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Tag: Wales

  • Stonhenge Function May Have Been Discovered

    The mysteries surrounding Stonehenge have baffled scientists for a very long time. Who built them? Why were they built? How did they even manage to get the stones to the spot? Aliens? Druid priests? All of these questions have been burning holes into peoples brains for centuries.

    Teams of archaeologists from the universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Southampton, Bournemouth and University College London have all been working on the project for well over 10 years now. They used a combination of the Stonehenge site itself and their extensive knowledge of the time period in general to piece together a hypothesis.

    “When Stonehenge was built, there was a growing island-wide culture – the same styles of houses, pottery and other material forms were used from Orkney to the south coast. This was very different to the regionalism of previous centuries,” Prof Mike Parker Pearson from Sheffield University explained to the Register.

    The stones, according to researchers, were put in place by communities as a gesture of the unification of farming communities who decided to lay down their arms and make peace.

    The undertaking wasn’t an easy one though. As Prof Pearson explained, “Stonehenge itself was a massive undertaking, requiring the labour of thousands to move stones from as far away as west Wales, shaping them and erecting them. Just the work itself, requiring everyone literally to pull together, would have been an act of unification.”

    They also have answers as to why the stones are arranged the way they are. The researches believe that the eight stones stand for different groups of Britain’s earliest farming communities. And that the area that they decided to build Stonehenge wasn’t a mistake either. “The solstice-aligned avenue sits on a series of natural landforms that, by chance, form an axis between the directions of midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset.”

    The place already had some sort of significance to the farmers, “this might explain why there are eight monuments in the Stonehenge area with solstitial alignments, a number unmatched anywhere else. Perhaps they saw this place as the centre of the world,” Prof Pearson wondered.

    How they got the monolithic stones to the site is another story though. This has been pondered upon for a while. The stones are thousands of pounds and some are believed to have been moved from as far away as west Wales. The same issue has come up at Easter Island and they may have solved the problem by “walking” the stones. Here is the video:

  • Google Maps To Add English, Welsh Waterways

    Google is preparing to add 2000 miles of additional travel routes to the map for the British Isles, specifically, Wales and England. While these waterways, like the River Thames, for instance, are already visible on Google Maps, they aren’t included as travel routes. To accomplish this goal, Google is working with the Canal River and Trust organization, which will identify pertinent information for Google to include like bridges and waterway access points.

    In the BBC’s Technology section, a spokesperson from the Canal River and Trust offered these comments about the Google Map expansion:

    “Say, I’m by a canal in Paddington and I want to go to Camden, and I put this information into Google Maps as a walking route – it wouldn’t send me to the canal, even though it’s a nice green route to get there, it would send me by road,” the Trust’s spokesman Jonathan Ludford told the BBC.

    While English canals are not as famous as their Venetian counterparts, they are extensively used by British citizens and the inclusion of the waterways data will only be beneficial:

    “It’s a very exciting project – Google is basically putting the canal network of England and Wales on the map, and people will be able to put in a route and if it’s appropriate to go by canal, they would go by canal,” [Ludford] said. “A lot of people live by canals, and we want them to use these canals – so to have Google promoting the waterways is a really exciting initiative.”

    Aside from assisting those that already use canals as transportation routes, you get the idea that Google and the Canal River and Trust collective is suggesting these waterways as alternative routes for travelers. Naturally, having a vehicle capable of water travel is a necessity.

  • St. David’s Day Honored With UK Google Doodle

    Today, Google is celebrating St. David’s Day with a fun little Google Doodle featuring a red dragon holding a daffodil. Both of these images are recognized as national emblems in Wales.

    St. David’s day is celebrated in Wales as the feast day of the saint, who is the patron saint of Wales. The holiday falls on March 1st of every year, as that is the agreed upon date of his death. St. David’s day has been a national day of celebration since the 18th century but was only declared a public holiday in the year 2000.

    St. David was a bishop born somewhere between 462 and 512 and became widely regarded as a very important teacher an spiritual leader. One of his major accomplishments was the founding of a monastic community in a sport that now bears his name and his cathedral. The beautiful church stands in the county of Pembrokeshire, as the westernmost point of Wales:

    Every year, the Welsh people hold parades to celebrate the day:

    As you can see, the celebration is heavy on the daffodils, a national emblem of Wales. The other major national emblem represented in the Google Doodle is a red dragon – which adorns the Welsh flag. The current flag of Wales was officially adopted in 1959, but the red dragon has been associated with the country for centuries, the exact reason being a matter of lost history and myth.