Originally published October 2008 With Halloween or Samhain coming I thought I would touch on something spooky this month. In the old Disney movie “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” there is a scary scene (at least it was scary when I first saw it as a child) when the Banshee and and the Death […]
Author: Groomporter
Blogger for The Celtic Croft and owner of MacGregor Historic Games http://historicgames.com
In the News
I’ve got a short week, bouncing MacGregor Games from the Renaissance Festival in Minnesota to 18th century Indiana this weekend, so just a quick look at Celtic related archeology news this week. Look for The Celtic Croft at Stone Mountain Highland Games later this month. Heat wave reveals Ancient Sites through Crop Marks in Wales […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: Scots Greys
Alleged corn/maize carvings in Rosslyn Chapel I’ve previously discussed the claim that Henry Sinclair sailed to the New World in the 1300’s. The Archeological Fantasies Podcast discussed “-the supposed pre-contact images of New World maize in places like Rosslyn Chapel and ancient temples around the world. What do these images actually look like, is it […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: The Celtic Church
Originally published October 2010 By the 6th century the Christian church in Ireland had become organized in a system of monastic “federations” connected to a mother house. By the 7th century this system appears to have replaced the Diocesan system, giving authority to the abbot of the monastery rather than to a Bishop. Bishops still […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: MacBeth
The real MacBeth was the High King of “Alba” from 1040-1057. (In the eleventh century the name Scotland was beginning to appear, but Alba was how the area would have been most commonly named at the time.) Chroniclers from the time describe him in complimentary terms. He is referred to as “ruddy of countenance, tall […]
Strawboys
Strawboys are an Irish tradition that I just discovered after seeing this picture on a Tumbler blog. According to one article I saw it may be a tradition that is seeing a bit of a revival in Ireland. Their origin seems to have been lost in the mists of time, but it seems associated with […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: Ireland, Lotteries & American Slang
Most people view lotteries as a modern practice that some governments use to raise funds outside of taxation. However the earliest known example of a European lottery to benefit the public good was in 1444 for the sake of repairing the city walls and fortifications of L’Ecluse, France. Probably the earliest English lottery was in […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: Crannogs
Crannogs are usually artificial “islands” that were constructed mainly in lakes, but on occasion in rivers. The name may derive from the Irish word for tree “crann” and may have referred to the timber palisades that protected such sites, or the timber foundations on which they were built. In Ireland most of the crannogs have […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: Celtic Spain
People usually don’t think of Spain when they think of Celts, but other than Gaul it is the only other place where the use of the term “Celt” is documented in antiquity in the form of names such as “Celtius” and tribal names such as “Celti Praestamarici.” Celts seem to have been just one of […]
Reiver’s Curse Stone
The “Border Reivers” were raiders along the Anglo-Scottish border primarily from the late 13th century to the beginning of the 17th century. Although their heyday is said to have been during the last century of that period. A good deal of the border country is mountain and moorland, good for grazing, but with relatively little […]