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All Hallows Church, Bardsey

Today I got to the village church in Bardsey. Oddly, having lived in the vicinity for forty years or so, I have only just learned of it's antiquity. The church is undoubtedy ancient, All Hallows church includes elements of an Anglo Saxon church dating between 850-950 AD with impressive Saxon tower and, in all probability, is the finest Saxon building in West Yorkshire.

The remnants of the successive changes are all evidenced within the building as it stands today.

 What really drew me to the site were the small stone relics in the church that include 11th century grave marker inscribed with a crudely carved Latin cross and probable include Saxon and Viking era carvings.

New sales website

I have changed my selling platform for the ancient coins and antiquities. The link on the left to Mauseus Sales wil take you there. There are rare and interesting genuine ancient items on offer should you wish to take a look like this "DEO ET DOMINO...." coin of Aurelian.

Prehistoric plants

Five years ago (almost to the day) I posted an ancient Greek coin that had the extinct silphium plant as its reverse design. I have a group of other extinct plants that I have been meaning to post for a while and have finally got around to photographing the early plant fossils. They are all horsetails or club mosses (or relatives of them) and date to the Carboniferous period, approximately 360-300 mybp.

 Annularia

Annularia
Annularia is a plant fossil belonging to the order Equisetales or Horsetail. Whorls of small leaflets are arranged concentrically around a thin stem. These were indicative of humid to wet habitats such as along rivers and lake shores.

 Sigillaria

Sigillaria (relative of club moss)
Sigillaria is a genus of extinct, spore-bearing, arborescent (tree-like) plants. It was a lycopodiophyte, and is related to the lycopsids, or club-mosses.

Sigillaria

Reaching a height up to 30 metres, with a tall, single or occasionally forked trunk that lacked wood. Support came from a layer of closely packed leaf bases just below the surface of the trunk, while the centre was filled with pith. The long, thin grass like leaves were attached directly to the stem and grew in a spiral along the trunk. The old leaf bases expanded as the trunk grew in width.

The trunk was topped with a plume of long, grass-like, microphyllous leaves, so that the plant looked somewhat like a tall, forked bottle brush. The plant bore its spores (not seeds) in cone-like structures.

 Lepidodendron cone/strobilus

Lepidodendron (related to club moss)
Lepidodendron had tall, thick trunks that rarely branched and were topped with a crown of bifurcating branches bearing clusters of leaves. These leaves were long and narrow, similar to large blades of grass, and were spirally-arranged.

Lepidodendron has been likened to a giant herb. The trunks produced little wood, being mostly soft tissues. Most structural support came from a thick, bark-like region. This region remained around the trunk as a rigid layer that grew thicker, but did not flake off like that of most modern trees. As the tree grew, the leaf cushions expanded to accommodate the increasing width of the trunk.

Lepidodendron likely lived in the wettest parts of the coal swamps that existed during the Carboniferous period. They grew in dense stands, likely having as many as 1000 to 2000 plants per hectare. This would have been possible because they did not branch until fully grown, and would have spent much of their lives as unbranched poles.

They sometimes reached heights of over 30 metres, and the trunks were often over 1 metre in diameter.

Calamites

Calamites (horsetail)Calamites is a genus of extinct arborescent (tree-like) horsetails to which the modern horsetails (genus Equisetum) are closely related. Unlike their herbaceous modern cousins, these plants were medium-sized trees, growing to heights of more than 30 metres (100 feet).

Club moss

Club mossThe climate supported lush, swampy forests. Club moss (Lycopods) made up the largest component of these forests and achieved gigantic size, growing to heights of more than 40 metres with supporting trunks measuring up to 2 metres or more in diameter.

The Devil's Arrows, Boroughbridge

I finally stopped off in Boroughbridge this weekend, after knowing of their existence for over forty years, to photograph the three monoliths collectively known as the Devil’s Arrows.

The Devil's Arrows consists of three huge stones that remain from an original four or five that stood in a southeast to northwest alignment less than 200 metres from the modern day A1(M) motorway, however they are of course considerably older dating from either the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. The stone at the southern end of the alignment is partially hidden under trees in its own fenced enclosure on the south side of a road that leads from Boroughbridge to Roecliffe and stands nearly 7 metres tall making it the second tallest standing stone in Britain only beaten by the mighty 8 metre monolith at Rudston, near Bridlington.

All three stones are made of millstone grit and are heavily weathered and fluted at their peaks, probably due to erosion by rainfall over the years, with the northern and southern stones having various indentations that could be interpreted as being cup marks although these marks could either be natural or the result of deliberate damage to the stones over the years (the southern stone is also carved with a modern OS benchmark, circled in the photo below).

It is thought that they may have been arranged to align with the southernmost summer moonrise. The stones are part of a wider Neolithic complex on the Ure-Swale plateau which incorporates the Thornborough Henges.