Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

Hi folks

long time since Rupert or I posted here but it just struck me that many of you will by now have seen our DVD 'Standing with Stones'. But there is one bit of it that hasn't really had a good airing, and maybe it should - that is Rupert's 'discovery' of the fossil tree trunk in the chamber at Bryn Celli Ddu. We really would like to get some feedback on this and see if anyone out there can either confirm our assertion or give an authoritative alternative explanation of the oddity of that free standing pillar. Let me explain what happened:

When filming 'Standing with Stones', during our second week away on our Wales/Ireland expedition, we came to Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesey. As was our routine, we first took ourselves there to do our preliminary recce. I had been there before - for Rupert it was a first time. Those of you familiar with this site will know that it is a large passage grave with a large central burial chamber. In that chamber is unusually, a single monolith - a pillar of stone.

We were in the chamber - me quietly thinking about camera angles and Rupert mulling how he could present this wonderful complex site, when he suddenly spoke to me and drew my attention to something so ridiculous and yet once seen so blindingly obvious that we were both genuinly shocked. We were shocked because lord knows how many people have passed through that little chamber and yet what we were suddenly seeing has been completely missed by everybody. We have looked high and low through all the literature, books, websites and blogs that mention this site. Nobody has seen something right in front of their faces that just doesn’t make any sense.

We were so taken aback by the implications of what we’d seen that instead writing script to shoot the next day, we decided we needed time to mull over this anomaly and we took off to Ireland instead - planning to film the Bryn Celli Ddu sequence on our return.

Here is the clip on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IubRw2ko69U

There are also a couple of photos of us with the pillar here: http://standingstones.tv/2008/07/15/shoot-diary-bryn-celli-ddu/

You’ll notice in the clip that Rupert says that “He came here yesterday” which you now know is not true. But it makes the point and is more succinct than “I came here ten days ago and I’ve been on a round trip through Ireland since in order to work out what I’m going to say next”

There have not been any experts gone to check the pillar as yet and we’d really like an expert second opinion on our interpretation of this little conundrum.

Anybody?

Michael

I hope no one minds me bringing this thread back up ..... it sort of captured my imagination and I was wondering if any definite conclusion had been reached.

I saw an impressive fossilised tree trunk at the Pit Rivers museum in Oxford yesterday, taken from Jurassic forest in Madagascar and according to the brass plaque "the original wood has been replaced by silica (SiO2) which turned it into stone," it was 200,000,000 years old. However, the museum information didn't tell us how long the fossil had been a rock when it was found.

Such a time span is quite a hard concept to grasp and I mention it as there was some suggestion that in certain conditions wood could solidify in a much shorter time ...... (though I think I may have been somewhat naive in my own small contribution to this discussion).

tjj

The differences are very subtle and certainly could be why they have been missed before or that I am wrong (if you see what I mean).
If you look around the vicinity of BCD there are a lot of rocks with these 'cut marks' some of them still have their inclusions where calcite crystals have formed. Woody textures also often appear in a variety of rocks.
The main reasons I think the pillar is different are that the 'cuts' are very untidy for this type of crystal inclusion, and the different woody textures (of bark and exposed grain) appear on all sides. They couldn't have been cut and a natural cylindrical pillar with those textures would be even more extraordinary.

I hope that makes some kind of sense. Trying to avoid paragraphs of rambling after a few glasses of red

..there is another named stone tree on TMA....

I wonder if this adds another aspect to the popularity of jet objects from the bronze age. Before you work it you can often quite clearly se the woodgrain.