#west hill cemetery

[packedwithpackards]

Packard gravestones in West Hill Cemetery. Photo taken by Bob Mills in Jul. 1980. Originally shared on this blog in Nov. 2022.

[messiah-girl]

Philadelphia, August 2022

[coloradomartini]

Wild Bill Hickok & Calamity Jane | Deadwood Mount Moriah Cemetery

Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are two famous graves right next to each other in Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, South Dakota. We will tour the famous graveyard in Deadwood, SD to visit Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane.

Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are two famous graves right next to each other in Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, South Dakota. We will tour the famous graveyard in Deadwood, SD to visit Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane to famous characters of the Old West and history. Learn more in the video by Generations Found YouTube: Deadwood, South Dakota More about this subject

[thethirdromana]

Can you estimate how long approximately Mina ran from their house to the cemetery hill, or is it impossible?

It's very possible, and lots of people have tried it out! I think @astrangergivingthestrangewelcome did a post about this last year or the year before, but I can't find that, tumblr's search function being what it is.

Here's a youtube video of someone walking Mina's route with today's entry overlaid:

In google maps it looks something like this:

Google reckons it's just under a mile from the Royal Crescent to St Mary's, 20 minutes at walking pace. Mina runs from the top of the West Cliff - I think she would be doing well to manage it in less than 10 minutes giving the steps on either side.

[tangerine-dream-machine]

do you wanna see the west with me?

Notes below!

This is not a realistic road trip at all, but here are the places/activities shown:

Yorktown Battlefield, Virginia: the site where General Cornwallis surrendered in 1781, bringing the end of the Revolutionary War

Liberty Bell, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: the famous bell with the message "Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof", and later a symbol of liberty for abolitionists and suffragists

Drive-in theater: outdoor cinemas that reached their peak in popularity in the 1950s to 60s; the film is The Searchers (1956)

Kayaking: a fun lake/ocean activity

Trail of Tears National Historic Trail: this trail crosses nine states and follows the forced displacement of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Muscogees, and Seminoles due to the Indian Removal Act in 1830

Traffic (and billboards): a bane to many and common in car-dependent cities

Cedar Hill Cemetery, Vicksburg, Mississippi: one of the oldest cemeteries in the US still being used; predates the Civil War and includes a Confederate burial site

Devil's Tower, Wyoming: a majestic (and sacred) butte and the first US national monument

Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah: a flat, empty salt pan estimated to hold 147 million tons of salt and a popular racing site

Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming: a geyser in the world's first national park known for its reliable eruptions

Gas station, Nowhere, USA

Horseback riding, Montana: no comment, just a fun time

Las Vegas, Nevada: the world renowned Sin City, a place that caters to many vices

Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, North Dakota: group of missile defense facilities including missile silos and the pyramid-shaped radar system; built in 1975 and decommissioned after one day of operation, a "monument to man's fear and ignorance"

Hoover Dam, Nevada and Arizona: hydroelectric power plant on the Colorado River; the highest dam in the world at the time of its completion in 1935

Space Needle, Seattle, Washington: an observation tower with a revolving restaurant built for the 1962 World Fair "Living in the Space Age", a theme chosen to show the US was not lagging behind the USSR in the Space Race

Sequoia National Park, California: home of the world's largest tree by volume (General Sherman) and the highest point in the contiguous US (Mount Whitney)

Muir Beach Overlook, California: a former base station overlook with dugouts that gained importance immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 as a means to watch for attacks on nearby San Francisco

@usukweek

[unusual-suspects]

west laurel hill cemetery, june 2024

[bogleech]

@revretch and I were driving home and from the road we could see the largest most complete fairy ring I have ever seen in all my life, even from other people's photos!!

If you're in Portland Oregon, go see it at Mt. Calvary Cemetery, on a hill at the fork of West Burnside & NW Skyline Blvd before it's gone!

I don't think you're supposed to walk up that hill but if you don't anyway don't forget how important it is to step inside, otherwise no fairies will get you at all!!

[rinnntastic]

Boothill fun fact of the day from a history minor with a Wild West hyper-fixation 😛

I’m nearly 100% positive he was named after “Boot Hill” which was a name used throughout the west for cemeteries that would mostly contain cowboys who “died with their boots on” (aka cowboys who died violently). One of the more famous Boot Hills was in Tombstone, Arizona, which was where the O.K. Corral shootout took place. This shootout is particularly famous; it lasted around one minute and was between the law (the Earp brothers and Doc Holiday) and a group of cowboys. The name of the cemetery is actually shown in the film “Tombstone”! Highly recommend watching it because Val Kilmer looked hot asf playing Doc Holiday 😭 maybe his name is a precursor for something that might happen to him or maybe it’s related to his lore🤨hmmm

Anyways thank you for coming to my ted talk, after re-reading this I realized I’m a major loser with too much time on my hands! If I don’t pull Boothill I’ll seriously start tweaking 😻

[cityofmeliora]

Ghost and Southern California

i'm from California, so a lot of the locations in the Ghost lore are familiar to me! i wanna use this post to show / explain Ghost being set in the Los Angeles area.

though it hadn't been explicitly stated yet then, there are actually hints that Ghost is based in Southern California as early as Chapter 4: The Accident. when Sister Imperator is driving, you can see palm trees on the hills along the road. of course, lots of places have palm trees, but the specific combination of palm trees with the rocky cliffs and sparse vegetation feels distinctly Californian to me.

the Dance Macabre music video shows Nihil met Sister Imperator at a mansion in LA (as explained by the intro). don't know the exact location, but if i had to guess, i'd place it maybe somewhere in Beverly Hills, which has a lot of mansions like this.

the Kiss The Go-Goat music video again confirms that they're in Los Angeles. it features the Whisky a Go Go, a real music venue in West Hollywood. the Mary On A Cross animated music video accurately places it on a corner along the Sunset Strip.

the Mary On A Cross lyric video shows Sister Imperator walking through the Ministry building before leaving to see the show at the Whisky a Go Go. this is another indicator the Ministry building is in the LA area since it's within driving distance of the venue. scenes in the Ministry building are filmed at a real mausoleum northeast of LA, but i'm not going to name the location because the Ministry is supposed to be a fictional building. interestingly, the lyric video also gives us the exact time of the concert.

after the events of Kiss The Go-Goat, the Mary On A Cross animated music video starts with Sister Imperator driving to her house, which is in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood near the Hollywood Sign. you can see from the road that they're in the hills looking over the city.

then Sister Imperator and Papa Nihil run from their house to the Hollywood Sign. there are hiking trails that go from the surrounding neighborhoods up to the Hollywood Sign. you can go behind it just like they do in the video.

Sister Imperator and Papa Nihil cross a body of water that is most likely the Hollywood Reservoir, although the video places the Hollywood Sign west of the lake instead of east, as in real life.

Sister Imperator and Papa Nihil make out in a cemetery (which i did not attempt to locate) and then end up at a motel. this is not a real motel, though. it's the Bates Motel movie set at Universal Studios Hollywood. i laughed so hard because recognized it instantly in Rite Here Rite now. (i've been on the same tour that the Nameless Ghouls were on.) Universal Studios Hollywood is both a theme park and an actual film studio. there are people filming when Nihil calls Mr. Psaltarian to come pick him up in the The Future Is A Foreign Land music video.

so to summarize some of the locations in those videos: the Whisky a Go Go, Hollywood Sign, and Universal Studios are highlighted in yellow. the red outline on the map shows the boundary of the Hollywood Hills neighborhood. the Hollywood Reservoir is the body of water in the middle of it.

The Future Is A Foreign Land music video and Chapter 13: The Beach Life feature Mr. Psaltarian's beach house, which is on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. though there are beach houses all along the SoCal coast, Malibu is closest to LA, and is pretty much the only place where houses are that close to the water without some kind of barrier. it's a real house and i've driven past it. i know the exact location but i'm not sharing it, for obvious reasons.

here is Malibu on a map relative to Los Angeles:

as a side note, it appears Cardi now drives Mr. Psaltarian's old car, a 1968 Buick LeSabre convertible. it has California license plates, of course, but the plates must have been replaced at some point, since that California license plate design wasn't in use until 1988.

lastly, Rite Here Rite Now is set at The Forum (now called KIA Forum), which is in Inglewood near the LAX airport. Inglewood is technically its own city, but it's completely surrounded by LA.

when Rite Here Rite Now released, TF said in an interview that it's "common knowledge" that Ghost is based in LA. i found it a bit funny because i've read very few Ghost fanfics that are actually set in LA, so i don't know how 'common' that knowledge really is, LOL. but i hope this post helps!

WHAT WAS BEHIND THE DECISION TO SHOOT THE FILM AT THE FORUM IN L.A.? TOBIAS FORGE: [...] There’s this common knowledge that the HQ of the band seems to be in L.A. So the Forum is not only a classic venue, but it’s sort of their home turf. Had we placed the story someplace else, we would’ve had to justify: Why are they there? Why is this show special? Revolver (June 2024)

[memewhore]

(Previous post for context)

I might have found some kind of ceremonial mound. I found a record of one other burial mound in this county and I found it and it's still standing - yay! It's right on the county border. But what the hell is across the road from it?? It's a mound-looking structure with tiers and an elongated flat top. On a farm. But I thought it couldn't be a mound because it's sitting right out in the open. Then I thought, "Ohhh, stupid me, it must be a reclaimed landfill! Duh!" But I did the research and there has never been a landfill there. Huh?? My dad said maybe it was a filled-in strip mine, but I was like, "Way ahead of you! Here's a map of every closed mine in Ohio - it's not there. There's never been a mine there, either."

It doesn't look like anything but a hill from the road, so maybe it's just big enough that people never really saw it. The back part with the lower level isn't visible from the road.

Reasons why this COULD possibly be an ancient mound:

There is a known mound right across the road, and several other smaller mounds and a native cemetery site (no mound) within 1-2 miles to the south across the county line.

It's next to a creek that later Native Americans used as a main travel route.

It's next to one of the main ancient trails in the county (the road now follows it.)

There's a cemetery next to it. No idea why, but SO many settlers and early towns built cemeteries next to or on top of burial mounds. Not always, but so often it's one of the first things I look for if I spot a potential mound.

The flat area on top of the mound is aligned exactly east-west. Ceremonial mounds were often aligned to the solstices or to important stars like Polaris. (The county line is slightly tilted. The mound is accurate, E-W.)

Other ceremonial mounds kinda look like reclaimed landfills. Here's Monks Mound in Illinois:

The oldest topo map I can find shows it there in 1944. The oldest aerial photo shows it in 1958. Being farmed. Btw, modern landfill regulations didn't happen until 1959. They mostly just burned or buried shit and called it a day.

So there's ample reason to investigate more. I just want to know WHAT it is.

And in related news, I'm now talking to the county Historical Society because I want to work with them and start a county "Prehistoric Preservation Society" because I am definitely already finding mounds. Most are small and I've found at least a dozen throughout the county that I'm certain are mounds and 50 or so more that look very likely. But this one and several other sites with big ones are the ones I want to focus on first because they'll be most likely to garner scientific interest.

[packedwithpackards]

Gravestones of Barnabas I and Mary his wife in West Hill Cemetery. As Bob writes, the cemetery was tended by Tom Packard "until his death in 1975, and actually on his property, now sold and subdivided." Photo taken by Bob Mills in Jul. 1980. Originally shared on this blog in Nov. 2022.

[copperbadge]

“Breaking into a cemetery”? Sam, dish the tea, please! (And not into Boston Harbour, either). What sort of sightseeing exigency required burglarizing the marble orchard? And how did you evade the gendarmes? This sounds a bit “Leverage”. (Or something a young Steve Rogers might pull.)

Looking back, I'm gonna say like 70% was me being young and stupid and 30% was probably ADHD-fueled impulsivity.

Copp's Hill Burial Ground sits on the flat top of Copp's Hill, with walls all the way around and entrances on opposite sides. The other two sides have houses butted up against the cemetery on one, and a tall wall with a long drop down to the street on the other. Signs posted outside of it say that it opens at sunrise and closes at dusk.

When I got there, which was early but well after sunrise, the main entrance was still locked. I walked around, looking for another one, and on the opposing side (the Charter Street entrance) the gate was also locked, but the wall is very low and so is the fencing. If you look at it on Google Streetview you can see that for a reasonably athletic person it would be fairly easy to get up on the wall and vault the fence.

I thought, well, it's supposed to be open, so probably I won't get into trouble if I climb in. Ah, youth.

So I did, and I had a very nice time; I didn't disturb or vandalize anything, obviously, I just walked around and looked for the gravestones I'd wanted to find (Prince Hall, the Mathers, etc). I still have photos I took that day:

[ID: A scanned film-camera photo of a cemetery, looking east towards the water, the sun barely touching the tops of the trees; the gravestones are laid out in irregular lines, cut through with brick-paved paths.]

Anyway, I spent a lovely hour or so amongst the stones, and then I happened to look up as a large SUV drove past the west entrance. It slowed down and I felt like it was...looking at me, very clearly visible as the only person in the cemetery. So I started strolling back towards the east entrance. Sure enough, not long after, a police car pulled up to the west entrance, lights going, and I took off running.

I cleared the fence pretty much in a single leap and darted down Charter Street, ducking into an alley where I pulled my coat off and stuffed it in my messenger bag, figuring that would make me harder to identify. The messenger bag converted to a backpack so I did that as well, pulling out the straps and shouldering it. I then strolled Incredibly Casually down the next cross-street to the Old North Church, which was open, and ducked inside just as the cop car rolled past again. I settled down in one of the high-walled pews for about half an hour, just to be safe, and I didn't hear the sirens come past again. It's quite a pretty little church anyway and I had a book, so it wasn't a hardship.

Should I have broken into the cemetery? While it was laughably easy and I had good intentions, probably not. But nobody was harmed, so while it's not a good example to set it's still a fun story to tell, especially in person (I do hand gestures).

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

The grave of Mary Nichols at Highgate Cemetery West . She died of diabetes in 1909, she lived in Muswell Hill , known as the sleeping angel on a bed of clouds ornamenting her tomb,was covered in ivy for many years until photographer John Gay rediscovered her resting place . Her inscription reads “ In Ever Loving Memory of Mary , darling wife of Arthur Nichols and fondly loved Mother of their only son Harold who fell asleep 7th May 1909 . Also of Dennis Arthur Charles son of Harold and Winifred who died April 1916 aged 18 months .

[legendary-defender-of-fandoms]

My (barely) Coherent Thoughts After Seeing Beetlejuice Live

Yes, I saw the show three times. Yes, I think I bought one of everything at the souvenir stand (and what I didn’t buy I either already owned or will add to my Christmas list). Yes, I know I have a problem. No, I don’t intend to do anything about it.

About five minutes into the show I decided that yes, if they ever stage a production on the West End (basically the Broadway of London, England), I WILL go to see it! And if Alex is invited back & says yes, I’ll book the next flight across the pond!

EVERYONE in the cast was amazing! From the leads to the supporting characters to the ensemble to the swings (a few subbed in for the last show) - they all gave incredible performances, and made every show the best.

Fun details you miss in a boot or just listening to the cast recording - on the backdrop for the opening scene, the hill in the cemetery is heavily based on Jack’s Hill in Nightmare Before Christmas. There are also two headstones with legible writing on the hill. One says “Van Dort” as a reference to Corpse Bride, and the other says Jane with a long name I couldn’t make out because my eyes suck & I got distracted by a group of mourners crossing the stage with an extra pair of feet.

I say this with the utmost respect & affection - every character in Beetlejuice is a certifiable weirdo! Charles LOOKS like the most normal character, but even he’s quirky & bizarre with his matter-of-fact “I’m very good at sex.” He’s awesome because he can play the straight man to the Deans & Otho and be funny with Delia, Lydia, Beetlejuice and the Maitlands. But everyone from the guy whose name is on the marquee to Maxine Dean is a strange & unusual person, and I am HERE FOR IT!

Things Beetlejuice would have to do to make me say “Yes” before he even finishes asking include: sit on my lap with his face inches from mine & his thighs balanced on mine so he can kick his feet in the air like a teenage girl, walk over to me with his silly little jaunty walk, wear either his full wedding attire or his Cowboy attire, just pop into existence when I say his name 3 times, etc.

The show really is part musical, part magic show. There’s a lot of sleight of hand & misdirection. I was starting to wonder how Justin even fits his arms into the sleeves of his costumes with all the crazy stuff they had hidden inside! Most of the tricks had to be modified from the Broadway version, like being stabbed by bad art, but they’re still impressive.

It should be illegal for anyone to look good in a decrepit red suit that looks like it just got Carrie’d, and yet.

It’s insane how folks can be handed nearly-identical scripts & songs for the same character, and yet come up with vastly different interpretations.

I don’t know what else I can say. I laughed, I cried, I stuck around at the stage door partially to get Justin’s autograph (which I did, the guy’s so nice & patient), partially to let traffic die down before getting stuck in a hot sticky parking garage for 20 minutes, mostly because my legs wouldn’t stop trembling after what can only be described as my first religious experience.

[melmac78]

@katblu42 wrote: “I know practically nothing about Texas, other than it is big, and in the South of the USA. It seems to be portrayed as having fairly warm weather . . . but as large as it is, does it have regions of varying weather patterns? And in a similar vein, are there various areas of diverse vegetation/fauna?”

••••••

In short, yes. I live in West Texas and mom in Southeast (about 500 or so miles apart), and we can have essentially two seasons. It can rain there and be bone dry here, and sometimes in the winter she asks me the temp so she can prepare the next day.

And it’s no exaggeration some parts of the state you can experience at least 3 seasons in the same day. I’m personally lucky in that I seem to have adapted to this particularly go here, which it’s frequent 2 seasons a day right now, but I get funny looks being in short sleeves in cooler weather because of it.

•••••••

Vegetation/fauna is definitely diverse. If I travel from home to Mom’s, in that 8 hour drive I go from:

• a flat area where most trees that aren’t mesquite were planted by settlers (you can tell where a house is/was based on clusters of trees), that grows cotton and feed if they aren’t an oil town

• area with mesas and wind turbines after leaving the Caprock, another ironically heavier oil area. The turbines are increasing to the point I joke they’re “Don Quixote’s nightmare.

• areas with thicker areas of trees that are shorter, oddly at times more prickly pear cactus, and bigger cities,

(This varies if I take the longer route - uncommon but I will in December to run a different St. Jude race - through Boerne/San Antonio where you go through the mesas and rolling plains again in the middle of the state, and unfortunately experience 40 mins. of cell phone dead zone. It’s bad to the point it’s LEGAL to go 80 mph to get through it)

• heavily wooded area and gentle hills.

And then if we go to Galveston or Corpus Christi there’s some marshy areas and then the coast.

The marshiest area is around La Porte I think, which is where the battle of San Jacinto was and the Texas fighters used this to an advantage.

••••••

Wildlife varies. I see more wild turkey and pheasant here than east coast. I’ve seen a few roadrunners but they seem more prevalent in the Palo Duro Canyon.

Prairie dogs are far more common in west Texas. Amarillo’s minor league team’s mascot is Sodpoodles (a nickname) and Lubbock has one park dedicated to the black tail prairie dogs.

Anyone watching them I’d say don’t walk close: their town system underground makes it dangerous to walk lest you fall through a hole.

I definitely see more deer near moms along with raccoons. Skunks more often here: in the summer I must walk the cemetery in full daylight, not dusk as they seem to like living there more. (Just clarifying for folks: where I am the cemetery is the safest place to walk due to bad traffic and has a very high visibility).

Snakes are definitely a big issue all around. For the poisonous ones, West Texas more rattlers and coral while East copperheads and water moccasins (though up here we’ll see some copperheads).

Coast we see a lot of sea turtles nest there, particularly Kemp Ridley. There’s a lot of hatching ceremonies in the year where the state protects the turtles until they waddle into the Gulf to give them a fighting chance to survive.

I’m sure there’s even more than this, but it’s more of I’ve experienced here

Thanks for the ask.

[lycomorpha]

Eivor's herbarium: Page 5 - grasses and yarrow from a cursed zone meadow

~

“From a hill-top meadow west of Grantebridge, where the land breathes again”.

~

Before changing county, I've been thinking about meadows and how agriculturally important they would have been to settlements like Grantebridge or Ravensthorpe. Handily there's a meadow not far from our previous stop outside Soma's longhouse, on a cursed hill-top just west of town.

Cursed zones are small areas on the map where a black roiling fog gathers, horses freak out, and Eivor talks of malevolence and cursed troll magic.

This horse is questioning its life choices...

To dispel the curse you need to find and destroy a skull covered in glowing symbols. Shoot it and the dark fog dissipates, with Eivor saying that the land can breathe again.

The cursed troll magic symbol

Cursed zones are a slightly odd feature, in that it’s not clear how the ‘magic’ of the curse works. There isn’t an obvious link to Isu tech. We find some notes/snippets of story around suggesting they’re being placed there by Saxons in an attempt to hex away the Danes. In the Wrath of the Druids DLC, the druids are using a recipe that creates hallucinogenic vapor to induce visions of werewolves etc, so the cursed zones could work in a similar way, with the fog being part of the mechanism. But it’s not clear to me unless I’ve missed something.

However they’re supposed to work, cursed zones are good places to find fungi, plants, and honking great big trees. So I quite like them. (I know some gamers hated them and felt they were pointless collectibles; if that’s you, maybe some video game botany will improve them?!)

Aerial view of the hill-top cursed zone west of Grantebridge

The hill-top cursed zone west of Grantebridge has a particularly nice view from above and is surrounded by meadow. Since Eivor is helping run a settlement with farms, I’m sure she’d appreciate the importance of hay meadows to agriculture, and as a source of herbaceous plants for medicinal uses.

In the long grass

What is a meadow?

A meadow is an area of grassland where the vegetation is allowed to grow tall and isn’t cut in spring and summer. In late summer/autumn, the meadow is mowed to make hay, which then feeds farm animals over the winter. Until then, cut meadow is grazed by animals (sheep, cows, maybe goats) which poop as they go, dropping some handy fertiliser around the place. When gets too cold and wet for livestock to be out grazing, animals are brought in and fed on the hay, with the meadow left until spring for the cycle to start over again. This is in contrast to pasture, which is grazed in the growing seasons rather than allowing grasses to get long.

The un-cursed meadow, ready for hay-making

Hay meadows are full of diverse grasses and wildflowers. In AC Valhalla we particularly see yarrow, ox-eye daisies, and grasses like Yorkshire fog (4th pressed grass from the left) and meadow foxtail (2nd from left.)

On this page I’ve centred yarrow, mainly because I’m saving the daisies for another page! The grasses are from a couple of square metres in my back garden that I keep as a veeeery smol meadow. I’m lucky enough to have some outdoor space, and my priority in life is generally insects. So I leave some grass to get tall, and encourage a range of local wildflowers and grasses that serve as food for bees, moths, and beetles. In the un-cursed meadow, Eivor might have also seen clover, yellow rattle, lady’s bedstraw, and I’d bet on sweet vernal grass and crested dogstail too (3rd grass from the right.)

Ox-eye daisies in my local cemetery meadow

Hay meadows are an amazing reservoir of wild plant and insect species, but are now a rare habitat. Apart from the obvious changes in agricultural practice, capitalism doesn’t value biodiversity in spaces it could build on, extract from, or intensively farm the crap out of. But hope is not lost for meadow species. Many conservation organisations here work with farming communities to restore former meadows or to create new ones. Churchyards and church lands that haven’t been developed are also important spaces for meadow preservation – and in AC Valhalla we see meadows around the monastery at Meldeburne.

Meadow grasses and flowers around Meldeburne monastery

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)

Super-common and very tough, yarrow is a component of meadows but is found anywhere grassy – it’s found in lawns and verges all over the UK. In my area you'd be hard pressed not to see any in summer.

Yarrow in my backyard

Feathery, finely divided leaves gave it another common name, milfoil or millefoil, meaning 1000 leaves. It has clusters of small white or pinkish flower heads with an interesting structure. The flat-topped clusters of flowers look like they’re made out of daisy(ish) shaped individual flowers...

...But take a look at those daisy shapes and you’ll see that each is actually a cluster of many smaller tiiiiny flowers that just LOOK like a daisy. The centre is made of a bundle of tube-like ‘disc’ flowers that have 5 petals fused together. These are surrounded by a few ‘ray’ flowers, each with one large petal. So cool!

Yarrow: flowers inside flowers

Ecologically, it’s an important source of nectar and pollen for bees, and a food plant for many other insects, including moths and beetles. Some cavity-nesting birds use it as lining material. I encourage it to grow in my lawn along with clover, self-heal and black medick, because it’s a lot hardier and more drought tolerant than any lawn grass.

Historically, yarrow used to be used medicinally to staunch bleeding, but weirdly was also called ‘nosebleed plant’ because of a myth that it caused nosebleeds. It also used to be used as a good luck charm.

Yarrow and ferns

I'm going to move onto the autumnal ferns of Ledercesterscire for page 6, but I'll probably come back to Grantebridgescire for some of the other mysteries.