediumistic channellings relating to Lemuria - but the distinction didn't last long. The legend soon crystallized into the form most often encountered today - that Mu and Lemuria are alternative names for a single lost continent, situated in the Pacific Ocean and having strong links both with Mount Shasta in California and with benevolent aliens from outer space.

Since I love showing off my book collection, here are a couple of classics to round the post off - James Churchward's The Children of Mu (1931) and Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882):

 

The Saint and the Spy Revisited

(courtesy of Bing Image Creator)

As I typed out that headline, it occurred to me that some readers might expect something about Roger Moore - so for their benefit, I'll insert a suitable photo from my collection to the bottom of this post. But what I really want to talk about is the legend-laden Dorset village of Whitchurch Canonicorum, which I wrote about in A Saint, a Spy and the Holy Grail back in 2014. The Holy Grail doesn't feature in this revisit, but both the Saint and the Spy do - thanks to some intriguing new information supplied by a reader of that earlier post.

When I came back to this blog after its long hiatus, I found the following comment awaiting moderation (fortunately only since January 2023 - a few other comments had been sitting in limbo for much longer than that!):

Bonjour, my name is Bruno Mevel. I used to live in Bridport and was involved in a play in Whitchurch years ago. The play was about the different possibilities as to who was Saint Wite. That play was written by a certain Christopher Dilke, journalist and author. He was also Georgi Markov's father-in-law... the reason why he is buried in Whitchurch. Don't know if this will reach you, if it does and you want some more info here is my mail address...

I didn't actually publish that comment, as I didn't want to give Bruno's email to all the world's spambots, but I did contact him and he very kindly sent me quite a lot of info. But before I get into it, here's a quick reminder of our two protagonists:

• Saint Wite, also known as Saint Candida (from a Latin word meaning "white"), who probably lived in the early middle ages but about whom nothing is really known (though there are several legends and speculative theories). Her remains are interred inside the church of St Candida at Whitchurch Canonicorum - one of only two genuine church shrines to survive the Protestant reformation in England.
   
  
• Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who worked for the BBC. He wasn't actually a spy, but he was accused of spreading anti-communist propaganda by his former compatriots. One morning in 1978, while he was waiting at a London bus stop on his way to work, some still-unknown assailant shot him in the leg with a sugar-coated ricin pellet fired from a rolled up umbrella (you can't do this with any old umbrella, by the way - you need a specially modified one from the Bulgarian equivalent of Q branch). Markov died a few days later, and he's buried in the churchyard of Whitchurch Canonicorum, with a gravestone inscribed in both English and Cyrillic.

In my earlier post, I said I couldn't find out how Markov came to be buried in a Dorset village churchyard - so that's one thing Bruno has cleared up, with the revelation that Markov was married to someone from that area. As well as expanding on this point, the additional information he sent also revealed a rather roundabout connection between Markov and St Wite herself. Here's a summary of the whole story.

In his comment above, Bruno mentioned that Georgi Markov's father-in-law was an author named Christopher Dilke (1913–87). In his later years Dilke moved to Whitchurch Canonicorum, where he wrote a play called Legends of St Wite for the church's 900th anniversary in July 1980 (I found this mention of it on the church's own website). Bruno happened to share mutual friends with the Dilke family, and Christopher Dilke asked him to perform one of the roles in the play. The plot involved a new Saxon bishop placed in charge of Whitchurch trying to ascertain just who St Wite was. In the process, he asks various people to give their opinions on the matter. Bruno (who is French) played the role of a Breton nobleman, presenting the Breton version of the St Wite legend.

The play was only performed once, inside the church itself. As much as anything, Bruno remembers the costumes they made for themselves, which were copied from the Bayeux tapestry (if you subtract 900 from 1980 and remember your history, you'll see this gets the period pretty much spot-on). Bruno also kept hold of the poster from the event, which was designed by a local artist named Albert Duplock. Here it is:

 Switching over to the Markov story, there's a connection with Christopher Dilke there too, because Markov married Dilke's daughter Annabel in 1975. After Markov's murder three years later, Annabel's mother claimed the Soviet KGB must have supplied the ricin that was used. This was the height of the Cold War, remember, when East-West espionage and intrigue was at its most intense. During Markov's funeral in St Candida's churchyard, the mourners - who included several other Bulgarian defectors - were protected by armed Special Branch officers who mingled discreetly with them.

As for the Roger Moore connection I mentioned - well, there isn't one really, except with my "The Saint and the Spy" title. Moore is best known, of course, for playing the most famous fictional spy of all, James Bond, in the 1970s and 80s, but those of us of a certain age also fondly remember him in the TV adaptation of The Saint, by Leslie Charteris, in the 1960s. In that series, Moore's character drove a distinctive white Volvo P1800 coupe, which I happened to see at the Bristol Classic Car Show in 2017. Here's my photo of it:

 In case you can't decipher the label on the windscreen, here's what it amounts to: This is the original Roger Moore "ST 1" 1962 TV Saint car. It was used in the first series and made its debut in the first episode [...] The registration "ST 1" was only used for filming - actual reg is 71 DXC.

Superheroes, Funny Animals and Sequential Art (circa 1600)

Montacute House near Yeovil in Somerset was built around 1600, at the height of the English Renaissance (Shakespeare’s Hamlet dates from around the same time). While the renaissance influence can be seen in the style and grandeur of the architecture, many of the sculptures adorning the interior and exterior of the house retain a mediaeval quaintness that is distinctly cartoony in places. I wrote about some of these a few years ago on the Montacute House blog, but since that blog seems to have disappeared from the internet I thought I’d dig out the relevant info and pictures and repost them here.

The Skimmington Frieze

This large plaster frieze (pictured at the top of this post) is one of the most distinctive features of the Great Hall at Montacute House. At first glance it looks like a single panel, but actually it’s an early example of “sequential art”, telling an amusing rustic story in two scenes. In the left half, you can see a wife hitting her hapless husband over the head with a shoe (she must have brought this along specially for the purpose, since she already has shoes on both feet!). It seems she caught him drunk in charge of the baby – which he’s still holding onto, despite all those kegs of beer he’s been working his way through. The scene is witnessed by the man’s neighbour, who proceeds to rat on him to the rest of the village. The second scene, on the right, shows the unfortunate husband being paraded through the streets in a form of ritual humiliation known as a Skimmington ride (for the background to this obscure bit of West Country folklore, see the Dark Dorset website).

Two Left Hands

The picture above shows another plaster carving at Montacute House, this one an overmantel in one of the bedrooms. Like the Skimmington Frieze, this dates from the time the house was built – but it shows a more “mainstream” subject in the form of a Biblical scene (the praying figure is meant to be King David). Nevertheless, it’s still very naïve in its execution. The cherub on the left clearly has two right hands, while the one on the right (though it’s not quite as obvious) has two left hands! As Kid Robson has pointed out (here and here and here), the “two left hands” syndrome is one that occasionally afflicted Marvel Comics artist Jack Kirby.

Hunky Punks

Moving to the exterior of Montacute House, and looking up at the parapet running around the roof, you can see a lot of strange little animals sitting on it (a couple of examples can be seen in the following photograph). The technical term for these is “hunky punks”, which according to Wikipedia is a local dialect word for a grotesque stone carving. Hunky punks are most often seen on churches, but Montacute has them as well. Montacute’s hunky punks take the form of rather cute-looking animals – either chimeras (combinations of different animals) or completely imaginary species. Presumably they were the 17th century equivalent of funny cartoon animals!

The Nine Worthies

High up on the East Front of Montacute House, you can see the statues of nine figures in armour (see images below). These represent the Nine Worthies – great military leaders of history and legend, including three from classical Greece and Rome (Hector, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar), three from Hebrew tradition (Joshua, King David and Judas Maccabeus) and three from European Christendom (King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon). The Nine Worthies were popular throughout Europe (see their Wikipedia article) and can be thought of as a kind of crusading super-team – a bit like a mediaeval version of the Avengers!

Giants and Saints in the Scottish Isles

Here is the third and last of my “what I did on my summer holiday” posts for this year! Probably the biggest highlight of the Scotland trip was a one-day Three Isles Tour of Mull, Iona and Staffa, involving no fewer than five boat trips and two bus journeys (the latter complete with highly entertaining commentary from the driver). There is nothing particularly fortean about the big island of Mull – though it’s very picturesque – but both Iona and Staffa have interesting legends associated with them. I’ll start with Staffa (pictured above), which is the more visually spectacular of the two.

Staffa is a small uninhabited island, and a relatively new one in comparison to its neighbours. Geologically, most of the Scottish “highlands and islands” date from the Caledonian orogeny 400+ million years ago. However, Staffa popped up only about 60 million years ago, when the Atlantic Ocean began to form. As North America pulled away from the British Isles, molten magma was forced up through the rent, and where it reached the surface it cooled to form basalt extrusions. Staffa is one of these – the Giant’s Causeway on the north coast of Ireland is another. When basalt solidifies from a molten state, it has a distinctive way of forming into interlocking hexagonal columns. This is a perfectly natural process, but the result is so artificial-looking that it has given rise to a variety of myths and legends.

According to one tradition, Staffa and the Giant’s Causeway are the two ends of an 80-mile causeway that used to link Ireland and Scotland. It was supposedly built by the Irish giant Finn Mac Cool (quite a well-known figure in Irish mythology – he appears in Finnegans Wake for example). After building the causeway, Finn was involved in a battle with a Scottish giant named Benandonner. The Irish and Scottish versions of the legend differ as to which of the two giants won, but they both conclude with the destruction of all but the two ends of the causeway.

In the 18th century, the Scottish poet James Macpherson created a Scoticized version of Finn Mac Cool called “Fingal”, and the largest of Staffa’s caves (the one on the right in the picture at the top of this post) soon became known as Fingal’s Cave. Prior to this point, the idea of visiting a remote location simply because it was scenic or visually spectacular was virtually unknown. However, with the advent of steamships and railways in the 19th century, Staffa – and Fingal’s Cave in particular – soon became a must-see tourist attraction for literary and artistic types. In 1830 Mendelssohn wrote a Fingal’s Cave overture, in 1832 J. M. W. Turner painted a picture of it, and in 1864 Jules Verne mentioned it in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, when the narrator encounters a similar structure in Iceland: “I had, of course, heard of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland and of Fingal’s Cave in Staffa, but never before had I beheld the sight of a basalt substructure.”

Here are my close-up pictures of the basalt columns (left) and Fingal’s Cave (right):

Over the years, legends have attached themselves to Staffa for the simple reason that it’s such an extraordinary sight. In contrast, the nearby island of Iona is a fairly ordinary-looking place (at least, the Mull-facing coast that we had time to explore is) ... but it has an extraordinary history. As I mentioned in last week’s post about Loch Ness, St Columba was the 6th century Irish monk who first brought Christianity to Scotland. Iona is the place that he set up the first Scottish monastery, in 563 AD. As far as I can tell, this much is real history – although many of the details of Columba’s life (including his encounter with the Loch Ness monster) are likely to be legendary accretions.

Columba’s monastery, Iona Abbey, became an important centre of “Celtic Christianity” during the Middle Ages. Sadly it fell into ruin after the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century – and then (almost as sadly, in my opinion) the ruined buildings were completely rebuilt in the early 20th century. This makes it almost impossible to get a feel for the mediaeval Abbey today. Ironically, one of the oldest objects still standing doesn’t look very old at all (either in its design or its state of preservation). This is St Martin’s Cross, pictured on the left below, which dates from the 9th century ... 1200 years ago! If you look closely you can see the decoration includes a number of snakes, which seem strangely un-Christian symbols (and un-Irish ones, for that matter).

More obviously old-looking is the statue of St Columba, in the right-hand image below. I don’t mean the wire mesh statue (which is very modern), but the mediaeval stone one – of which only the highly weathered feet remain!

The Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition

The Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition in Drumnadrochit was much better than I’d expected it to be. As the most hyped-up cryptozoological tourist attraction in Britain, I’d assumed the visitor centre would dutifully tell people what they wanted to hear, with dumbed-down science and lots of far-fetched speculation. But it’s nothing like that at all. It features a series of sober and intelligent audio-visual presentations, together with museum displays of research equipment, newspaper cuttings and relics recovered from various wrecks. As for dumbing down – visitors (even the ten-year-old ones) are expected to take words like “bathymetry”, “pelagic”, “thermocline” and “refraction” in their stride.

In a way the Loch Ness Centre is another example of the Scottish skepticism I was talking about last week. This is particularly noticeable in the case of the best-known theory of the Loch Ness Monster, that it is a long-necked marine reptile such as a plesiosaur which has somehow managed to survive since Jurassic times. Admittedly the Loch Ness Centre features this image in their logo (which you can see in the photo above), and in innumerable toys and other souvenirs for sale in the gift shop. But inside the exhibition they stamp on this theory right at the very start. Any creature that managed to emerge unscathed from the Mesozoic would have been definitively killed off during the ice age, when the whole of Scotland was covered by a kilometre-thick block of ice for tens of thousands of years. Anything in the loch today that is larger than a single-celled micro-organism must have arrived after the ice melted. And why plesiosaurs anyway? They were pushed out of their ecological niche by whales and dolphins, which are found in plentiful numbers in the waters around Scotland.

The seemingly deep-rooted idea that a long-necked monster inhabits Loch Ness only dates from about a hundred years ago. Prior to that, mysterious sightings in the loch always referred to a “huge fish” or a “strange fish”. The word “monster”, prior to the early 20th century, only cropped up in the context of St Columba – the 6th century monk who brought Christianity to Scotland from Ireland. According to legend, Columba “drove away a water monster” in the River Ness near Inverness. It’s important to note, however, that this is a legend relating to a specific event – a miracle associated with a saint – and not recurring monster sightings by ordinary people.

A later development in Scottish folklore were the “water-horses” that were said to inhabit various lochs, including Loch Ness. Called kelpies, these creatures would drag unsuspecting travellers into the water and devour them. A pair of kelpies are the subject of a huge modern sculpture near Falkirk, about a hundred miles south of Loch Ness. At 30 metres (100 feet) in height, this is currently the largest statue in Britain. I only glimpsed it a few times from the M9 motorway, but my cousin, who stayed in Scotland longer than I did, sent me the following photo that she took after I left (she sent it via Facebook, which has the annoying habit of converting good quality, high resolution pictures into small, low resolution ones):

The general conclusion at the Loch Ness centre – again essentially a skeptical one – is that historical accounts of “water horses” and “huge fish” most likely refer to sightings of Atlantic sturgeon. These can grow to several metres in length, and do indeed have a vaguely horse-shaped head. The biggest problem with any large animal living in the Loch is the lack of sufficient food, but that doesn’t apply to sturgeon which are essentially sea creatures that would only be occasional visitors to the loch. While sturgeon have been spotted in and around Scotland in past centuries, they are virtually unknown there now (except for the definitely-not-monstrous First Minister, of course).

As for modern sightings of long-necked or serpentine creatures – most, if not all, of these can be explained as misidentifications (together with a few deliberate hoaxes). The visitor centre gives plenty of examples of floating logs, swimming deer, waterbirds and boat wakes all looking like convincing Loch Ness Monsters. I only spent a few minutes looking at the Loch, but even in that time I took the two pictures below which give an idea how misidentifications might arise. The one on the left contains a few dark specks which, if you zoom in on them, you can see are birds in flight. A couple of them have distinctly arc-like shapes which could be mistaken for “monster humps” under different viewing conditions. The second picture shows a boat trailing a wake, with another long wave that has been churned up by the boat in the foreground. Again, under different conditions (e.g. in foggier weather) the latter could be mistaken for a long, serpentine creature just below the surface.

The House of the Screaming Skull

“The Screaming Skull” is the title of a Hollywood movie from 1958, a short story first published in 1908, and a rather dubious legend that can be traced back to Victorian times. The short story was set in Cornwall and the film somewhere in the United States, but the legend comes from Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset. That’s only about six miles from where I live, but it isn’t open to the public, and it’s quite a distance from the main road, so I’d never actually seen it till last week. I felt rather awkward gawping at what is obviously just a private house (even if it’s a famously haunted one), so I carefully kept to the public footpath and managed to grab the appropriately cryptic view shown above.

The legend of Bettiscombe’s screaming skull is one of Dorset’s best known ghost stories. In their book Dark Dorset, Robert Newland and Mark North devote no less than 17 pages to it. As is often the case, the legend seems to have evolved with each telling. The first reference to an old skull being kept at the manor house dates from 1847, but it wasn’t described as “screaming”, and it wasn’t associated with a ghost. Quite the opposite, in fact – “While this skull is kept here no ghost will ever infest Bettiscombe House”.

In 1872, the lawyer and amateur folklorist John Udal repeated the story of a skull being kept in the house out of superstition, and added that “the legend runs that it belonged to a faithful black servant of an early possessor of the property”. Just over a decade later, in 1883, the daughter of a British Museum researcher accompanied her father to the house, and picked up a much more detailed version of the story. The servant “had declared before his death that his spirit would not rest unless his body was taken to his native land and buried there”. Ignoring the warning, they buried him in the local churchyard – “then the haunting began; fearful screams proceeded from the grave”. The body was dug up and the skull brought into the house, but “the reputation of the screaming skull of Bettiscombe House remains unimpaired”. This was the first written reference to “screaming” in connection with the skull.

Around 1900, John Udal was posted to the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean. By chance, he came across a plantation that had been founded by “John Pinney, son of Azariah Pinney, formerly of Bettiscombe”. Udal also learned that one of the early plantation workers had been given the slave-name Bettiscombe – and immediately leapt to the conclusion that this was the “black servant” associated with the legend of the screaming skull. Most modern accounts of the Bettiscombe legend take this association for granted, without mentioning the shaky foundations on which it is based (except Wikipedia, of course, which gleefully tells us that “In 1963 a professor of human and comparative anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons stated that the skull was not that of a black man but that of a European female aged between twenty-five and thirty”).

The reason I decided to go and look at Bettiscombe Manor was that I recently came across the movie version of The Screaming Skull on a public domain movie site (I’d already read the short story a few years ago). It’s often said that the film is based on the story, and the story is based on the legend … but beyond the phrase “screaming skull” there’s really no similarity between the three versions. The short story (written by F. Marion Crawford, and originally published in two parts in Collier’s Magazine in 1908) is really quite clever, although it’s narrated in an old-fashioned way. In contrast the movie comes across as atrociously bad, but that’s largely due to its low budget and amateurish direction. If you can get all the way to the end without falling asleep, the underlying storyline is actually quite good.

Partly as an excuse to show a couple of downmarket paperback covers (which as regular readers know, I can never resist), here are two items of related trivia:

• The part of Dorset in which Bettiscombe is situated is called Marshwood Vale (in fact I parked the car in the village of Marshwood itself). This boasts a very tenuous connection with H. P. Lovecraft, courtesy of John Brunner’s 1992 short story “Concerning the Forthcoming Inexpensive Paperback Translation of the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred” – in which he transposes two of Lovecraft’s infamous New England towns to the Dorset countryside. Brunner’s version has “the small town of Arkham overlooking Marshwood Vale in the county of Dorset, England”, while Dunwich is “a parish whose boundaries adjoin those of Arkham”. The story is reprinted in Robert M. Price’s Necronomicon anthology pictured below.
• The anthology in which I read F. Marion Crawford’s “The Screaming Skull” was The 4th Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories, also pictured below. The longest story in the book is James Blish’s werewolf-themed novella “There Shall Be No Darkness”, originally written in 1950. Much later, in 1974, this story was adapted as The Beast Must Die by Amicus Productions – often seen as an inferior competitor to Hammer Films. This is one of their best films, though – pretty faithful to Blish’s original plotline, and with plenty of added seventies grooviness.

A Weird Offer!

As mentioned last week, Weird Wessex: A Tourist Guide to 100 Strange and Unusual Sights by Paul Jackson and me (*) has just been published by the CFZ Publishing Group. Lavishly illustrated with over 200 full-colour photographs, the book takes you on a journey across the counties of Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Berkshire in search of some of the weirder and sometimes little known sights waiting to be discovered.

For a limited time, you can order your copy of Weird Wessex direct from the publisher for just £10 – a massive discount of 18% on the recommended retail price of £12.50. What’s more, for customers in the UK postage is absolutely free, and the first 16 copies sold will include a bookplate signed by both Paul and me (*).

So what are you waiting for? It’s the perfect opportunity to add to your “Weird” collection (mine is pictured above). For full details, click here to visit the CFZ Publishing website.

You should also be able to get Weird Wessex (ISBN 978-1-909488-35-9) from any other book retailer, such as Amazon UK, or as a Kindle ebook.

(*) Until a week ago I would never have written “by Paul and me”, but “by Paul and myself” – which sounds more elegant, more polite and more grammatical to my ears. But when I used that phrase on Facebook, someone pointed out to me that “myself” is a reflexive pronoun. That means it can only ever be used in a sentence where the subject is “I”. You can say “I wrote the book myself” but you can’t say “The book is by myself”. You have to say “The book is by me”. Putting another person in the mix doesn’t change things – so “The book is by Paul and myself” is equally wrong. I will probably forget this almost immediately, but at least I got it right in this post.

Weird Wessex

The latest book to feature my name on the cover is a collaboration with Paul Jackson of the
Random Encounters with the Unusual blog. It’s called Weird Wessex: A Tourist Guide to 100 Strange and Unusual Sights. Here is the blurb:

At its height, the Saxon kingdom of Wessex sprawled across Southern England, encompassing Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset, Somerset and parts of Devon and Berkshire. Even before the Saxons arrived the area had a reputation as a weird place, with Stonehenge and its Druids, Glastonbury and the Holy Grail, the bizarre chalk figure of the Cerne Giant and the reputed location of King Arthur’s Camelot. In more recent times the tradition of weirdness has continued, with flying saucers sighted over Warminster, intricate Crop Circles popping up around Alton Barnes and hordes of spaced-out hippies converging on the mystical hubs of Glastonbury and Totnes.

This book is a tourist guide with a difference. It describes 100 of the weirdest sights in Wessex, ranging from world-famous places like Glastonbury and Stonehenge to hidden oddities that may even surprise the locals. Divided into ten thematic chapters, it is lavishly illustrated with over 200 full-colour photographs.

The ten chapters, each featuring ten sites, are arranged thematically as follows:

• Weird Archaeology
• Weird Buildings
• Weird Constructions
• Weird History
• Weird Landscape
• Weird Legends
• Weird Religion
• Weird Science
• Weird Secrets
• Weird Tales

In terms of content, the book is pretty close to a 50:50 collaboration. Paul lives towards the eastern end of the area, on the border of Wiltshire and Hampshire, while I live further west near the Somerset-Dorset border. So it was quite easy to divide the legwork between the two of us!

The book is published by Jon Downes at CFZ Publishing, under the Fortean Words imprint (although most of the sites are “quirky” rather than out-and-out Fortean). The book is in full colour, 200 pages long, with an average of one photograph per page. I’m amazed, and very pleased, that Jon has managed to keep the cover price down to £12.50 (it would have been more like £18 if we’d used CreateSpace).

There are several ways you can get hold of your copy of Weird Wessex:

• You can buy it from Amazon UK (or any other Amazon site). The book is print-on-demand, so don’t worry if Amazon says “out of stock”. As soon as you order it, the printer will run a copy off for you.
• You should also be able to order the paperback through any other book retailer – the ISBN is 978-1-909488-35-9.
• The book is available in a Kindle edition, though unfortunately not in any other ebook format.
• In the near future (probably about a week from now) the CFZ website will be running a special offer on Weird Wessex. If you order the book direct from the publisher it will cost just £10 plus p&p, and include a bookplate signed by both authors (wow!)
• People in the local area who cross paths with either of the authors can order a copy direct from us. We will be happy to sign it for you, and may even offer a discount (depending how generous we’re feeling).

Dragon Slayers

I didn’t specifically set out to take pictures of dragon slayers last Wednesday, but by the end of the day I realized I had five of them. Together with another four photos I already had, I decided that was enough for a blog post!

There are plenty of dragon-slaying legends, many of them symbolizing the triumph of good over evil. In this sense the ultimate dragon-slayer must be St Michael – the Biblical archangel who defeats “the great dragon, the primeval Serpent, known as the devil or Satan” (Revelation 12:9). Three versions of this story are depicted above. The one in the middle is a picture I took in the Louvre in Paris two years ago, which featured previously in my post Monsters, Mystery and a Monkey. It’s an early work by Raphael, dating from around 1504.

The other two pictures I took in the National Gallery in London last week. The one on the left is by another Italian painter, Piero della Francesca, and dates from 1469. It’s less dramatic than Raphael’s version, and the dragon looks... well, unimpressive to say the least. The picture on the right was painted the previous year, 1468, by the Spanish artist Bartolomé Bermejo. His dragon is the weirdest-looking of the three – the caption describes it as “a monstrous creature, part-reptile, part-bat”.

The other saintly dragon slayer that everyone has heard of is St George (who is the patron saint of England, despite having no historical or legendary connection with the country). The story of George and the Dragon is essentially a Christianized version of the archetypal dragon-slaying legend (cf. my earlier post on Dragons and Dinosaurs), in which a community regularly appeases their local dragon by feeding it young female virgins. Then they suddenly realize the next in line is the King’s daughter, so it’s time to find themselves a dragon-slayer.

Here are three pictorial versions of St George and the Dragon, all by Italian artists:

The one at top left is by Raphael again – it’s a companion piece to his picture of St Michael and hangs next to it in the Louvre. To its right is a later version (circa 1555) by Tintoretto, which I saw in the National Gallery last week. Interestingly this reverses Raphael’s perspective – it has the fleeing princess in the foreground while St George, on horseback, fights the dragon in the background. I think Tintoretto’s version is much more dramatic – a kind of High Renaissance version of a “damsel in distress” pulp magazine cover!

The third picture is also in the National Gallery. It’s by Uccello, dating from around 1470, and has a more cartoony look than the other pictures. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is the strange (and rather Fortean-looking) atmospheric phenomenon looming in the background behind St George.

A less well known dragon-slaying legend is that of Apollo and Python. The latter was a giant serpent-like dragon in Greek mythology (after which the snake genus was named), which according to legend was slain by the god Apollo. I have to admit I’d never heard of this legend until I saw Turner’s painting of it in the Tate Gallery last week (I’ve been rude about Turner in the past, but he’s started to grow on me since I saw the film Mr Turner).

At first sight Turner’s “dragon” looks very snake-like, although if you look closely there is a huge claw-like hand visible. Basically it’s difficult to work out exactly what’s going on, which is a generic problem I have with most of Turner’s work (he painted two other “horror” pictures, one of Death on a Pale Horse and one of Sea Monsters, which are even more confusing).

Finally, here are a couple of mediaeval dragon-slayers from Somerset. The one on the left can be seen on the wall of the church in Stoke-sub-Hamdon, and was featured previously in my post on Dragon Symbolism. As I said in that post, it may be intended to represent St Michael, due to its proximity to a hill called St Michael’s Hill.

I saw the dragon-slayer on the right a few weeks ago in Wells Cathedral, on the wall of the staircase leading to the Chapter House. I don’t think he’s meant to be anyone famous – I’ve seen him described variously as a “peasant”, a “priest” or a “pilgrim”. With his right hand he’s holding one of the pillars which support the roof, while casually using his left hand to slay a small dragon with his walking stick!

Camelot, maybe

Hill-forts are among the most impressive pre-Roman structures to be found in Britain. They are particularly common in southern England, as Paul Jackson described in his blog post A Handful of Hill Forts. Despite the name, hill-forts weren’t really military structures so much as small, self-contained towns that were defended by artificially built ramparts. An example can be seen in the photograph above, which shows Cadbury Castle in Somerset.

Cadbury Castle was built during the Iron Age, around 500 BC, and was continuously occupied until it was overrun by the Romans in the first century AD, in what seems to have been a particularly brutal and violent event. According to the Somerset County Council website, there is “clear evidence of destruction by fire and the massacre of a group of inhabitants”. However, after the departure of the Romans, the South Cadbury site was reoccupied and redeveloped in the early Middle Ages.

In 1533, a man named John Leland was given a commission by King Henry VIII “to make a search after England’s Antiquities”. This assignment took him to all corners of the country, including the Somerset village of South Cadbury, where he wrote “At the very south end of the church of South Cadbury standeth Camelot, sometime a famous town or castle” and that “The people can tell nothing there but that they have heard say that Arthur much restored to Camelot.”

In other words, Leland was saying that Cadbury Castle was nothing less than King Arthur’s Camelot!

Now King Arthur is one of the most frustrating figures in British history. Almost everyone has heard of him, but there is no firm consensus on what century he lived in, what kingdom he ruled over, or even if he existed in the real world at all. As I said last year in The Lost Tomb of King Arthur:

Down here in the south-west, the prevailing opinion is that he was the King of Dumnonia around 500 AD, a century or so after the departure of the Romans. Dumnonia roughly corresponded to modern-day Cornwall, Devon and Somerset, which remained resolutely Celtic while Wessex to the East (Dorset/Wiltshire/Hampshire) adopted the language and culture of the Anglo-Saxons.

According to this view, it’s not that unreasonable to suggest that Cadbury Castle might have been associated with King Arthur – possibly even one of his main courts. It was occupied at the right time, and it’s in the right place. I made this point in my book Bloody British History: Somerset:

Cadbury Castle is one of the best natural defences on what would have been the eastern border of Dumnonia. Although the hillfort had existed for more than a thousand years in Arthur’s time, its modern name dates from precisely that period. Cadbury means ‘Cado’s Fort’... and Cado was king of Dumnonia around the time Arthur was born. Archaeologically, too, the evidence points to the site being an important military installation of the period. It was refortified in the fifth century with massive stone walls, and in the middle of the hilltop a timber-framed Great Hall was built – a splendid palace fit for a King!

These days, the only structure on the top of Cadbury Castle is a stone plinth dated “2000 AD” (see picture below). The plaque on top of this shows the directions and distances to a number of other places in southwest England. I struggled at first to discern a common theme to these, eventually deciding that they're all places dear to the hearts of hippies and New Agers! There are nine places in all, as follows:

• Two other “Arthurian” sites, Tintagel and Glastonbury
• Two other hill-forts, Ham Hill and Maiden Castle
• Another Iron Age site, Hengistbury Head, which was a busy seaport and trading centre
• Two megalithic sites, Stonehenge and Avebury
• Lamyatt Beacon, the site of a Romano-Celtic temple
• Alfred’s Tower, an 18th century folly commemorating Alfred the Great

The History of Atlantis

I wrote another short article for eHow last week: What Did Atlantis Look Like?. The editorial instructions said the piece should draw on multiple “credible expert sources”, but when it comes down to it there is only one really credible source on the subject :  the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who described the sinking of Atlantis in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias in the 4th century BC. Everything that has ever been written about Atlantis draws in one way or another on Plato’s account.

Modern proponents of Atlantis seem to fall into three broad camps:

• Academics (and pseudo-academics) who scour the world looking for archaeological and historical evidence of a lost Atlantean civilization. This approach really took off with the publication of Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882.
• New Agers and other mystics who emphasize the spiritual and high-tech aspects of Atlantean culture, often receiving their information through telepathic “channelling” as opposed to more materialistic methods. This idea seems to have originated with the Theosophical movement in the late 19th century, continuing into the 20th century with the writings of Edgar Cayce and others.
• Fictional treatments of Atlantis often portray it as still existing, thousands of years after it sank beneath the waves, in the form of a highly advanced underwater civilization. The best-known representative of this version of Atlantis is probably Namor the Sub-Mariner from Marvel Comics, although the earliest occurrence of the idea that I’m aware of is Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Maracot Deep from 1929.

The thing about Plato’s account that makes all this variety possible is that virtually no-one imagines he was telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That leaves people free to pick and choose the bits they like, and add whatever further details they feel necessary.

Plato was a philosopher, not a historian, so he wasn’t in the business of recording purely factual accounts of historical events. He used the story of Atlantis as a vehicle to make specific points about moral and political philosophy. At the same time, however, Plato wasn’t in the business of writing imaginative fiction either. It’s hard to see why he would have gone to the trouble of fabricating such a convoluted story when he could have conveyed the same message in a more straightforward way. So it’s reasonable enough to conclude that some of what Plato said about Atlantis was based in fact, and some of it was made up.

But which is which? Translated into modern-day terms, the essential elements of Plato’s account are as follows:

1. Atlantis was an island which sank beneath the sea as the result of a catastrophic earthquake.
2. The island was large, perhaps 2000 or more miles in extent, and located in the Atlantic Ocean beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. After it sank, Plato says it “became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean”.
3. According to Plato, the sinking of Atlantis occurred around 9600 BC, when Atlantean civilization was at its height. Although Europe, North Africa and the Middle East were still in the early Neolithic period (New Stone Age) at that time, Plato’s Atlantis boasted a rich and thriving Bronze Age culture of a kind not seen elsewhere until 6000 years later.

As a general rule, the closer an Atlantis-hunter is to the academic mainstream, the fewer details of Plato’s account they seem prepared to accept. At the most hardnosed extreme, they just accept point (1) and ignore the rest. The second point – an island of that size located where Plato said it was – really isn’t credible in light of what is now known about the north Atlantic seabed. Similarly, the idea that such an advanced Bronze Age culture could have existed 12 millennia ago, without leaving the slightest trace in the neighbouring parts of Africa and Europe, just doesn’t fit with academically accepted chronology.

The figure of 9600 BC comes from Plato’s dating of the sinking of Atlantis to 9000 years before the time of Solon — a Greek statesman who lived around 600 BC. But one of the references cited in my eHow article claims that “Studies have shown there would appear to be a ten-fold error in all figures over a hundred in Plato’s work, due probably to an early translation error.” This would give a date of 600 + 900 (not 9000) = 1500 BC, which neatly coincides with the Bronze Age eruption of the small Greek island of Santorini – often cited as the most rationalistic explanation for the origin of Plato’s story.

But rationality is for the academics. At the other extreme, the mystics and New Agers are perfectly happy to accept Plato’s date of approximately 10,000 BC. They’re generally less interested in the location of Atlantis than in its level of technical and spiritual advancement – so they tend to focus on point (3) above rather than the first two. From their point of view, the idea of Bronze Age technology presents no problem at all, even when the rest of the world was back in the Stone Age. In fact they’re likely to advocate an even higher level of ancient Atlantean culture, complete with such things as flying vehicles, ESP, teleportation and maybe even space travel!

A Saint, a Spy and the Holy Grail

Whitchurch Canonicorum is a small village a few miles west of Bridport in Dorset. At seven syllables, it’s one of the longest place names in England. This may seem a little pretentious, but Whitchurch Canonicorum is no ordinary village. It was founded in Anglo-Saxon times by the most famous Saxon king of all, Alfred the Great, who called it Hwitan Cyrican, meaning “white church”. Nothing remains of the original Saxon church, but the present building – dating from the 12th to 15th century – has more than its fair share of Fortean oddities: the relics of a mediaeval saint, an icon of the Holy Grail, and the grave of one of the most unusual victims of Cold War espionage.

Surprising as it may seem, there are only two places in the country known to contain the mortal remains of a genuine saint. One is Westminster Abbey in London; the other is the church of Saint Candida and Holy Cross in Whitchurch Canonicorum. Candida is the Latin word for “white”, and the saint herself is more often referred to as “Saint Wite”. The only inscription visible on her shrine is a modern one: Hic reqesct reliqe Sce Wite (“Here rest the relics of Saint Wite”) – apparently duplicating the Latin inscription on a lead casket found inside the tomb when it was opened in 1900.

The tomb itself is very plain – some people think that’s why it escaped destruction during the Protestant Reformation, when so many other shrines around the country were destroyed. Its only distinguishing feature is the presence of three yonic-shaped orifices, where people can place prayer cards and other offerings to the saint (“yonic” is the feminine equivalent of phallic – I had to look it up on Google).

With regard to Saint Wite (or Saint Candida) herself, nothing at all seems to be known about her from historical records. According to local legend, however, she was a Saxon wise-woman who was murdered by the Vikings. Whether or not it’s related to the legend, on the outside of the church tower are carvings representing a ship and an axe, which are often said to symbolize the Vikings. Unfortunately the images are so badly weathered they’re difficult to make out, but lower down on the church wall is another, much clearer carving. This depicts a two-handled vessel, traditionally identified as the Holy Grail.

This part of the church dates from the 12th and 13th centuries, when the popularity of the Grail legend was at its height. But although the legend has a Christian theme, it’s not often depicted in church art of the time. So what is it doing here at Whitchurch Canonicorum? If it’s true that Joseph of Arimathea took the Grail to Glastonbury, he may have landed on the Dorset coast and made his way northwards from there. His route may well have taken him through the place that was later to become Whitchurch Canonicorum.

Moving to more recent times, the churchyard contains one gravestone with a bilingual inscription – English on one side, Cyrillic on the other. This is the last resting place of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian journalist who was murdered in London in bizarre circumstances in 1978. One morning he was waiting at a bus stop on his way to the BBC World Service, where he worked at the time. He felt a stinging sensation in the back of his leg, and turned round to see a man pointing an umbrella at him. Four days later he died from Ricin poisoning. The umbrella had been used to fire a tiny sugar-coated pellet into his leg; when the sugar dissolved it released the deadly chemical into his bloodstream.

Phrases such as “worthy of James Bond” or “like something Q might have dreamed up” are journalistic clichés, but in this case they’re entirely justified. It’s tempting to think that a real-life James Bond discovered that Markov was a communist spy, and a real-life Q devised a foolproof method of eliminating him. But if that had happened, knowing how the British authorities normally operate, they would have botched the whole thing and Georgi Markov would still be alive and well today.

In fact it happened the other way around. Markov was murdered by Bulgarian (or possibly Russian) secret agents, because they discovered he was using his position at the BBC to spread anti-Communist propaganda. And the Communists, being super-efficient and entirely non-decadent, didn’t botch anything. Georgi Markov died, and his umbrella-wielding assassin was never caught.

I’m not sure why Markov ended up buried in a Dorset village churchyard, though.

Iron Man, the Illuminati and the Holy Grail

For about 18 months now I’ve had work trickling in writing short educational articles for various websites. Essentially the site supplies a title, around which I have to write an article. You can find all the titles I’ve done listed on my website, under the broad headings of Science and History. Most of the topics are pretty mainstream, but a few are distinctly Fortean. Earlier this year, for example, I did an article for Synonym Classroom entitled “What Are the Flaws in the Ancient Astronaut Theory?” (As I said, the titles are supplied by the website – I wouldn’t have worded it so negatively).

More recently, a number of assignments have come in from eHow, rewriting articles which have been on that site for some time but need to be brought up to date. There’s a lot of competition for this sort of thing, resulting in a feeding frenzy every time a new batch of titles appears. Among the half-dozen I’ve managed to grab so far were three I was particularly pleased with – on Iron Man, the Illuminati and the Holy Grail (you see – it wasn’t just a contrived headline to grab your attention!).

I did What Is the Holy Grail? in July, and The History of the Illuminati in August. They’re both archetypally Fortean subjects, although the writing guidelines for eHow are pretty strict so I had to stick to facts rather than speculation in both articles.

Perhaps the most surprising title of all was one I did last week: How to Make Energy Like Iron Man. This was listed in the Science category, not Entertainment, and I’ve always wanted to have a go at one of these “science behind science fiction” articles. To make things even more interesting, the science in this case is Cold Fusion – a Fortean topic in its own right, since it’s a classic example of “damned science”. Nevertheless, all the evidence (from the movies, at any rate) suggests that the Arc Reactor in Tony Stark’s chest plate is some kind of Cold Fusion generator.

I really enjoyed researching the article, but there was one thing I kept coming across that drives me mad. That’s the widespread belief that the character of Iron Man, and/or Tony Stark, was created for the 2008 movie starring Robert Downey, Jr. As I pointed out in The Marvel Age of Comics last year, that’s simply not true. While RDJ’s interpretation of Tony Stark is definitely appealing, it’s nonsense to say things like “he created the role and no-one else could possibly play it” when the character has been around since 1963.

But perhaps I shouldn’t press the point so hard. I recently dug out the T-shirt pictured below, which used to fit me perfectly when it was new (the larger one fits me now). OK, then – if the character of Iron Man was created in 2008, this T-shirt must be newer than that, right? I reckon that makes me about 16 years old (which, by coincidence, is a pretty accurate estimate of my mental age).

Actually the T-shirt dates from 1968 (the iron-on transfer was a free gift in Terrific #1, dated 15 April 1967, but I bought it as a back issue the following year). In those days, of course, no-one had heard of Cold Fusion. The highest level of technology mentioned in the early Iron Man stories was “transistors”. I wrote an article on that subject earlier this year, too: What Is a Transistor and What Effect Did Its Invention Have on Computers?

Frog Falls, Dragons and the Universe

On a trip to the local supermarket a couple of weeks ago I discovered an antiques shop I’d never noticed before (even though it’s been there for months, apparently). I bought a 580-page, half-leather-bound, gold-embossed book called The Universe for just a pound. It’s a very late (1909) edition of a book that was first published in French in 1865, but it’s still a pretty good bargain. The shop is called Loopy’s (“Antique – Modern – Retro”) and it’s right opposite the Crewkerne branch of Lidl... and equally good value.

The first English edition of The Universe, by Félix Archimède Pouchet, appeared in 1870. It’s divided into four main sections: “The Animal Kingdom”, “The Vegetable Kingdom”, “Geology” and “The Sidereal Universe” (i.e. astronomy). There’s also a short appendix at the end called “Popular Errors: Monsters and Superstitions” – which, as you might imagine, is one of the best bits. It deals mainly with mediaeval legends of sea serpents and dragons, including the one pictured above from a work by Athanasius Kircher (one of The First UFO Hoaxers I mentioned a few weeks ago).

The appendix isn’t the most Fortean part of the book, however. In the section on the animal kingdom there’s a short chapter dealing with “Showers of Frogs”... fifty years before Charles Fort made the subject his own in The Book of the Damned. Pouchet had no doubts about the reality of amphibian fafrotskies: “Mention is made of these in very remote times, but later writers generally believed that the assertions of the authors who related them were inventions. Modern observations have at last demonstrated the actual existence of this phenomenon, which is explained nowadays in a very rational manner.”

I was going to type out more, but then I decided it would be easier just to take a photograph: