Magna Carta - what the hell is it?

Magna Carta are two words that nearly all of us would have heard at some point in our lives, but how many of us actually know what they mean, both literally and figuratively? The literal meaning is easily clarified, it means Great Charter, but what does it stand for? Perhaps at best you'd have a vague idea that it has something to do with law or democracy and that it was a bloody long time ago. That much would be correct; but I think it might be a good idea, with both a general election and the 800th anniversary looming, to become a bit more familiar with what many would call the birth of democracy in what is now the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

I give our state its full title just to contrast with what the situation was in the summer of 1215, we were a long way from being a united kingdom. The ailing King John had been on the throne since 1199 when he had succeeded his elder brother Richard (of Lionheart fame). Richard had been a popular king and John's failed attempt to usurp him whilst he was away on the Third Crusade did not endear him to the masses. The masses had little power, however, so it didn't really matter what they thought. The power in the realm was held by the triumvirate of king, church and barons and John managed to rub both of the other sides of that triangle up the wrong way.

A drawing of the effigy of John's tomb in Worcester cathedral

The barons weren't happy because he charged them high taxes for his wars with France. They were also expected to provide men and supplies for the campaigns, campaigns that many of them, the northern barons in particular, thought did not concern them. A lot of them also owed him money and John had begun to get into the habit of giving the most lucrative positions to his cronies instead of allowing them to proceed by birthright through the baronial lines. A few years earlier John had had a significant falling out with Pope Innocent III who excommunicated him in 1209. John was seen to lack religious conviction and some even suspected him of atheism; almost unthinkable at that time.

The final straw was the complete failure in France of John's efforts to recapture Normandy. Since the time of the Norman conquest the 'King of England' had spoken French and also ruled over substantial parts of northern and western France. Some kings had actually spent rather more time in Normandy and Anjou than they had in England. John was finally defeated by Phillip II of France in 1214 leaving not with the title Count of Anjou but merely a long list of failures and debts. John, then, had long been unpopular and, unbeknownst to him, only had a year or so to live. Things were not going well. To give you a measure of his popularity, in 1235 Matthew Parris, the creator of the wonderful map of Britain from the 1250s, seen below, said this of John: Vile as it is, Hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of John.

For as long as there had been a king, or queen, of England the ruler had always taken the attitude that they were in that position by divine right, literally appointed by God to rule as they saw fit. Their decisions were completely their own and they could change the law of the land at a stroke without consulting with anyone else; they considered themselves to be outside of and above the law. Magna Carta changed all this. Much of what was written in Magna Carta was a little parochial and dealt very specifically with issues of the time; but there are two points that stand out from all the others, what are now called articles 39 and 40. They read thusly:

"No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land."

"To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice."

Flowery language aside these are two points that are, today, the cornerstone of justice systems around the globe and come June 1215 John was in no position to refuse when the barons presented him with their list of demands. In green and pleasant Runnymede, near Windsor, John conceded to the demands of the barons. Being John, though, he had completely reneged on the Great Charter before the year was out. He had appealed to the Pope to declare it null as it impinged on his holy rights; that was typical of John, always thinking of others before himself. The Pope who, remember, had excommunicated John only 6 years earlier came to his rescue. He recognised the risk to the status quo that this precedent might set and duly declared Magna Carta null and void claiming that it was 'unjust, illegal, harmful to royal rights and shameful to English people'.

In what was probably the best result all round, John died in October of the following year whilst still waging a campaign against the barons. His son, Henry III, was only 9 years old and not considered capable of ruling on his own; William Marshall was appointed as regent to rule in his stead, and he did a pretty good job of it. In conjunction with the young Henry he reissued Magna Carta but with some of the clauses removed, most notably clause 61 which appointed 25 nobles to act as a kind of arbiter of whether the king was doing a good job or not; if not then the clause gave the populace explicit permission to openly rebel against the king. This new charter achieved little in real terms but it did show that the new king and his regent were open to negotiations, at least more open than John had been.

No fan of King John, Matthew Parris produced what was
then one of the most accurate maps of Britain ever made

In 1225, at the age of 20, Henry began ruling in his own right. He once again reissued Magna Carta, importantly he did so completely of his own volition and with his royal seal attached; he promised to honour it so that he could legitimately levy taxes, technically every monarch since has had to ask permission to raise a tax. This 1225 version of Magna Carta is considered the definitive version and it allowed Henry to go on to rule for 56 years, an astonishing feat in the 13th century.

Although these events happened a full eight centuries ago they were the birth of what can be considered our modern system of Government. Committees were established to provide oversight of the monarchs actions, some were lords, some were commoners; and so the first version of parliament was born. Today parliament is not especially popular, with anyone. It is as if it has become the unaccountable despot it was supposed to protect us from. But I don't look at this as a bad thing because everybody thinks this. The left think parliament is rubbish, the right think parliament is rubbish, everyone thinks parliament is rubbish and this is a good thing, because it shows it's working. For a democratic society to work there has to be an enormous amount of compromise, and whist it is better to bend than to break, compromises rarely make people happy.

This isn't to say that there aren't problems, there are, not least the lack of engagement of the populous at large with the political system. Young people in particular seem to think that politics isn't relevant to them, so they don't vote, so politicians don't pay them much attention and so politics actually does become less relevant to them. But the solution to this isn't apathy, it should be a motivation to become even more involved. The days when you could change the system from without are gone, they've been gone from this country since the 1650s. For centuries we've been a stable, prosperous nation and we have our hated bureaucracy to thank for that. If we want something to change we have to engage with the system, compromise and ensure that no one is happy. This is the secret to our happiness.

The Magna Carta was the beginning of this unhappy happiness and it has weathered all challenges. That of Charles I resulted in a brutal civil war and his execution but parliament and the charter persevered. No monarch since has put up any serious resistance to the supremacy of the people and its parliament - at least not on these islands. On July 4th 1776 the British colonies in the fledgling United States, who had been rebelling against what they considered to be a despotic King George, won their independence. They, rightly, didn't want to pay taxes without a say in how they were spent; no taxation without representation. When they wrote the Declaration of Independence the founding fathers were coming up with a new Magna Carta for their newly founded country. Even there, though, it has retained its prominence. Magna Carta has been referenced more than 400 times by the US Supreme Court and in the crypt of the Capital building there is a golden copy of the Magna Carta along with a golden copy of King John's seal.

In about a month there will be a general election in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The result looks finely balanced at this stage. I don't care who you vote for. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't even really matter who wins, over a lifetime, over the centuries, it all balances out. I do think its important that democracy wins, however.

Get out there and vote.

This is one of only 4 original copies of the 1215 Magna Carta. This one is held at the British Library near Kings Cross
and will be on display through the summer

http://www.bl.uk/magna-carta
http://magnacarta800th.com/

Lest We Forget....

Pretty much everyone in London must be aware of the various commemorative public art installations that have been happening over the past few weeks to mark the centenary of the First World War beginning. With the passing of Harry Patch in 2009 this conflict did truly become history; he was the last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches of western Europe. It is now only through books, documentaries, films and other second hand sources that we can learn about what is sometimes called The Great War.

I'm not sure a war should ever be called great. Whilst there are certainly circumstances where it is worthwhile to take up arms to defend an ideal or way of life I don't think that we should necessarily glory in it. War should be a last resort, a terrible necessity carried out only to the extent necessary and only when no other option remains. Was the First World War one of these occasions? I honestly don't know. I've read conflicting views on this and am not qualified to make a judgement. I'm not sure that anyone is. I am sure that we must make sure nothing like that ever happens again and that is why installations like this are welcome. Each ceramic poppy in the pictures here, and I have by no means covered them all, represents a fallen soldier. I don't know how many there are, many hundreds of thousands. Too many.

The same as the first picture but original colour

The Thames Barrier

Ahhhh, this feels good. Today I did something I haven't done in a long time: I went out with my camera, in the sun, to take photos just for fun. I wasn't doing it because the stupid 365 Project was making its daily demand; nor because I was at some event where tradition demands that a few badly shot pictures of blurry revellers be taken for posterity; nor because I happened to be visiting somewhere that, theoretically, I should be taking photos of. No, today it was just me, the camera, good weather, London and science podcasts. Bliss.

So it was I decided to head down to the Thames Barrier. It's only a few miles from where I live but I had never gone down there before; I soon realised I had been remiss, there were ample opportunities for some interesting photography. 

The Thames Barrier, then. Why is it there? How long has it been there? How does it work? And why does it look so weird? Some of these questions are easier to answer than others. The reason it is in that specific location is quite straightforward; the Thames, if you look at it on a map, is wrigglier than a three year old with ants in their pants but in this little section, between Silvertown in Newham and New Charlton in the borough of Greenwich, the banks are quite straight and parallel to one another; this makes it much easier to build a massive, water tight, movable barrier - the second largest in the world. Also, the underlying chalk bedrock in the area happens to be a little harder than the chalk and clay on which most of London sits and so could support the structure. As an aside, London is steadily sinking into the ground much as Venice is now, but that's a problem for another century. The other interpretation of the question Why is it there? - as in Why do we need it at all? - is also simple enough, if not a little tragic.

In 1953 a spring tide coincided with a severe storm over the North Sea, this led to a surge in sea level of over 5 metres. The first area to be affected was Scotland where 19 fatalities were reported, but conditions only got worse as the surge travelled south into the progressively more shallow waters of the southern North Sea. Approximately 1000km2 of eastern England were flooded with the sea encroaching as much as 2 miles inland in Lincolnshire and Norfolk. Over 1600km of coastline was flooded along with severe floods in Silvertown and Canning Town in East London; just a mile down the road from me. The result was tens of thousands being made homeless and 307 deaths. At sea, many trawlers and other boats were lost producing another 224 deaths.

Sadly, by comparison, we had it easy. The Netherlands, where a fifth of the country is below mean sea level and half of it is at less than 1m above sea level, over 1800 people were drowned as a quarter of the country was lost to the sea. There were also long term effects as being flooded by sea water is not like being flooded by fresh water. Having that much salt dumped onto the land devastates farm land or, indeed, any land where you might want vegetation to thrive.

As a result of this natural disaster, the second worst in British recorded history, the Government began planning how to protect us from such 1 in 1000 year catastrophes. Sea defences around the country were built/bolstered and a plan for some kind of barrier to protect central London was commissioned.

The design was first drawn up in the 1950s by Charles Draper but construction didn't begin until 1974; it was opened by Her Majesty The Queen on my 1st birthday in 1984 and, in today's money, it cost nearly £2b. There are five large piers and two smaller ones creating four 60m navigable spans and two 30m navigable spans. The 60m spans were specifically that size so as to be the same as Tower Bridge, i.e. anything that could get through Tower Bridge had to be able to get through the barrier too. I think my photos struggle to convey the scale of this area adequately; the river is over half a kilometre wide here, and you could fit Tower Bridge onto it four times just in the central section. It's huge.

Used with permission

So how does the damn thing work? Hopefully the diagram to the right will help explain. Between each pier there is a hollow gate with a circular cross section; when the gates are closed this rests in a depression cut into the riverbed  allowing the free flow of water. To stop the fluvial flow these can be rotated such that nothing pass. To close the barrier isn't a simple task, though, it requires coordination with many other flood defences in the region and costs about £16000 per go.

The Barrier can protect London in two different ways depending on which direction the flooding is expected: from the North Sea or from the river itself. It's easy enough to imagine how it might protect London from the type of disaster experienced in 1953, you simply close the gate and, with any luck, nothing will get passed it and the areas down stream won't be too badly damaged either. But it can also help if there has been a lot of rain and the flooding is coming from upriver in the Thames basin. It does this by closing the gates during a low tide, this means that once the tide starts rising again it can't get back up river and this creates a basin of low level water that the flood water can run into allowing it to drain out of the city more quickly.

As it approaches it's 30th birthday the Thames Barrier continues to provide protection for Londoners; disconcertingly, though, this protection is having to be deployed more and more frequently. In it's first 6 years of use it was only closed 4 times, in the last decade it has averaged 7 times per year. Is this a possible measure of global warming? Are flood events occurring more often? In the fantastically complex science of climate change it isn't possible to draw a conclusion from one measure of anything, but it would seem to support that. The barrier was only designed to protect against a surge in sea level of 4.67 metres. If sea levels raise by a metre this century, as seems likely, then the capacity of the barrier to protect the capital would be greatly reduced. Add to that the slightly odd fact that Britain is tilting (the south and east are sinking and the north and west are rising at about 5cm/century) and the future looks ever more precarious. The original design was supposed to provide solid protection up until the year 2030 followed by a period of ever diminishing returns after that. The Environment Agency, however, who now runs the barrier, has said that it has no intention of replacing it before the year 2070. I do wonder if this is based on good scientific advice or on Governments that are not willing to spend money on insurance policies. Hopefully it won't take another disaster of the kind seen in 1953 to force their hand.

The view to the west, Docklands and the O2 can be seen in the distance

After three hours I had only covered about 200 yards of the riverbank but I had had a great time. The weather and light were fantastic and it was good to be there knowing that I could write it up at my leisure in the style that I used to before the 365 Project consumed my hobby. I knew I would have the time to look into the history of this impressive structure and do it some justice in words as well as in pictures. Basically, I have my blog back and I love it. I hope you enjoy it too.

365 Project: Photo 130

I admit it; I've become a bit of a sucker for grunging up photos, SnapSeed just makes it too damned easy. Anyway, here is the north entrance to Westminster Abbey. Vital statistics: Portland and Reyns stone, Gothic, built around 1220-1425 and quite, quite beautiful.

365 Project: Photo 129

This happy chappy stands like a sentinel in front of the British Museum's new(ish) exhibition on Pompei and Herculaneum; an exhibition I've been very excited about getting to. Thanks to Sue I'm a member of the museum which means I can get into the non-free galleries as often as I like for no charge but, annoyingly, this particular show is proving so phenomenally popular that admission is normally barred. It runs for most of the year so chances to give it a thorough going over are still plentiful and I recommend you do the same, but not until after I'm done with it if you don't mind.

365 Project: Photo 107

By a total fluke I happen to have taken a photo that perfectly fits today's prompt, A Sign. I was in Covent Garden entering the market itself and I spotted this long list of rules and bye-laws for traders, it dates from the late 1820s. This picture doesn't really give a sense of how large this stone carving is; it's a good 5-6 feet in height and this only shows about 50% of what is there. I like how the differing amounts for the fines conveys a sense of what the Georgians considered acceptable or otherwise.

365 Project: Photo 023

This blog has been going for nearly two years now and so I thought it's about time I posted a picture of a graphically explicit act of homosexual paedophilia; and so I have. But don't get too excited, perverts, it's also a little bit artsy and I reckon I could even work a history lesson in if I tried.

The picture below is of the Warren Cup, one of the treasures of the British Museum. I work just a five minute walk from the British Museum and can frequently be found wandering its galleries during my lunch break. I was there today when I remembered that I still had to take today's photo for the 365 Project, the theme of which was Snuggle. I was thinking of ways I could best pull this off when I remembered that in the Roman Gallery sat the beautiful piece below. Made of silver sometime between 5-15CE the Warren Cup has two images hammered onto its surface, both of a similar nature. In the image below the active lover, the erastes, sits below the passive eromenos who we can tell is a young boy by the lack of beard, wreath and musculature. I chose this half of the cup to show as it has an extra element to it, a servant peeking in through the door to see if now would be a good time to disturb; I'm going to guess: no.

One of the reasons I like this cup, other than marvelling at the intricacy of 2,000 year old craftsmanship, is that it perfectly portrays the way cultures can change over time. Public buildings in Roman cities were very often adorned with scenes of a graphically sexual nature, it was the done thing, and there could have been nothing more normal than for a man to have sex with another man - homosexuality was so common that the Romans didn't even have a word for it. Also, incest and what we now call paedophilia were not frowned upon, especially amongst the ruling classes. The cornerstone of education in Ancient Greece was to pair up a young boy with an older male teacher; tutorials were thorough.

In the UK in 2013, far from commissioning an expensive piece of silverware to show off to your friends, the perpetrator of such an act would be incarcerated for the protection society. One of my pet hates, though, is when people today try to reframe the past through a modern lens, pronouncing events or ideas to be savage or brutal or wrong. The example that annoys me most frequently is that of the Maya, Toltecs and over Pre-Columbian cultures. There are so many interesting things to be leant but every documentary seems obsessed with portraying the human sacrifice associated with the cyclical demise of their cities and proclaiming it evil. It doesn't even have to be a culture of years gone by, however; there are plenty of disparate societies alive and kicking in the world today and what's wrong in one will be mainstream in another. The age of consent in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy is 14, in Spain it is 13, for me that's too young, but hey, they can do what they like.

Cultures, by their very nature, change. Think of your grandparents as young children and what would have been considered 'normal' or acceptable for them and how that has changed in just one life time. What more will change before we all die? It's impossible to say, but let's hope there are records made of it and that they're at least half as beautiful as this cup.

Land of Ice and Fire. And Rain.

The Land of Ice and Fire is how Iceland likes to brand itself, not entirely unreasonably either. It's home to many glaciers, including Europe's largest, and is the second most volcanic country in the world after Hawaii. But I would recommend, just for accuracy's sake you understand, the slight addendum of 'and rain'. In the days we were there it only stopped raining for 100 minutes; admittedly they were an amazing 100 minutes with some of the most crystal clear light and beautiful countryside I've ever seen but still. Now I know what you're thinking: the Welsh tourist board has already cornered that market, but I don't see why they couldn't come to some sort of mutual agreement.

When you live in a place where you're likely to spend a large portion of the year battling the elements it's always nice to know that at the end of the day you can have a nice hot bath and, thanks to another aspect of Iceland's extreme nature, Icelanders have a better deal than most. 14% of the surface of Iceland is covered by lakes, there are many underground reservoirs too and where these are found near to one of the many vents to the Earth's core that the country straddles the result is a vast aquifer of ready made bath water. You see, the mains water that gets pumped into Reykjavik isn't cold like ours but piping hot and so whereas we have to wait for the water to get hot they often have to wait for the water to get cold.

The reason Iceland is so geologically active is that it sits astride the mid-Atlantic ridge, in fact, worse than that, the fault line actually splits in two right in the middle of the country. This has resulted in there being more than 30 active volcanic systems in the country and one third of the total magma that has erupted to the Earth's surface in the last 500 years has been on this one island. In 1783 the Laki volcano erupted, and it was a real monster. The guy that told me about it said for me to look up the history of my country, or any country in the northern hemisphere, for that year and it would be mentioned; and he was right. That summer was known as the Sand Summer in the UK because the sky was changed to a pallid yellow from all the sulphur that was belched into the atmosphere. Ten thousand Britons were killed by the fallout from the eruption. One third of the population of Iceland were killed. Chilling statistics like that is probably why locals were all a bit nonplussed when their last major eruption was under way resulting in flights throughout northern Europe being grounded due to worries about the ash cloud. Apparently they found it genuinely amusing that people would get so worked up by such a small eruption and annoyed that the world seemed incapable of pronouncing a simple word like Eyjafjallajökull. 

A close up of the blow hole, so to speak, between eruptions. It smelt as bad as it looks.

All the poor weather we encountered meant that there was no chance of seeing the Northern Lights, which was a shame but not a surprise as I knew before we left that solar activity was low. Luckily, though, we did get to see the other main thing that I wanted to get out of the trip, whales. Minke whales, to be precise. These baleen whales are normally solitary but we managed to find two together that were presumably feeding on a ball of herring or some other such fishy goodness. The rolling of the waves and the lash of the wind and rain meant that the only vaguely in focus shot I managed to get was less than impressive but, for me, this particular encounter wasn't about photography, it was about seeing one of nature's wonders up close and personal. So although I didn't get a heap of shots of humpbacks breaching and fluking I was still more than pleased with my day.

When I'm away I now increasingly approach any new place with a view to how I'm going to represent it on this blog. What story am I going to tell? What are the key elements I need to photograph? What caption would fit here? And if I come up with a good turn of phrase I'll quickly note it down knowing that my awful memory will inevitably let it fall from it's grasp. But on this occasion I was content to just stand there trying to guess where they would surface next whilst simultaneously trying to dodge the increasing quantity of vomit puddles on deck and not fall into the briny deep. And there was a lot to dodge too, let me tell you; I hadn't seen that many people vomiting with wild abandon in one place since my last night out in Cardiff. Sue does not cope well on boats and, whilst she wasn't a contributor to the fish food being mopped overboard that day, she felt pretty rough the whole time we were out there but she manfully fought it all the way and coped extremely well. As we chugged back into the harbour she said that I have my 'roller coaster' face on. For those that haven't gone on a trip to Alton Towers with me this basically means I have a fixed grin on my face combined with a sort of wildness in the eyes that gives me an altogether unhinged appearance. This means I've had fun. The only slightly unsettling thing about the trip was that in the opposite berth to our whale spotting ship were two whale hunting ships; a stark reminder that these impressive creatures have no protection in Icelandic waters. The argument goes that they have been doing this for a thousand years, it's a part of their culture, why should they have to stop now?

Minke whales are known for the small size of their dorsal fin compared to their body size

More of a struggle was our next excursion where the plan was to spend the day going to Thingvellir, the seat of Iceland's ancient parliament the Althingi; a set of geysers, one of which is called geyser and is what every other geyser in the world is named after; and also the Gullfoss waterfall. The weather was absolutely appalling, incessantly, all day and it was particularly annoying for this last item on the agenda as it is one of the most impressive waterfalls I've ever had the good fortune to visit. I could have easily spent a whole day just photographing this one location but all that I could do was snatch a few hastily composed shots before my camera got saturated. The photo I've included here has rain drops on the lens and the sky looks miserable; it's a damned fine waterfall, though. I could probably say the same thing about the geyser; to really appreciate it you would need a nice blue sky to give some contrast to the vast, boiling jet of water that surges upwards every 4-8 minutes. As it was, in my photos, it just sort of blends into the background so that you can't really get a feel for the dynamism of the moment.

Before we set off on this trip there were several 'facts' about Iceland that I wanted to check out, like: Iceland has no trees; Iceland has no dogs; in any town there is only one shop where you can buy alcohol and it's run by the Government, and a few others. It turns out that only the last of these is true. Iceland does have trees but the rule of thumb is that if it is taller than a man then it is an imported species. The saying goes that if you ever get lost in an Icelandic forest then just stand up. And Iceland definitely has dogs, in fact it even has native dogs. When the first human settlers arrived the Arctic fox was the only mammal living on the island. That has now changed with the introduction of sheep, reindeer, rabbits and the inevitable rats and mice. A generation ago a farmer asked permission of the Government to import some mink so that he could farm them for their fur. The Government said no on the grounds that they might escape and overrun the country. The farmer continued to apply for years but the answer was always the same. Eventually the farmer died but then his son took up the cause and continued to apply. He commissioned specially built mink-proof cages from which there could be no escape and, eventually, the authorities relented and granted him a license. Within four days the mink had escaped and so they complete the list of mammals you can find in Iceland.

The lower section of the Gullfoss falls

I really enjoyed our time in Iceland. At times the weather had completely kicked our arse but it was always beautiful and always compelling. If it wasn't so damned expensive it would definitely be a regular haunt as it only takes three hours to get to and has lots to offer anyone that likes wild landscapes and a strong Arctic wind. At some point we were looking through our guidebook and it mentioned that Reykjavik is the northern-most capital in the world; I love this sort of thing. I like having things that I can tick off of a list, especially things of a geographical nature such as this. It can go on the list right under the other places I've gone like southern-most town, northern-most town, highest altitude town. As we were discussing this, and as we rapidly approach our tenth anniversary of travelling the world together, we decided to tot up all the different countries we had visited as a pair, ignoring ones we had gone to the one without the other. We were somewhat startled to come to a total of 25 countries, an eighth of the world's total. That's good going; but then we realised that at that pace it'd take 80 years to get them all done - the Ultimate List. Must up the pace.

Reykjavik

The reflection underneath is a bit spidery for my liking.....

Takk. That's how you say thanks in Icelandic; nice and easy. Every other word in the language, every single other word, is completely unpronounceable. You might be forgiven for thinking that there would be some slight similarities between Icelandic and English, they both have a solid Norwegian base to them from when  our two islands were colonised by the vikings in the last half of the first millennium; but you would be wrong. Very wrong. Icelandic is actually more like ancient Norse than modern day Norse is; due to centuries of isolation and a policy of actively coming up with words with an Icelandic root instead of borrowing from other languages it has evolved very little. As examples of the way they police their language: their word for computer translates as number prophetess; telephone is long thread; mobile phone is travelling long thread; and, rather worryingly, they have no word for interesting. To hear Icelandic spoken is, however, quite interesting. It has a fairly quiet and reserved tone to it, as do the people in general, but every now and then, out of no where, they throw in an exaggerated ook sort of a noise as if they're trying to out honk one of the local geese that populate the area in place of the pigeons you normally find in most cities. Imagine a drunk Welshman doing a Monty Python impression and you might be half way there.

Names, of people, are also a little unusual. Similarly to Russian they have a patronymic and matronymic system; basically you come up with a forename for your new son but his surname is already decided - it's his mother's name with son added onto it. Concordantly, the surname for a girl is her father's name followed by the Icelandic for daughter, dottir. To clarify, I would be called Jason Pearlsson, my wife would be called Susan Davidsdottir and SKY news correspondent Kay Burley would be Kay Satansdottir. Simple.

So it was that Sue Davidsdottir and I set off into this alien culture with aspirations of whale watching and a good view of the aurora borealis; sadly, we would only achieve one of these.

Reykjavik was first settled by Norse colonists in the year 870 and was called such because you can just about make out steam from nearby hot springs (Reykjavik means Smokey Harbour); the city, indeed the country, was mostly just a fishing and sheep farming outpost for the next several centuries and when the city received its charter from their Danish rulers in 1752 the population had grown to a colossal 167 individuals. The charter wasn't granted to the people themselves or some sort of mayor or ruler but to a corporation that was tasked with developing native industries with a view to improving living conditions of the indigenous population. Today there are 120,000 people in the city and 320,000 in the country as a whole and they are free to enjoy what is widely acknowledged to be amongst the best healthcare and educational systems in the world. This is probably in no small part due to the fact that 80% of the tax collected in Iceland is spent on those two areas alone. This, combined with the fact that they have no standing army, 100% of their power comes from geothermal or hydroelectric sources and a few other key indicators, has led to Iceland being rated the most peaceful country on Earth.

The most built up area in all Iceland; some of those buildings are as many as four storeys high!

Despite being the largest city in Iceland by quite some distance Reykjavik has maintained the feel of a sleepy fishing town. The picture above is from the top of the Hallgrimskirkja cathedral looking west towards the harbour over the most developed part of the city but it looks more like a leafy suburb. As they have chosen not to build upwards it does mean that the urban sprawl continues for some miles east and south and is beginning to swallow up what used to be smaller satellite towns in the same way that Copenhagen and Oslo have done.

The panorama below is of the far side of lake Tjomin which nuzzles up against the side of the Icelandic parliament the Alþingi, pronounced AL-thing, the oldest parliament in the world at well over 1,000 years old. I like the contrast in the leaves of the trees as they begin their journey from green to brown through yellow and red. It also nicely highlights the degree of variation that is to be found in Icelandic architecture; it's quite unusual to find two buildings next to each other that are the same and this makes walking the streets of the capital all the more interesting. This is in stark contrast to the unrelenting tedium of new, suburban developments in the UK where conformity seems to be the order of the day.

I really liked Iceland. As soon as I stepped off of the plane and saw the bleak, rugged landscape and felt the icy wind bite I knew that I was going to enjoy this rough, harsh country. When I go on holiday I prefer to see mountains and ice over sun and sand; I like to feel that at any moment the weather could turn and you'll be hit with a storm that makes even getting something to eat an ordeal. This is just as well, because this is what we got. Our first day was wet, cold and blustery; pretty bad weather-wise. From bad it turned to brutal as winds reached gale force and the rain got heavier and heavier so whilst I enjoyed doing battle with Iceland and its weather it did mean that photography opportunities were few and far between, not if I wanted my camera to avoid a soaking in any case.

In my next post I'll describe the trials and tribulations of sightseeing in a country that is the second most volcanic in the world and sat between two of the roughest oceans we have. For now I'll say that there was a brief moment of respite; for two hours on our final morning in Reykjavik the rain stopped, the wind dropped  and the clouds parted. For two hours the sun shone through and gave me some of the most beautiful, crystal clear light I have ever seen. When I saw how things had improved I instigated a desperate rush around the city revisiting the key landmarks that we had been perusing under much less favourable conditions for the last few days. Even though it was almost noon the sun was still very low in the sky as we were only a degree or so from the Arctic circle. For the shots of Mount Esja and the Sun Voyager sculpture the light also happened to be coming in from the side and so was perfect for giving depth to the mountains. I am very happy with the panorama below, it is well worth looking at on a big screen and I foresee a canvas print of it on my living room wall in the not too distant future.

Click to enpanaramatudinate

Durham

I had been promised a visit to Durham for a long time, years in fact. I had been promised by my wife, repeatedly, in the build up to visiting her parents in the north eastern town of Hartlepool. Hartlepool itself doesn't have much going for it (sorry, in-laws); the last time I was there I did my usual walk around the marina and along the coast and whilst dodging a downpour I took refuge in the Museum of Hartlepool. Even this couldn't muster much to say about the town other than its peak was well over half a millennium ago. Today, it's probably only known outside of the region as the place that hanged a monkey thinking it was a Frenchman and for being the home town of that canoe guy who pretended he was dead. In fact I think my in-laws were once considering buying the house next door to him.

So, with this in prospect the carrot of Durham was frequently dangled in front of me and last March we finally got to go. Sadly the weather started out pretty awfully; low cloud and heavy showers left us dashing between buildings to avoid the worst of it but it did eventually improve.

About half way along its journey to Sunderland the river Wear makes a strange little kink around a large, raised peninsular and it is at the summit of this that the cathedral was built in the 11th century. The first phase of building was completed within 40 years, which is actually quite fast for a Gothic cathedral; even the newest phases of building were completed some 600 years ago. It was to this amazing feat of architecture that I had been so keen to get to.

We started to the north west of the promontory and walked south to a bridge where we could cross over to the steep, gorge-like sides of the cathedral's home. As we climbed it was easy to see why this was once as much of a military stronghold for the prince-bishops as it was a place of worship. By the time we were inside we had all got pretty wet and were welcome of the refuge, but there was certainly more on offer there than somewhere to dry off. The Cathedral Church of Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin and St. Cuthbert of Durham, to give it its full name, has several interesting features. It was originally set up to worship the aforementioned St. Cuthbert but can also claim to have the remains of the Venerable Bede, three copies of the Magna Carta, some of the first books to ever be printed in England and, as if that wasn't enough, the head of some guy called St. Oswald of Northumbria. Oh, it also doubled up as Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from time to time.

Bede was a monk born in the 7th century who, amongst other things, was a chronicler of the history of the British people; Cuthbert was one of his disciples. I love that, even more than one thousand years ago, we had a strong and rich history that was worth writing down.

Together with the cathedral, Durham Castle forms part of a UNESCO  World Heritage Site

As with most cathedrals there is, if you're willing to pay for it, the opportunity to climb to the summit of the tower via an increasingly precipitous spiral staircase. I love going up these. It's a mixture of ingenious engineering, function playing second fiddle to form, the mild peril involved when you have to pass another climber and the always spectacular views from the top that combine to give a special experience every time.

The cathedral is possibly the most complete Norman building in the country and the eastern portion of the interior has a very different feel about it from most other cathedrals in the country. The great antiquity of the structure comes at a significant cost; literally. It takes about £40,000 per week to keep the cathedral in a decent state of repair, mostly in the form of wages for the six stonemasons, three joiners, two maintenance technicians and four gardeners employed in its upkeep, as well as a resident archaeologist that records and oversees much of this work.

The eastern façade

Once we had explored the cathedral it was time for lunch and we did well to find some excellent fish and chips, which always goes down well. By this time the sun had come out and our walk along the river back around the peninsula was a very different affair to our first encounter. The water was very still which gave me the chance to get some good reflections as can be seen in my first picture in this post.

So, I got to go to Durham; but this begs the question: how will I be enticed to make the trek north from now on? A visit to Whitby? Walking on the north Yorkshire Moors? Who knows, frankly.

Looking up at Durham cathedral from the river Wear

Chichen Itza

This is it. This is the Big One. This is the one I had been waiting for since I was a kid, the place in all of the promised land of Mexico that I was most keen to see. I had hiked to Macchu Picchu, hunted down the Northern Lights, seen the Great Pyramids at Giza and now I was about to see Chichen Itza. I was excited, but where to begin.....

The town currently nearest to Chichen Itza is a small, unremarkable place by the name of Piste that lies halfway between Merida and Cancun. We arrived mid afternoon having hot footed it up from Tulum on a local bus. We planned to spend at least a couple of days in the area taking in the pyramids, some local caves and the cenotes I wrote about previously next to the nearby town of Valladolid. We had deliberately picked a more expensive hotel for this stay but the benefit was it was actually within walking distance of the complex so that, with an early start, we could beat the crowds that would be bussed in from locations further afield, but that was for tomorrow. That evening we decided to get tickets to the sound and light show that is put on each night. This basically involves using the pyramid as a huge projector screen and explaining some of the history of the monument using a lot of bright lights and a big ass sound system; I believe there is something similar done with the pyramids at Giza.

I'll be honest, the show was crap and I do not recommend it. It reeked of the 1980s and badly needed updating. The story was only in Spanish so we could get the general gist if we concentrated but anyone without a decent grasp of Spanish would probably get pretty bored pretty quickly, as we eventually did. The colourful lights could only hold your attention so long and so the whole experience was a little underwhelming. What I was pleased about, however, was that it allowed me to plot a mental map of the site so that, in the morning, I would be able to march us straight to the main points of interest and hopefully get even more of a head start on most of the other tourists.

Not a good picture, hand held in the dark, but it gives an impression of the sound and light show - not all that.

And so it proved. The next day we were queuing up before the site was opened so that we could be amongst the first people over the threshold. Using my recently reconnoitered information we made straight for the main draw overtaking the less well informed tourists as we went. Once we arrived the only people there were a few gardeners doing some early morning weeding before the heat became unbearable; we had even beat the hawkers to it, they were still busy setting up their wears, only concerned with being ready before the coaches started arriving. The Great Pyramid; El Castillo; Kukulcan; call it what you will, this is a very impressive structure and the chances are that you've seen a picture of it before. It is the archetypal image of Mayan and Mexican culture and the tourist board, understandably, make a big deal of it and attract 1.2m people per year in the process. That being said it is only the second most visited archaeological site in Mexico after Teotihuacan, which I'll deal with in a future post. Chichen Itza, though, is unarguably the more picturesque of the two.

The story behind Chichen Itza begins in the 5th century when a settlement was established next to two large cenotes that are found in the area guaranteeing a reliable water supply. It was the Itza people that built the village into a large and prosperous conurbation, indeed the name Chichen Itza means 'the mouth of the well of the Itza.' From about the year 750 there began a golden age for the city that was to last half a millennium, but it was not completely without incident. For the first 200 years or so the Itza people, an ethnic subset of the Maya, prospered and grew their sphere of control building temples and palaces as they went; this was all done in their own cultural and architectural style so that the first phase of building in the area is very distinct. Equally distinct, though, is the Toltec style which takes over and comes to dominate the area come the 10th century.

One of the two cenotes that fed Chichen Itza. For a sense of scale try to spot the guy in the red t-shirt on the right.

The Toltec were normally to be found in central Mexico, away to the north west near where the capital can be found today. Exactly how the Toltecs came to dominate the area seems to be under debate. I've found some sources that say that the Toltecs came as conquerors and put the Itza under fearsome suppression and others that say it was a more peaceful integration based around commerce. There are also a multitude of local myths and legends that all contradict each other and have no archaeological evidence to back them up. It would seem we can't yet be sure how it happpened but we do know that the culture completely changed. Clothing, architecture, rituals, even sports all changed. The Toltecs introduced pelota, a ball game often erroneously compared to football. The game was full of symbolism and basically involved using your hip to hit a ball shaped piece of galvanised rubber through a stone hoop high up on a wall; don't think basketball, though, the hoop was vertical not horizontal. The largest pelota court in all of the Americas was built at Chichen Itza measuring approximately 170x70 metres. Many people today take their sports very seriously but none can quite match the Toltecs for their commitment, a lot was at stake in such games, the very lives of the competitors even, although it remains unclear if it was the winners or the losers that were sacrificed.

The pelota court with one of the two hoops through which the ball would be aimed

Human sacrifice. This is something that the Maya are somewhat infamous for. It's quite easy to conjure up an image of some body painted indian chap covered in feathers cutting the heart out of a prostrate prisoner of war before throwing the body down the steps of a pyramid. Personally I've always felt a bit uneasy about this; not the human sacrifice part, I'm down with that, it's the judging them by today's western standards that I don't like. I've lost count of the number of otherwise excellent documentaries I've seen on the Maya that talk of sacrificial rituals as barbaric, inhumane, primitive and the like; obviously they're pretty gruesome but I don't see that it's fair to judge other, past cultures by our own sanitised standards. Laws are just a matter of taste really. It used to be a high crime to speak ill of our monarch or God but nowadays most of us do it. Today, if two thugs disagree, fight and one gets killed we lock the other up, but a few hundred years ago if one gentleman called out another to a duel and killed him it was fair game. In any case, in this instance, it was the Toltecs that introduced human sacrifice to the Maya and very keen on it they were too. Many ritualistic aspects of life all of a sudden needed willing, or not so willing, people to lay down their lives for the good of the community. Lots of these would have been prisoners of war with raids being carried out on rival tribes with the express purpose of capturing live prisoners with which to please the Gods; as is so often the case, though, young, virgin girls got rather a raw deal. They were often thrown into the cenotes to guarantee the water supply and there is much evidence of this. In the early 20th century the cenotes were dredged and as well as turning up lots of ceramics and other ceremonial objects there were also multiple human remains recovered that showed evidence of being sacrificed.

This gentleman was carrying his goods to the make-shift market passed the Temple of 1000 Columns

The prosperity of Chichen Itza increased for another 200 years through the 11th and 12th centuries until the city covered more than 300 hectares of land. It was during this period that many of the larger and most famous structures were built; El Castillo, the ball court, the Temple of Warriors, the Jaguar Temple, a stellar observatory and the Complex of 1,000 Columns amongst many others. What I was most interested in, though, was El Castillo, the great pyramid that was built in honour of Quetzalcoatl the feathered serpent, a God imported with the Toltecs from central Mexico that had been worshipped there since the 1st century BCE.

This pyramid is full of meaning and symbolism; as well as being an obvious symbol of power and advanced technology, the single most impressive aspect of this structure is what it reveals of the Mayan's mathematical and astronomical abilities. It is effectively a giant calendar, there are 91 steps from the base to the summit on each side with one last one at the top on which sits the temple, this makes 365 in total; I don't need to tell you the significance of that number. Also, and this draws tens of thousands of visitors every year, on the spring and autumn equinoxes the pyramid is aligned such that one of it's stepped edges casts a shadow onto the side of one of the staircases that gives a shade-like body to the serpent that runs down the pyramid. This was probably a deliberate design feature but there are some archaeologists that claim it is a coincidence.

The zig zag shadow gives the impression of a snakes body with the head carved in stone at the bottom left. Design feature or lucky happenstance? This is not one of my pictures, image used under a creative commons license.

Nearby there lies the remains of an observatory that looks remarkably like the ones that the Europeans would develop 500 years later with a domed roof with slots in it through which stellar observations could be made. They had advanced to such an extent that they were able to accurately predict solar eclipses and the orbit of Venus, putting them on a par with mathematicians of the Old World.

I can't really talk about the Mayans and their calendar without mentioning the now infamous end of the world predictions that have become so popular in recent years. Let me begin by saying that they are, of course, bullshit. What is galling, though, is that the Mayans didn't even predict the end of the world, they believed that there would be a pretty much endless series of cycles that would last for millions of years. During the winter solstice this year, December 21st, one of their many cycles will come to an end. On December 22nd another one will begin. Apparently there are people that will pre-emptively kill themselves in time for this event in much the same way people said they would for the Rapture that failed to materialise last year and I certainly wouldn't want to stop them; it'd be nice to have a little dose of good old Darwinian natural selection brought to the table.

Returning to what we do know, the Maya had 13 weeks each of 20 days (their numbering system was base 20)  in their ceremonial year giving 260 days. They thought that the number 13 was unlucky so the 13th day of the 13th week was a particularly bad day to be walking under ladders in Chichen Itza. Obviously this ceremonial calendar didn't fit in with their observations of reality and so they also came up with an astronomical calendar that had 18 periods of 20 days totalling 360 days. This gave them 5 left over which they considered literally unstable and dangerous as they belonged to neither one year nor the other. To mesh these two separate calendars together they came up with a system of two cogs of unequal size that cycled around each other known as the Calendar Round; and how long did it take for the two to catch each other up and get back to where they started? Surprise, surprise, 52 years. There's no escaping these numbers. The Mayans were so accurate in their time keeping that it can be worked out that, according to their own legends, the earth was created on August 11th, 3314BCE; this is a fairly similar sort of date for pre-history in many other cultures.

Chichen Itza, then, is a place where two cultures collided to produce one of the most interesting sites in all of Mesoamerica. It existed for nearly one thousand years and was the major economic and military power in the region for more than half of that; but then it all came to a sudden end, and no one knows why. It wasn't that unusual for whole cities like this to suddenly become uninhabited but the Mayans, such fastidious record keepers, usually made a note of why, whether it be because they were conquered by another tribe; a drought; some sort of disease pandemic; or sometimes they would do it deliberately as one of their calendar cycles came to an end and they felt that it was time to start again. Many theories compete to explain why, sometime in the 14th century, there ceases to be evidence of any new buildings or development of any kind. Some say they were conquered, others that the civilisation just ran out of steam in a slow decline over a century or so. We may never know, but when the Spanish arrived in 1526 there was still a population there although it was much reduced. Over the next decade the conquistadors tried and failed to conquer the region, but by the 1580s the inevitable happened and the area became nothing more than a cattle ranch.

Today, the area has been officially declared as one of the new Seven Wonders of the World along with the Great Wall of China; Petra in Jordan; Christ the Redeemer in Rio; the Colosseum in Rome; the Taj Mahal in Agra (where my great grandmother was born) and, my favourite, Machu Picchu in eastern Peru. I am very much a list ticking type of person, I have been to three of these places already and am hoping to get a fourth by the end of this year; maybe I could try and get them all by the end of the decade? In any case, this recognition as one of the worlds treasures has guaranteed the future of Chichen Itza for years to come for locals and visitors alike and I, for one, am very happy about that.