The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #9379   Message #62851
Posted By: Penny
13-Mar-99 - 02:17 PM
Thread Name: English Folk Songs
Subject: RE: English Folk Songs
Hey, I'm not an expert, you know, but I do have books. Cran is usually a crane, as in long-legged feathery thing that stands around by water. We don't have cranes now, but may have had in the past, or they may have meant herons.

The Uffington White Horse is the one you mean, I think (the grass doesn't grow because it is regularly "scoured", as are the other hill figures. "(Have you been to Cerne Abbas in Dorset ever? That one is sure to interest some of the contributors here!) There is no known date for most of them, but some work was done on Uffington a couple of years back, and it is much older than Celtic.

Arthur was either a Celt, or Romano-Celtic, which may mean the same thing except for the cultural accretions.

I know that the Stone of Scone was reputed to be the one which Jacob used as a pillow when he was running from Esau, but, I have to put my geologist's hard-hat on here, it's been identified as a red sandstone of a type found in Scotland. There is such rock quite close to Scone. Then again, I think the identification may have been done after the operation to retrieve it earlier this century, and there has been a suggestion that the one returned recently was a fake, substituted at that time. My personal feeling is that the importance of that stone is not its high and far off past, but that invested in it in the last few hundred years by the Scots, who have quite rightly been given it back. My heart would rather that it had stayed back when seized, rather than been granted.