Wednesday 6 November 2019

In the presence of ancient living beings...


Last weekend I spent a few hours with my wife at Croft Castle in Herefordshire. This is a unique fortified house that has been occupied since 1066 by the Croft family. The views out from the house are over wooded hills and valleys towards the Brecon beacons. 

At the castle is a long avenue of ancient sweet chesnut trees, at least four hundred years old. It is humbling to walk down the avenue past living beings which were planted about the same time that a leading renaissance explorer, mathematician and natural philosopher was observing the surface of the moon at Syon Park in West London (this observer was the Englishman Thomas Harriot who drew what he saw of the moon through his telescope a few months before Galileo used his telescope to look at the surface of the moon and record what he saw). 

Image copyright Henk van Boeschoten from HERE.