September Roundup

Star Wars

                September 30, 2024

            September Roundup

            September was very much a month of two halves for me. Hope you all had a good month - mine flew by!
The first two weeks of September were spent on the Isles of Scilly. I could write so much about this special collection of islands off Cornwall, but we’d be here all day, and somehow I like keeping some of that place just for me. I’ll share photos of the ancient sites I visited though (what else would I share on here?), which I appreciated much more since my last visit in 2021, the holiday on which I wrote the first part of Children of Shadows. Quite full circle.
This is one of the most intact Scilly-type Bronze Age entrance graves, Innisidgen Upper, compared to less-preserved Lower, built partly into the rock down the slope on the right.
Halangy Down is the amazing remains of an Iron Age/Roman village, with field boundaries, terraces, lower walls, cupboards and hearths of roundhouses to explore.
Just above Halangy at the top of the hill is Bant’s Carn, another amazingly preserved Bronze Age grave. It’s amazing to stand in there, feel the stone, imagine people using the chamber over the decades, filling it with urns.
This is Bandit, a very friendly dog, guardian of the ancient village while his human assistant clears some of the heathland. I loved his black and white split.
While those were from our first walk on St. Mary’s, this was the next day, and this is Giant’s Grave. As you can see it’s large, a neat mound with a passage through to the rectangular chamber inside. These chambers, like those I visited in Scotland, all have a larger curb around them too.
This is another of the six less intact and smaller burials on Porth Hellick Down. You can see the same basic chamber construction of (usually four) capstones over the walls.
This is the statue menhir known as Billy Idol, now cemented on St. Martin’s but perhaps from a nearby (now over the sea) Iron Age/Roman shrine. It’s hard to make out the face but you can definitely see the head compared to the chest of the figure that may have had more of a body. The daytime ‘lighthouse’ the Daymark is in the background.
I took a wonderful guided tour of the uninhabited Samson with Katharine Sawyer who runs Scilly Walks. I went solo this time, but took the tour with her with my family when I was maybe nine. This is another definite chamber on Samson’s South Hill, facing North Hill.
North Hill contains this ancient cist burial, basically a stone coffin perhaps reserved for someone special at a time when most were still cremated and placed in the large chambers.
I remember crouching into this mound when I was younger, and recreated that experience this time. This was also partial inspiration for a very important spot later in Children of Shadows…
This is on Bryher’s Samson Hill, looking across to Samson but also to one of the three impressive entrance graves on the hill. From above, you can definitely see the edges of the once-mound/curb, the larger stones much more prominent on this hill for whichever reason. At the time of their construction, all the islands I’ve mentioned would’ve been connected by fields. Some ancient boundaries are marked by lines of seaweed at low tides.
The hill in the background is actually one of the largest Bronze Age burials in Western Europe, not that you’d know by walking across there! The OS map has as many dots as bumble bees that now patrol the heather. I think we only spotted a definite five or six graves. In the midground is the semi-famous Hell Bay. But the foreground of this photo shows the line of Iron Age ramparts. I’d climbed over them at least twice in the past without realising that this Shipman Head Down was once a hillfort.
This stone circle mysteriously appeared on a beach on St. Martin’s one day… quite an impressive structure aligning to the moonrise.
And from one circle to another. On the drive back home we popped in Woodhenge for a break. Woodhenge was a series of wooden circles by the site of Durrington Walls, where the builders and users of Stonehenge lives and feasted.
You can see the curve of the bank and ditch, an enclosure built actually after the houses were abandoned. But everything was connected here for hundreds of years from Neolithic into Bronze Age, with avenues and the bends of the Avon.
There’s Woodhenge from afar, one of two major timber ceremonial structures on the site. You can see the slight henge surrounding what has now been recreated with colour-coded concrete cylinders.
What I found interesting about the six concentric ovals is their general lack of symmetry with each other. Above is one of the better line ups. Nobody really can know what it looked like: if the posts were carved or had lintels like Stonehenge on top.
But that’s enough about ancient things for one roundup! Turning 22 made me feel slightly ancient actually, but not that much. I had a great birthday, the first in a while spent actually on the day with friends and family, good food, and plenty of new reading material. My birthday also marked a year of this newsletter. Thank you to all who’ve joined me on this journey so far! We’re creeping closer to triple digits. If you’re one of those few who have been here since the beginning or thereabouts, you get a special dose of gratitude! But to anyone taking the time to read this: thank you, thank you, thank you.
A year’s gone past very quickly, yet I feel this is just the start of this journey of mine.
Speaking of journeys, I took the train this time for my final day of on-site volunteering for North Leigh Roman Villa. Rain dampened the visitor numbers, but I enjoyed every interaction with those that did make the trek, and with my fellow volunteers of course.
I loved watching that patch of Apollo-sun trace along the patterns throughout the day.
A great highlight was seeing the new roof of the mosaic house, which let more light in. After not being able to see that piece of ancient artwork for months, I was awed again to see it, and to properly be able to share it with visitors for the first time. Watching a pheasant explore the ruins was also quite a sight!
Since then I’ve actually had my first full week of 9-5 work, working as a labourer for my heating engineer friend. There’s a different sort of satisfaction you get from completing jobs with your hands, and a different ‘zone’ you get into. I’ve been very grateful for the experience!
Writing Update
In the quiet moments on holiday (without WiFi or even a steady data connection) I typed up about two thirds of notes from my great trip to France in May, ready to infuse into my Roman Empire-travelling gem journey. These also aided in my writing of a 3,000 word short story of which I’m very proud, written for what will be a beautiful anthology. If anything comes from that submission, I’ll let you know (fingers crossed)!
I wrote my third article for Vlogger Beat, soon to be released. This was the second part of my comprehensive guide to jacksepticeye’s multimedia ALTRVERSE, this one covering the short films from 2019 until the present, mainly focussing on his fictional organisation IRIS. Here’s a link to my articles if you missed the last two and for when the latest goes live. Please give it a read to support me and my writing, but also to learn about another of the many fictional universes I’m fascinated by.
I also received a very exciting email. I hope it’ll lead to something I can talk about.
On top of that, the first guest post for this newsletter was a pleasant surprise in my inbox. (More on that in the next A Long Time Ago… which’ll wrap up my guide to Marvel Star Wars comics.) That felt like a very exciting next step to what I do here, though, and I hope you’ll enjoy the new formula and perspectives I plan to share in my Star Wars/history series.
This month’s releases:
A Long Time Ago… #12 and #13 in case you missed them.
This month's books
This segment showcases the new additions to my research and fiction collections. Sadly and unexpectedly, this month’s comics order did not arrive, but as is to be expected, it was a very bookish birthday, filling up a few gaps in the collection that I’ve mentioned in past A Long Time Ago… posts, as well as some surprises:

A healthy near-half-and-half split of Star Wars and everything else. The Join the Resistance trilogy will be a fun read, as will Pirates Price and the last few volumes of IDW’s Star Wars comics in the reflective plastic, completing that 2017-2020 collection. The other book on that second row is one I’ve been holding myself back from reading, a collection of interviews with the band twenty one pilots (who I met in May!) telling their whole story so far. My to be read pile is too full!
The bottom row is a mixed bag of fiction/non-fiction, all amazing resources for my writing supplied by my thoughtful parents. The Morpurgo is the first of his I remember reading, set on Bryher and with a magical sword - which is funny because that Alice Roberts book talks about the warrior-woman’s sword and mirror Iron Age cist burial found on Bryher!

And as another means of thank you to my parents, here’s three more books they found for me this month, plus the Marc Guggenheim novel not pictured last month! The bottom two are pretty self-explanatory - and while I don’t like JK Rowling at all, I’ll appreciate the gorgeously decorated screenplay.
And that's the end of this month’s roundup. Thank you so much to everyone that reads these, especially if you’ve made it this far. Please share with your friends and family and ask them to subscribe - that would mean the world to me. I do love sharing my various exploits with you all, and would treasure having more people with me on my writing (and life) journey.
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Cheers,
Harvey

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