500words

        During Elizabeth I’s long reign her ambition was to anglicise Ireland.  By the 1590s she had been more or less successful with the exception of Ulster but Ulster appeared to be safe enough, cut off as it was from the rest of the country by a natural barrier of mountains and lakes.  So long as the Northern chiefs were quiet it was safe enough to leave them alone. In Munster Elizabeth made a concentrated effort to anglicise the province.  Fighting dragged on for three years and almost all Munster was laid waste.  Although Elizabeth won this conflict it had the effect of uniting the native Irish and the Old English settlers, the descendants of the Normans, in their common faith of Catholicism.  This strengthened the government’s belief that to be Roman Catholic was synonymous with treason.  A land settlement in Monaghan had undermined traditional life there and the establishment of military garri...

  High Flying Reindeer Now Dasher! Now Dancer! Now Prancer and Vixen! …  Now, come on! Reindeer can’t fly, can they? A quick Google search for ‘reindeer flying’ brought up two suggested questions: How do reindeer fly? and Are reindeer real? I did wonder why people who were old enough to type into a search engine bar would ask these questions, but then, I realised that I had just done it too. Most of the results were, unsurprisingly, related to Santa’s reindeer, but it turns out that the 1823 poem ‘The Night before Christmas’ with authorship claimed by Clement C Moore in 1837, isn’t the beginning of the flying reindeer story. There are beliefs and legends surrounding reindeer taking flight dating back to prehistory. In the central and eastern regions of Mongolia, and into parts of Northern Europe and Asia, carved Reindeer Stones stand up to 15 feet high. The earliest of these unusual stones is thought to be between 5000 and 7000 years old with most dating to the Late Bronze age...