Wednesday 1 April 2020

An East Kent Local History Puzzle from 1250 AD and the inevitable other stuff

In these difficult times, why bother with our local history here in East Kent?

This is a quote from Marcus Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher writing about 2100 years ago.

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?"

The Translation is from the Robert Harris novel Imperium, which is what I'm reading just now.

Anyway the puzzle is to do with the way we see things, back in around 1250 AD making maps was very tricky, there was no easy way to determine the shape of Britain.
 The red arrow points to The Isle of Thanet and the blue one to The Isle of Wight with the Latin name Vectis is there for comparison. clicking on the map should make it big enough to read

I really don't know how anyone would get on any better with trying to work out the shape of land masses, without some fairly advanced equipment which just wasn't available back in the middle of the 1200s.

You can see Hadrian's Wall and the less famous Antonine Wall, there are quite a lot of major rivers shown crossing places are very important and clearly marked. So the puzzle is is for anyone who wants to do it. I have put two faint arrows one green and one purple near the bottom of the map can you identify the places they point at.

The map was drawn by Matthew Paris somewhere between 1250 and 1259.

next a bit of today's news
Photo from Sir Roger Gale's Facebook post
link to the post
climate change is a great worry at the moment





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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.