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Ice Age Story

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Orkney Riddle  Ice Age Story This is a story of Britain, and north-west Europe, as it passed through several periods of extreme cold, Ice Ages, the formative events that created the landscape we live with. It is not authoritative, and may be taken with a pinch of salt, but I hope that those who have learned, as I have, the geological history of Britain, will withhold any kneejerk response that may lurk unbidden in their bosoms. The general territory that the story covers is very roughly the Atlantic coast of Europe, but includes the Alpine mountains of southern France, and the northern mass of Scandinavia.  Specific areas that are covered are Britain, Norway, and the North Sea. These constitute an area that academia deems to have been covered by thick ice sheets, the British and Irish Ice-Sheet and the Scandinavian Ice-Sheet. These ice sheets are thought by some to have been joined across the North Sea for part of the last ice age. The theory that is proposed, studied, taught ...
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About

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Orkney Riddle    Jeffery Nicholls   A Potted History   I first went digging in 1964. My first "proper" excavation was in 1968 when I assisted in the excavation of a mesloithic site on Hengistbury Head in Dorset. I was a "Digger" from 1973 to 1984, and an engineer from 1985 to 2007 when I worked on pipeline excavations for 2 years. I worked two seasons with G de G Sieveking in 1973 and 1974 at Grimes Graves.  I worked for Peter White on Ancient monuments from 1977 to 1984. I worked one season at Wroxeter Roman City for Philip Barker, and two seasons putting in the drains for Wroxeter in 1976 and 1977 for Peter Brown and Peter White. I directed the excavation of a Dorset Barrow in 1975, in which I completely removed the monument from the face of the planet, and found not a bone, nor a pot, nor a sherd, nor anything that might represent the idea that the barrow was a funerary monument, as i was lead to believe. I don't think I ever recovered from that, and I have q...
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Solving the Riddle

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The Orkney Riddle  Solving the Riddle  The Riddle of neolithic Orkney is that there are insufficient significant structures on Orkney to support the huge numbers of hands that would have been been required to build the Neolithic monuments there, 5000 years ago. The Orkney Riddle is a group of  blogs based on this theme. It is named for the strand of undersea shallow beach that leads off east, from the Pentland Skerries, above,  in the Pentland Firth which may be the last relic of land that once connected Orkney to Scotland. This undersea feature is called the Sandy Riddle.  I started to research the geology of Britain over the last 100,000 years about 4 years ago. I began because I could find no real world evidence that Neolithic people had boats capable of transporting them and their animals across the Pentland Firth to Orkney in numbers sufficient to build the structures in Orkney that they clearly did. In order to get to an evidence based theory of both the ...
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Stones of Brodgar

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 The Stones of Brodgar  When I went to the Ring of Brodgar today I took a photo of each stone from outside the ditch. I have a theory that the Stones of Brodgar were set in their places with a sloping edge facing in the same relative direction in rotation around the circle. They obviously don't all have an obvious slope on one side. Also at least one of the stones fell over in historic or prehistoric times, and may have been re-erected by Historic Scotland staff. Could they have put them up wrongly? I don't know if my theory works. What do you think? Jeffery Nicholls 
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Orkney Riddle Index

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  Orkney Riddle  Index This is the southern tip of South Ronaldsay,  close to the Tomb of the Eagles.  The island offshore is called the Pentland Skerries. It is attached to a shoal of underwater shallow seabed, called the Sandy Riddle. Hence, the Orkney Riddle.  Here is the index to the blogs that make up the Orkney Riddle, research that touches the surface to suggest what really happened in the land of the Simmerdim.   A Bizarre Idea  Neolithic people walking to Orkney! That's the bizarre idea.  The Orkney Vole  It's a bit of a mystery how the vole delivered itself from Belgium to Orkney without passing through England and Scotland.    They Must Have Had Boats  That's what I have been told. Sorry, I don't believe it. Neolithic Migration to Orkney   This is a very brief summary of what may have happened in Orkney between 3500BC, and 2500BC. Pentland Firth  Crossing the Pentland Firth is exciting on a modern boat. It ...
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Doggerland

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Doggerland   Looking for evidence in the southern North Sea that might suggest that habitable land once linked Norfolk to Holland?  Shallow seas in the southern North Sea,  Doggerland and between Norfolk,  Lincolnshire and Holland.  Summary:- Two research documents are re-framed here to provide a proof that a land corridor once joined Norfolk to Holland allowing the migration of woodlands, vegetation, insects, reptiles, mammals,  and people between Europe and Britain,  until the Neolithic period of human prehistory.  The analysis of deposits sampled in the "Europe's Lost Frontiers" project records two major erosional events.  The first of these occurs as sea levels rise to drown wetland peats at around 9000BP,  or later. Peats growing in the region were drowned as sea levels rose. Peats growing at higher levels were not found ,and are therefore likely to have been removed from these locations by a later erosional event.  The second ...
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