500words

   Jeanie October 2022 Long, long before the introduction of the international date line, the Arab geographer Abulfeda (1273-1331) predicted that circumnavigators would gain one day.   He was proved right in 1522 at the end of the Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation – the first successful navigation around the world.    After sailing westward from Spain, the expedition called at Cape Verde in the Atlantic Ocean for provisions on Wednesday 9 July 1522 (ship’s time) - however locals told them that it was actually Thursday 10 July.   The crew was very confused as they had meticulously recorded every day of their 3 year journey, without fail. The international date line (IDL) was not drawn up until 1884.   It is an imaginary line of demarcation that passes through the mid-Pacific at roughly 180 degrees longitude.   It is halfway around the world from the prime meridian (0 degrees longitude) which is in Greenwich London.   The IDL runs from the N...

    It has been reported widely in the media that consumers are confused by the three terms ‘sell-by’, ‘best before’ and ‘use-by’, used in food labelling. Just in case any of you are in the confused group, here’s a brief rundown. Sell-by dates don’t matter a bit to the consumer. They were introduced for stock control in Marks and Spencer’s warehouses in the 1950s and then rolled out to the shelves in the 1970s. The  best-before  date, sometimes shown as BBE (best before end), is about quality and not safety, so is usually applied to foods that have been preserved including frozen, dried, tinned foods, pickles and jams and some hard cheeses. Best-before dates were first introduced, also by M&S, in the 1990s as an indicator of the quality of their food. Using produce by the best before date guarantees the optimum flavour, texture and appearance of the food. This means that there is no need to get rid of food that has passed its best-before date, it’s ent...

  The Date Palm The date palm is the oldest tree still living, it has been known from remotest antiquity and extensive fossil records extend back 80 million years to the late Cretaceous period.   It is thought that the date palm was first cultivated in lands around the Persian Gulf over 6000 years ago and evidence has been found in Neolithic sites in Egypt and Syria. The “Fertile Crescent”, the land north of the Arabian Desert and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf, is the region where settled farming first emerged and people began clearing the land and developing the local vegetation. One of the oldest palm artifacts found is a seal from a jar found at the Saqqara necropolis in Giza, Egypt.   Made from plaited palm leaves, it is approximately 2,100 years old.     DNA extracted from it shows a very similar genetic code to the modern North African date palm.   It also has generic definition similar to the wild Cretan Palm found in Crete an...

The Meikleour Beech Hedge, in Meikleour near Perth in Scotland, has been recognised since 1966 as the longest hedge in Britain and the highest of its kind in the world. The hedge was planted in autumn 1745 by Jean Mercer and her husband, Robert Murray Nairne, on the  Marquess of Lansdowne's Meikleour estate. It is said that the hedge is a living landmark to the men who planted it; they were Jacobite sympathisers who were called to fight in the Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746, and none of them returned alive. In order to remember them, and her husband who also died in the battle, Jean Mercer said that the hedge should be left to grow towards the heavens. And grow it did; over the last few hundred years, the Meikleour Beech Hegde has grown to an incredible height of 30m and is 530m (one third of a mile) long. In fact, it is so huge that the process of cutting and re-measuring the hedge takes four men approximately six weeks to complete; in 2019 this operation cost t...

  OUR HEDGE We have a hedge and it is ancient and lovely.   Lovely to look at but not great to cut as it is about 12 foot tall and 8 foot wide in places.   Peter and I (mainly Peter) used to cut it ourselves but now we get someone younger, fitter and with less fear to do it for us.   The bit on the hill is especially tricky and risky! We worry about the hedge because there are 4 other gardens that share it.   Presumably it is difficult for them to cut it too – although each of them only has a little bit compared to us.   We worry that someday someone will get fed up cut a chunk out of it and replace it with a fence, or a wall, or a little leylandii hedge or some such.   I don’t think they really can, as it is “our” hedge but who knows?   Someday we might come home and it could be gone.   There is legislation around this.   When a hedge sits along the boundary between 2 properties both landowners need to be in agreement before it is r...

  A hedge is a line of closely spaced shrubs or trees – designed to form a barrier or mark a boundary of an area.   A hedge is also a way of containing a path, or collection of paths that form a maze.   Mazes can be either a single route from start to finish or may offer a convoluted labyrinth of options from a start to end point.     The definition of labyrinth and a maze indicates that the first has a single path, whereas the second may not necessarily lead to a centre.   However, as the mazes became more popular this term encompassed both single paths and multiple options. The first recorded labyrinth was in Egypt in the 5 th Century BC, and one of the most famous labyrinths is the Cretan Labyrinth – with the Minotaur at it’s centre.   These of course had brickwork walls.   Most theories on labyrinths involve their use as a form of spiritual journey, or a way to evidence a path towards something – Nordic fishermen walked through labyrint...

W hat’s in a hedge?        It will come as no surprise to most of you that I have a n interest in hedges at present. I have recently spent many happy weekend hours in a damp , muddy field digging little holes in stony ground and inserting wee whips of hawthorn, hazel, rose , whitebeam , dogwood and blackthorn.       N orthern I reland has the highest density of field boundary hedges in the UK which gives us the impression of a wooded landscape whereas, in fact, the island of Ireland has the lowest native woodland cover in Europe . So , t he abundance of hedgerows goes some way to making up for the lack of deciduous woodland and hedgerows are an important habitat for a wide range of wildlife , supporting all levels of the food chain.   Although there are some ancient hedges in Northern Ireland , most are substantially younger than in the rest of Britain where hedges can be upwards of 1000 years old , Northern Ireland’s hedges t...