Punch & Jamie

 cw: Murder manslaughter 

Things don't "come in threes": we're just primed to be aware of that sort of thing after something odd / outré / other sails over our aware-horizon. I had just finished reviewing O Brother - a harrowing tale of a young chap going off the rails and never quite getting back on track. From quite another field of my attention a similar story burst front and centre. The Rest Is Politics TRIP is a two-hander podcast in which Alastair Campbell [New Labour] and Rory Stewart [Con.] disagree agreeably. They are both white cis-het British centerists, so their disagreements are hardly existential. They chatter on about British and World politics much like other members of the commentariat. They are actually much better networked than most regular journalists and started a sub-podcast TRIP-Leading where they have interviewed past and present prime ministers and Presidents of  . . . Albania, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Guyana . . .

But they also share space with other people who are making a difference. In mid November, they did a foursome [also on YT] with James Graham and Jacob Dunne on Prison Reform, Masculinity, and Restorative Justice. Rory Stewart knows something about prisons because he was Minister i/c of them in the brief Theresa May government. He took his job seriously rather than soundbytely: visiting the most hellish and trying to put lipstick on the pig. Jacob Dunne knows rather more because, like Gary "O Brother" Nevin, he was banged up .  . .  for killing a stranger with a single punch while off his face with drink and other drugs.  Because he was 19, and no longer a child, because he plead guilty he was sentenced to 4 years in prison and served 14 months. Prison is not the best place for the dispossessed to find meaning or guidance on what next?

After Jacob was released, his probation officer wasn't able to help him find somewhere to live: there was a long waiting list for . . . zero available places. But she was able to talk to him about Remedi an organization helping people come to terms with their actions and the consequences. They also hold out a hand to the victims of crime, helping them come to terms with their loss. After some time communicating through intermediaries, Jacob got to meet 'his' dead chap's parents and everyone in the room did well with their anger management. Joan Scourfield, the grieving mother and Jacob Dunne the killer got past forgiveness and became . . . friends? They meet on the regular anyway and have done two-handers for / with The Forgiveness Project, demonstrating that being kind to others is being kind to yourself. And that revenge and hate just keeps the juggernaut of self-righteous anger crushing more souls. Jacob Dunne has written a book about his journey: Right from Wrong: My Story of Guilt and Redemption [2022] - co-writer credit → Mark Eglinton. Some months later, the story was flagged by edgy playwright James Graham and he brought the story to the stage as Punch.

 Graham [b.1982] and Dunne [b.1992] both grew up working class in Greater Nottingham, a post-industrial conurbation in the English Midlands. But their lives were very different. As a teenager Graham was figure-skating on the local rink while Dunne was more into getting hammered. Graham stayed in school and went on to college; Dunne failed and then dropped out of school, supporting himself selling drugs. But they had common ground and a similar accent and collaborated to bring a powerful drama to the stage . . . many different stages, on both sides of the Atlantic. Audiences have been shaken and stirred and resolved to do better and be kinder and less judgemental. Who knows, maybe a powerful play can shift the dial where decades of statistics and analysis and hand-wringing has achieved nothing but heartache all round. Like Mr Bates vs The Post Office in 2024 [see also Blob].

There are those who never met any of the people involved and refuse to condone or explain or forgive. For those folks mired in their certainties, evil actions are only carried out by evil people. And of course they themselves are squeaky clean in thought and deed. A sample from FB

• Bindy Beridge How about you change the word ‘scrapping’ in the article to violent assault. 
• John Mccaffrey He killed an innocent man, but we have to listen to his sob story and watch him make money out of the man he killed from his book. 
• Tracey Poole Rehabilitation is all very well but where’s the justice for the victim and their family? It’s like they’re just meant to move on and be pleased that the offender who ruined their lives is having a nice time now. There would be no forgiveness from me. 

What they don't appreciate is that Jacob Dunne is walking right next to Mephistopheles "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it". It's okay if he cracks on with new dogoodnik path though life; indeed it's okay if he cracks a joke once in a while. He clearly has an inherent reservoir of empathy: when he was a teen, his presence would light up The Gang. Now he's turning that one talent [which is death to hide] on for funders and donors and prison officers and offenders. Getting a more positive message to / for / about the dispossessed whom the state forgot requires time and treasure. We have decades of inertia to turn the ship of state from victim blaming and depriving the deprived.

One optimistic note. In contrast to the friend-group of Gary "O Brother" Niven in Irvine; 'most' of Jacob's pals have grown out of nihilistic self-destruction and are now, like him, 30-something Dads making a better fist of living their best lives than they were when punching people back in the days of their youth.

Mammals suck

Thanksgiving last, a post on FB went so viral that both my correspondent G and Katie Hinde noticed. The latter's not too surprising because the FB post was all about Professor Hinde and her 20 years of research into the composition of milk. And correspondent G? She is the best researcher I know who was never trained in how to do research but worked it all out for herself, and created a sharp set of tools for Finding Out. Like us all, G is focused on a subset of all things, but I haven't yet worked out what are the limits of that subset. In the present case: milk, lactation, evolution and amazin' women in science. 

One interesting facet of the story is how fractal research can be. In 2018, another of 'my' amazin' women, Dau.II, asked a gimlet question about seal milk whc set me off down a comparative composition of milk mammal-hole. It was clear to me then that "a milk is a milk is a milk" [ref] is just not true: the protein content of milk can vary 1% to 13% among mammalian species. Humanity has about the lowest [protein] known. Hinde's earliest milk research documented quite different milk content within the human species. There is even a suggestion that mother's tailor their milk to suit each pregnancy: boys and girls get a different shake. One comment under the Hinde TED talk cited below asks "What about fraternal twins one of each sex" hey I was half of that conundrum in utero.

For reasons which baffle reasonable-patriarch me, human lactation and breast-feeding is highly charged and politicized. We were barred from Bewley's in 1976 for suckling The Boy invisibly in  a café. It is not kosher to advocate for breast-feeding because that will shame mothers who cannot. "cannot" is a broad church from a breast cancer survivor who has undergone a double mastectomy to a 1st time mother from a buttoned-up family who "just can't".  And it's not a linear spectrum! All kinds of reasons, unreasons and circumstances can align to prevent mothers using their own milk-bar. You don't want to get too high horse about this because clearly there are successfully walking talking thinking and earning adults who were formula from Day 1. Thing is blaming 'victims' is sooo much cheaper than blaming systems. Hinde advocates [What we don't know about mother's milk TED alert] that 'society' looks at making it easier for mothers to feed their own with their own in, say, the work-place. How might that happen? 

• there is a place other than the jacks where a lactating manager might get going with a breast-pump
• there is a creche in the building
• there is a government policy to mandate paid parental leave for those who want it 

Your company, your country may be failing here. I think we can all agree that The Answer is unlikely to be "increasingly polarized assertion, please". 

Some statistical number crunching might help: what are the levels of glyphosate in human milk? Is that level higher than in other human bodily fluids? DDT, back in the day, accumulated in apex predators, because it was metabolically stable, so every meal up the food chain had higher concentrations. If kids are loading up with glyphosate from the water or pollen or the air they breathe then breast milk isn't making it worse. And more focused: what's the level in cow's milk from which infant formula is created. Next: what about BPA in milk: same questions apply. 

• Are bottle fed children or their later adult selves different from breast feeders w.r.t. [insert condition here]?
• is the difference statistically significant?
• does it matter; or is the difference just part of nature's wonderful diversity?
• will the difference cost society / the state more than making, and making available, some fun engaging infomercials to ante-natal classes?

One of the rhetorical devices used by Katie Hinde points out that breast-milk is minority interest to the biomed research world. I updated her stats on pubmed paper-counts to reflect the state of play in late 2025:  

I'll add that there were 57 extra hits [erectile disfunction] for the right-hand column from spelinge challenged research groups. Earlier prez at Harvard Thinks Big 4 by younger Hinde: "Why Mammals Suck".  Much more data-rich prez by even younger Hinde: showing how mother's milk differs for boys and girls.

Hard chaw gone

cw: suicide

All happy families are alike; each unhappy 
family is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy. 

Apparently this phenomenon is known as the Anna Karenina principle. It's probably true for healthy and sick bodies. Take blood pressure: it is driven up if a) the heart beats faster b) pushes more through each beat c) fluid builds up in the finite circulatory system d) the walls of the blood vessels constrict , so that the finite fluid volume is squeezed e) some other effect I may have forgotten. "Normal" blood pressure is maintained by a complex and multiply-redundant system [ACE, ADH, ANP, ANS, ARB etc] of hormones, neurotransmitters, receptors and ligands. Doctors have a rather large pharmacopeia [at least 9 different statins] from which to prescribe. The skill is working out which part of the system is banjaxed and targeting that without jerking around the bits which are doing their best under adverse circumstances.

I've been ear-booking a memoir, O Brother by John Niven [Guardian review], which is disc-harrowing and redemptive by turns. Niven and his wee brother Gary were raised in the 1970s among the dispossessed of Irvine, a New Town SW of Glasgow. There was plenty of scope, and many role-models, for having dumb-ass, often violent, adventures on the move fast and break things spectrum. It was easy enough to get aff their heids with glue, Bucky and vodka - and later (with more money) ecstasy and cocaine. Yet these boys had quite divergent life-courses: 

• John pushed himself to, and through, college [1st class hons, no less] and became [eventually, much struggle] a successful author and screen-writer with fast cars and nice suitings.
• Gary became a woefully inept drug dealer; serving time for possession with intent to supply. 

One late-onset tonk the brothers had in common was being afflicted with cluster headaches - a rare [1/1000] crushingly painful, episodic condition. This was seriously and serially mis-diagnosed in the boy who was left behind in Irvine: his GP clocked "headache" and prescribed Nurofen. John, in London, with college education and access to Google, got both diagnosis and access to treatment (insofar as there is effective treatment!). happy heads are alike; each unhappy head is achy in its own way and aspirin won't blatt a brain tumour.

Poor wee Gary, broke and broken, finally managed to off himself . . . while in hospital [having called 911 after another evening of suicidal ideation and dead-end despair]. It shouldn't happen under those circumstances. But my father shouldn't have died "unexpectedly" in hospital after falling downstairs and being subjected to a succession of 'hilariously' inappropriate medical interventions. My brother and I went to identify the body half expecting to meet The Other Mr Scientist on the hospital books whose treatments had been shuffled and intercalated with the Da's. There was an outside chance that our father was on a trolley awaiting an MRI in the other hospital in the same Trust. Oh, and they lost his medical records! 

Gary was kept on life-support for four [4!] days after he'd killed himself. X-rays, and oxygen and intubation and MRI were readily available for the dead. But simple care-and-attention were not there for the living. The family never faulted the coal-face staff at the ER and ICU - they were kind, professional and effective. The System and The Management; not so much. John and his surviving sister went, through three [3!] FoI requests, after the transcript of Gary's 911 call. They sued the hospital for negligence and cover-up and won.

It was a Pyrrhic victory. No amount of win, no amount of compo, could bring back the wild beloved boy who never grew up. It took ten years of process before John the Writer could get their story down on paper. By that time, John was able to record that all of Gary's pals were dead. Some additional back-story in Holyrood.

Tolstoy's quote in the original Russian: Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему. 

DKFL

I just finished ear-booking a memoir Eyewitness: The Rise and Fall of Dorling Kindersley by Christopher Davis. In a first for me, it was read by a voice-bot; but it would have been hard to determine this from the aural evidence alone. It had about the same number of egregious mispronunciations as the, like, people they employ to create audio-books.

In our pantheon of the Saints of Kapital, Peter Kindersley ranks second only to Sir Clive "ZX81" Sinclair, [of whom multiprev].  We were distantly aware of Dorling Kindersley as a publisher of gorgeous glossy informative non-fiction for families. Dau.I and Dau.II were born in 1993 and 1995 and by 1996 we joined Sa Bhaile [At Home] a community of woo-folk [a lorra Birkenstocks and rice-cakes] who chose intentionally to keep their kids out of school.  In 1998, The Education Welfare Bill threatened to regularize Home Education in Ireland. Some of us in Sa Bhaile had a [interminable] series of meetings to create a new more structured disorganization; the better to fight or divert The Man from interfering in our version of educating kids at home. It was quite heady as we decided to organize the first conference sponsored by our nascent Home Education Network HEN.

Around this time, The Beloved went to London for a meeting [AGM??] of Education Otherwise EO, the well-established British equivalent  of HEN. The key-note speaker was Peter Kindersley, riding high on a direct selling pyramid scheme venture called Dorling Kindersley Family Learning. The business model for DKFL was for wannabee thousandaires to host DKFL jamborees at their homes - think Tupperware Parties for heavily discounted books, CDs and other merch. After his talk, TB barrelled up to him and said how inspiring DKFL was . . . and would DK like to sponsor the launch of HEN across the water in Ireland. Kindersley answered positively in a way that was not just "ho ho an untapped market". But businesslike, he asked for a business plan and proposal to be sent to his PA. 

Within a month a personal cheque for £2,000 had been lodged in the HEN bank account! In those far-off days, £2K was enough to cover all the upfront costs of running the 1st HEN Conference in Newtown School in 1999. That conference broke even - turning a modest profit from The Raffle. The Peter Kindersley Memorial Fund was rolled over to float the 2nd Conference in 2000AD. And so on! That subsidy enabled HEN to stagger on from year to year without requiring any Effective to raise funds for the major expense of the HEN financial year. Which was just as well because the HEN community was long on visionaries but short on grunts. So long and thanks for all the fi$h, Mr Kindersley.

The Beloved also signed up to be a "Presenter" for DKFL which didn't make us hundredaires let alone thousandaires but did allow us to acquire dozens and dozens of books at cost-price ad maiorem edu glossiem of our girls:  

The title of Christopher Davis' book Eyewitness is a reference to the long series of Eyewitness Guides whc fill the bottom right corner of the picture above: Sea Life; Mammals; Sports; Plants; Transport; Your Body; Space etc.. Those DK books formed the core resource for Dau.I and Dau.II to educate themselves from the comfort of their own sofa.

Davis was the 2nd Hire when Dorling and Kindersley launched DK at the Annual Frankfurt Book Fair in 1976. He was therefore witness to [and co-cause of] the Rise and Rise of DK through the 80s and 90s as they launched a string of million copy best sellers including John Seymour's Self-sufficiency which got us where we are today. Davis was "let go" just before DK imploded spectacularly by investing in millions and millions of unsellable items of Star Wars merch in 1999. The book is wry, funny and a good lens on booze, deals, hubris and humility. The bare bones of DK's history and timeline is captured here.

Th5n1ksgiving 2025

Bird flu is endemic now. The H5N1 strain of the virus, which has been found in turkey Meleagris gallopavo flocks in counties CW MH MO this November, is notably concerning because it is particularly virulent if/when it jumps the species barrier and starts to scythe through, like, people. One problem is that bird flu circulates in wild birds, and the Department of Agriculture has NO resources to prevent sparrows or rooks vectoring the virus into free-range commercial flocks. What they have done is mandate that poultry farmers get their birds indoors to minimize the chance of passerine poop in the feeders or water troughs. We are a teensy bit concerned for our favorite free-range && organic egg farm halfway between here and The Déise. In supermarkets in Ireland you can but organic eggs or free-range eggs but not organic-free-range and I go all Buridan's Ass on making the choice.

Today, it's Thanksgiving in the USA, the Canadian having given their thanks in October as always. In Ireland it's a just a normal working day but tomorrow Black Friday the shops will be rammed because discounts are to be had. And because Kapital can never have enough retail incentives Cyber Monday is in 4 days time. Whatevs, we have family&friends in the US and I try to remember to send them a greet in the much-to-be-thankful-for vein. My quip for 2025 has been This:

is as close as we're getting to turkey this year. Not that we'd be eating turkey in normal times - a most over-rated thing on which to waste oven-time. A little chicken can go a long way: roast as an excuse for roast potatoes, cold for late night sangers, curry for St Stephen's Day, and soup for the next couple of days after that. And the best of all these, for my pref, is soup. The justification for chicken and ham at Christmas is somewhat diminished because half the family are vegetarians. But our favorite farm does a line in free-range pork and ham and we had an excellent collar roast last year. I am tasked to order another for this December.

But to reiterate: we have much to be thankful for: plenty of firewood, the use of our legs, minds not tooo confuse, and a distinct want of Want.

Arrrrghinish

Bauxite is a locally [Les Baux-de-Provence, Jamaica, Guinea, Hungary] abundant reddish rock which is mostly Al(OH)₃ but run through with iron Fe silicon Si and titanium Ti congeners. Bauxite is the most abundant source of alumin[i]um for our take-out trays, soda cans and airplane wings. In broad terms, getting dirty bauxite to Shiny Al is a 4 step process 

1. Crush it to increase the surface area for chemical action
2. Slop in A Lot of hot caustic soda NaOH and boil it up under pressure to create pure sodium aluminate Na₂O·Al₂O₃
3. Discard the alkaline sludge aka red mud into tailing ponds until the end of time
4. Apply A Lot of electric current to reduce the alumina / aluminium(III) oxide / Al₂O₃ crystals to pure metal

Step 3 is a mill stone round the neck of share-holders and requires the company to divert significant dividend money to maintenance costs for the tailing ponds. In 2014, The Blob described the ruinous consequences of failing to front up these infra-structural costs in Ajka, Hungary. There on 4th October 2010, a berm failed after a rainy ould Summer. Seven people and 7 million fish died in the tsunami of toxic waste.

Long ago and far away??  On 4th September 1983 Aughinish Alumina Limited (AAL), a partnership of Alcan (40%), Billiton (35%) and Anaconda (25%) started operations in Co Limerick, using steps 1 - 3 of the ELI5 protocol above. You can see the consequences of 40 years of productivity from space:

on the South of the Shannon Estuary ~10km WSW of the Airport and about half that distance W of Askeaton, Co Limerick. AAL was the largest producer of alumina in Europe, making 35% of this key industrial resource at one time. Mergers, sales and acquisitions found AAL in the hands of Rusal in 2007.  Rusal is the creation of billionaire Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska Олег Владимирович Дерипаска.

So there was a Russian asset in the Republic when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 but the once and future Taoiseach Micheál Martin claimed Irish exceptionalism w.r.t., like, sanctions and Kevin Sheahan, Askeaton publican and Fianna Fáil CoCo councillor echoed this unprincipled parochialism. Because 450 of his parishioners were directly employed by Rusal and he needed their votes next time around - he had secured 1,246 first prefs in 2019 . . . the Irish for shame is náire. The fact that Deripaska is a citizen of CypRus and deplores the invasion of Ukraine shouldn't make no differ.

A couple of weeks ago the YT algorithm dropped me The Aughinish Incident a very Irish Disaster [26 min] by Kev Collins. It addresses another facet of the Aughinish / Askeaton story . . . tl;dw? AAL started ops in 1983, over the next ten years there was an uptick in a range of human and animal health issues locally. Cattle dying from vet-baffling ailments, stillborn and deformed calves. And children too. It's not much use cherishing AAL as a major likely employer for the next generation of Askeatoneers if those youngsters are disabled or dead before they can be hired. Public and political pressure built up and up until in 1995 the EPA was tasked to determine a) if the uptick was within the normal range b) if not, what was the cause.

After 3 years, and £5million, that investigative study concluded that there was a) nothing to see here b) no cause could be assigned with statistical confidence to the nothing. The skeptical minority report of environmental statistician Dr Sarah Walters from U.Birmingham was suppressed. So only 5 volumes and a summary [PDFs downloadable] totalling 1,280 pages were published . . . in 2013.  Unless a) you live in NW Co. Limerick && b) you're doing a degree in stats && c) your crap-detector is particularly well polished I doubt you're going to read the report with a jotter on the table for taking notes. Kev Collins runs a channel on which he can make articulate assertions w/o itemising all the supporting evidence. A bit like some of The Blob, do I hear you say? His Aughinish piece-to-camera is a useful teaser or call-to-arms, but you'll have to Work to determine if a) the EPA was suborned and bought off by oligarch-roubles or b) the adverse health storm in West Limerick was hard to endure but not attributable to anything but the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or c) little gr👁👁n men.

One of Kev's points is that the fissured limestone nature of the bedrock upon which the AAL red mud mountain is piled up is not uniform in texture. The subterranean fissures have capacity to funnel toxins underground quite a distance from the Aughinish source . . . to blurf up in some unfortunate Askeaton farmer's borehole - but not the neighbour's. The geology around the plant is quite diverse

with a thesaurus of limestones, siltstones, mudstones, shales and sandstones; variously cherty, muddy, laminated . . . and differentially porous. Which is an unfortunate reality because, it seems, the EPA adopted a model of uniform geology which was all about the Mean values while smooshing the variability around those means. Must hunt down Dr Walters' minority report.

Maybe refer back to the cluster of Down syndrome kids born to a cohort of mothers who had earlier attended the same secondary school in Dundalk. At the time my boss and his boss crunched the numbers and concluded that so many cases in such a small cohort was vanishingly unlikely BUT it was a) wrong and b) counter-productive to point the indignant finger of blame at The Brits and their Sellafield nuclear facilities just 100km E across the Irish sea.

The day after YT delivered The Aughinish Incident, Wikipedia headlined "The High Court of Justice in London rules BHP liable for the 2015 Mariana dam disaster in Minas Gerais, Brazil". That is Ten Years ago! BHP was originally an Australian mining corp but went multinational megacorp by merging with Billiton Maatschappij. Yes, yes the same Billiton which [see above] had a 35% stake in AAL when that enterprise floated . . . kleine wereld!  The High Court judge handing down that condemnation was/is Finola O'Farrell. Justice O'Farrell has acquired a lapel-full of gongs and honours from The Brits but I bet she's eligible for an Irish passport. As with Aughinish, the wheels of justice / fact-finding ground slow for downstream Minas Gerais. But a sorry tale of corner-cutting, lack of environmental testing, failures of technical oversight launched 45 million tonnes of toxic crud into the Doce River killing 19 people and uncountable millions of fish. That was +40x as much as at Ajka in Hungary 5 years previous. 

I trust that the EPA, Micheál Martin TD and Kevin Sheahan CC will own their responsibility when/if [whc heaven forfend] corner-cutting, lack of environmental testing, & failures of technical oversight cause a similar breach of berm into the mighty Shannon.

But for me, the bottom line is that the State should cherish all those who are crushed by misfortune [in maternity hospitals, sketchy work-places, on the roads, at the seaside]. Then we'd be less quick to lawyer up and/ or Go Tribunal and assign blame at ruinous cost to everyone involved except the lawyers. 

Just a little closer to the Lord

I've been a fan [have two of his glossy coffee-table books fan] of Andy Goldsworthy since Stone [1994] Time [2000]. His schtick is to assemble or modify natural materials so they better stand out in the landscape. A good part of the oeuvre reflects on impermanence - even gurt big lumps of sandstone are being imperceptibly changed by wind and tide. It can be a salutary lesson in humility: we're on the planet for a few years and when we're gone Nothing beside remains . . . yes, even The Blob will be poofed away by The Algorithm and forgotten.

In the 00s, a Donegal forester called Liam Emery was tasked to cover another Irish hillside [The S face of the Hill of Bogay] with a monoculture of Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis because Coillte the state forestry service likes to cast things in its own image: dull, monolithic, short-termist, tone-deaf. [maps loca] 

But Liam elected to stick one to The Man and interplant 3,000 Japanese larch Larix kaempferi among the spruce. Not randomly but intentionally so that as the trees grew to maturity the golden-turning larch needles would (at certain times of the year [FALL], under certain [rare-in-Donegal, sunny] weather conditions) light up the hillside with the image of a Celtic cross. I am not sure if the project was driven by particularly religious ad maiorem dei gratiam etc.  sentiments. But it surely tuned into a particularly peculiarly Irish heritage [R image clipped YT by Stephen Reid ultimately from Will Reilly].  So park your wonder-fatigue and check out the YT story. 

tl;dw: in ~2002, Liam and his pal Bernard went off piste; they surveyed then planted 3,000 alien-to-the-project larch whips in a 200m x 100m pattern. In 2010 Liam suffered a fatal kayaking accident and it wasn't until a tourist overflight in 2016 brought the arbor-image to the internet. Slightly longer version.

Obvs, being so photogenic and with Liam's tragic death and all, there is a movement to stay Coillte's hand w.r.t. to felling out the forest when its commercial time is done . . . in ca. 2045. But forests must be thinned every ~15 years lest the trees suffocate each other from being too close-packed. Dogoodnik tree-huggers can't just Stop The Chainsaws and think that will solve the problem. Kiwi Sean came and thinned our forest in 2022, bringing in selective light and air and converting crinkle-crankle trees into firewood to warm a couple of Olds in the twilight of their years. So I guess we can expect the picture of the cross get increasingly pixellated with each thinning cycle.

Also earlier Triquetra (Celtic knot) in P. sitchensis and L. kaempferi above the Lake of Glencar Co Sligo 

Hat-tip off also to thelife.of_reilly on Insta for a) the Bogay drone footage and b) flagging that another artificial heritage construct, the Grianán of Aileach lies about 3km NNE from the Emery Celtic Cross. The GoA is a 19thC re-construction of an iron-age hill-fort atop the peak in the distant background of the picture [R]. 

¿Post Title? Bloboprev.