Down and Down
Olli, who is an archaeology student, and I keep having a conversation where I say that I don't really understand why things go down and down. Archaeologists dig down say, ten feet, and there's a Roman villa.
And yet I can't quite picture the conversation where they decide to build the new villa on top of the old one. But I suppose they did, more or less. Is the whole planet getting higher, therefore? Or at least the built-up bits?
This is the sort of question I ask; and she gives me a puzzled shrug.
Anyway, a few days ago I got evidence of it whilst driving through a Northern city - you know, the kind that's supposed to be full of pigeons and ferrets and flat caps and the like.
They were resurfacing the road and had scraped off all the layers of tarmac and stuff that they used nowadays for roads. Underneath were lots and lots of rather beautiful setts (they are like cobbles, but neater - Wikipedia doesn't seem to do setts, but you can scroll down from cobblestones).
Okay, fair enough, I thought, the roads at least go down and down.
This brings me to the ghosts.
In the 1970s I stayed in Abingdon Abbey in Berkshire, England. I was helping to put on a theatre festival in the delightful Unicorn Theatre there. For a few nights we slept in the Long Gallery but any ghosts left us well alone.
The curator of the abbey told me, however, that when he was on his own in the Abbey he had sometimes seen ghostly monks walking about. However, they only seemed to exist from the knees up, drifting about looking even shorter than mediaeval monks generally looked.
After a while he found out that the floor of the Long Gallery had been raised over the years, and the ghosts dated from when the floor was about a foot lower.
So surely, if everything's getting higher and higher, then this should be true of many ghosts, if not most? I know there's a story of some workman in York seeing lots of Roman soldiers walking through underground walls, but surely most ghosts should at least disappear below their ankles?
I've never seen a ghost, but if I ever do I shall try to check that it's at the right level on the floor. And if it's not I shall be even more puzzled than I am already.
And yet I can't quite picture the conversation where they decide to build the new villa on top of the old one. But I suppose they did, more or less. Is the whole planet getting higher, therefore? Or at least the built-up bits?
This is the sort of question I ask; and she gives me a puzzled shrug.
Anyway, a few days ago I got evidence of it whilst driving through a Northern city - you know, the kind that's supposed to be full of pigeons and ferrets and flat caps and the like.
They were resurfacing the road and had scraped off all the layers of tarmac and stuff that they used nowadays for roads. Underneath were lots and lots of rather beautiful setts (they are like cobbles, but neater - Wikipedia doesn't seem to do setts, but you can scroll down from cobblestones).
Okay, fair enough, I thought, the roads at least go down and down.
This brings me to the ghosts.
In the 1970s I stayed in Abingdon Abbey in Berkshire, England. I was helping to put on a theatre festival in the delightful Unicorn Theatre there. For a few nights we slept in the Long Gallery but any ghosts left us well alone.
The curator of the abbey told me, however, that when he was on his own in the Abbey he had sometimes seen ghostly monks walking about. However, they only seemed to exist from the knees up, drifting about looking even shorter than mediaeval monks generally looked.
After a while he found out that the floor of the Long Gallery had been raised over the years, and the ghosts dated from when the floor was about a foot lower.
So surely, if everything's getting higher and higher, then this should be true of many ghosts, if not most? I know there's a story of some workman in York seeing lots of Roman soldiers walking through underground walls, but surely most ghosts should at least disappear below their ankles?
I've never seen a ghost, but if I ever do I shall try to check that it's at the right level on the floor. And if it's not I shall be even more puzzled than I am already.
posted by Daphne at 10:36 pm
1 Comments:
I think, if I ever saw a ghost, I'd be checking something other than their feet! My feet, for instance, for puddles around them!
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