Happisburgh, Deep History Coast: Footprints in the Mud

 

No, not the monolith of 2001 but nevertheless
equally as mysterious

This September the wife and I took our third break on the coast of the out-of-the-way Norfolk village of Happisburgh  As I noted in my post of Oct 2022 Happisburgh, in spite of it having that back-of-the-beyond, on-the-way-to-nowhere feel about it, nevertheless is a very notable location not least because of its paleontological significance. Seven standing wood monuments at the side of car park tell the story as it is currently understood. (See pictures above and below of two of them)

Happisburgh can lay claim to the earliest hominid footprints outside Africa. See the pictures above. See also below for pictures of the actual footprints before they were washed away by the restless sea.

At 850,000 years old these footprints are in the middle of the quaternary period; the age when Milankovitch cycles drove the complex beat of repeated glaciation. These footprints would have been made in mud during a warm interglacial interval. The mud is now soft rock, soft enough in fact for it to be possible to dig out small chunks with one's fingernail. Nevertheless, these hardened layers of mud are harder than the rock forming the cliffs which one can see in the background of the above picture. The cliffs overlie the interglacial strata but are being rapidly eroded leaving outliers of the relatively hard paleontological mud. The interpretation boards explained that these cliffs are largely the deposits of a later glaciation that bulldozed its way through the region 450,00 years ago. A section through the resultant glacial till can be seen in the photograph below of the cliffs. I'm no field geologist but this is my expectation of what the chaotic till left by glaciation would look like.....

In spite of the huge time scales that this landscape is evidence of, as we walked along the beach my overriding feeling was of the changing ephemerality of it all, especially of life.  The soft cliffs of Happisburgh are quickly eroding and each year a few more feet are lost. On the day of our walk the waves were wild with the restlessness that has carried on for eon's carving the coastline, churning the sand and depositing sediment along with fossils. At one point we came across a large bloated dead seal, perhaps ultimately to be buried by the waves and fossilized.

I took a picture of a cormorant perched on a break water. He was probably looking for fishing opportunities.....

The bird, of course, was completely unaware of the deep history drama still playing out around it; it has only been given to human beings to become conscious of that. In the background of my picture can be seen a huge container ship creeping along just over the horizon; a testament to human knowledge & technical prowess but nevertheless dwarfed by the scales of nature. The cormorant, whose mind was entirely focused on the fight for survival, wouldn't have a clue about the meaning of that ship or about the purpose of the orange cage on which he was perched, or about the bipedal ape who was contemplating him; not a clue about these things, any more than he had the slightest inkling about the deep history out of which his species had emerged. In a few more years his fight for survival would be over and he would be forgotten by the world. (Mat 10:29-31)

Later when returning to our caravan via the cliff path we saw another marvel of technology; a large potato harvester (See picture above, looking north): The driver was having his sandwich break in its comfortable air-conditioned cab. In the background are two line-of-sight microwave towers of the Bacton Gas Terminal. The technology in this picture is testament to the warmth and food delivered to modern homes on an industrial scale. Looking along the cliff top in the opposite southerly direction is another kind of communication tower, a monument to an entirely different kind of culture and this can be seen in the centre of this picture: 

This tower is none other than the tower of Happisburgh church. This website tells us that the church was completely rebuilt in the 14th century, the perpendicular period of church building. The late mediaeval culture of the day was emerging from earlier times when a feudal economic base meant that most utilities were generated locally rather than via a market supplied by industrialized production, By the late 14th century the black death had started to break this feudal system. However, pastural farming in Norfolk had brought a brisk trade in wool making the region wealthy enough to build such imposing churches. The market was starting to gain traction as a wealth creator. Since then, in just a few hundred years, human culture has changed beyond recognition as the market and a highly technological industry has generated wealth that the builders of Happisburgh church could not even imagine; the key to it was an agricultural revolution that had reached a pinnacle in our potato harvester where just one man could harvest a huge field in a day - or less.

Seven hundred years later that wealth has bought leisure, health and above all the knowledge and time to contemplate the mysteries of existence; but with it our culture has lost the assurance that those late medieval church builders had about the meaning of life; does our modern culture understand the meaning of the wider cosmic perspective about which we have learned so much? For some scholars the universe "just is" and believe that apart from meanings we create ourselves there is no other meaning to be discovered. So, is the man in the street who has been tutored by numerous academic authorities any better off about meanings than that cormorant? In the "light" of what some authorities will tell us the universe is all very random, empty, dark, cold and meaningless. So, it is no surprise that large swathes of our otherwise blessed & rich Western populations have given up seeking meaning altogether and are content to keep their heads above the economic waters as best they can. But really, although I've critiqued some of these authorities, I can't be too hard on them: The huge empty scales of the cosmic perspective are perplexing to say the least. In comparison those medieval church builders knew very little about this perspective; in their cosmology earth was so obviously the centre stage of a sacred drama that had run only for a few thousand years. In an attempt to cut the knot, the Christian Biblical literalists have returned to those cozier cosmogonies of past ages, reducing cosmic ages to less than 10,000 years and in some cases returning to a cosmogony that even our medieval forebears, who inherited Greek science, knew to be obviously wrong; namely, that the earthly drama takes place on a flat circular stage, not unlike the circular setting of Avebury. 

The universe is so organized that it allows us to describe it in terms of those elegant mathematical forms which our God given minds have distilled from the top of that organization. But that doesn't in anyway give the universe the necessity of aseity: Those mathematical forms are computational devices which only describe. As I've said so often, my view is that the universe is a work of art selected from the platonic world of possibility; laws or no laws it is not a necessity. There is good art and bad art but all is art and art is but reified possibility. Our deep history by God's grace is a reification from just one of the many possible stories in the platonic realm. Just as Tolkien selected one possible history to tell from all the possible stories that could be told, our cosmic history is as equally unique. That history, although perplexing to some, is nevertheless a miracle of creation and grace. With these thoughts in mind as I looked at a crystal-clear coastal night sky at 3am marveling at the visible milky way for the first time in years, it is a remarkable fact that at Happisburgh cosmic history becomes palpable. 

Northumberland: Myth and Imagination - Part 3

(See here and here for parts 1 and 2)

The people who built Duddo stone circle (above) were probably working to some worldview but we have only vague ideas about what that perspective was. Humanity has always been challenged with the task of making comprehensive worldview level sense of its environment; but epistemic problems have impeded success and gaps have been filled with intolerance and dogma. But as we see below the error of fundamentalist scripturallism is not the answer to those epistemic difficulties - far from it!

Some solutions ameliorate one problem only to introduce another. An example is sickle cell hemoglobin which helps suppress the symptoms of malaria but increases the risk of sickle cell anemia. In circumstances like this there is tension between the advantages and disadvantages of alternative outcomes as they are weighed against one another and some trade-off settled for. There is, I believe, a tension of this type in the epistemic heuristic inherent in the mental make up of human beings.

Human beings, it hardly need be said, are in the main social animals and this confronts them with one of their greatest epistemic challenges; that is, attempting to interpret the output of the most complex object known to man, namely the human mind. But the task of trying to read other minds is carried out routinely on the hoof and is a highly informal process. No doubt we have large packages of both soft and firm cognitive neural-ware which address this problem, particularly in the realm of reading the meaning of language. Human beings offer few observational clues as to what they are thinking even when they use language to express themselves. Hence, in this connection  human epistemic techniques have to join a paucity of evidential data-dots in order to arrive at highly complex conclusions about fellow humans. The epistemic process of predicting the otherwise hidden complexities of the human mind is likely to be very seat-of-the-pants. It is a miracle, however, that the process of mutual understanding works as well as it does, but there is a likely trade-off: The gains of getting it right outweigh the losses of making occasional (perhaps even frequent) mistakes. So it is likely that our neural-ware interpreter is balanced between the huge advantages of correctly understanding fellow human beings and an inevitable background noise of error. This human epistemic system is tuned on a knife edge and it's no surprise that in some individuals the inter-human neural package seems to malfunction badly: Autistics tend to under-interpret incoming data and paranoiacs over interpret it.

It is something akin to this very high risk neural-ware package which, I propose, is in operation during worldview synthesis. Unlike formal science which proceeds at a snails pace starting with basic and relatively simple systems and tries to build from the bottom up (see Brian Cox's comments here), worldview synthesis much more resembles the task of attempting to see behind the scenes into the human mind; this comprehensive epistemic process takes in a huge sweep of life experience as it tries to affirm very broad conclusions using methods that are informal and themselves often nigh on inscrutable. Highly ambitions conclusions, sometimes bordering on pretension and audacity, are arrived at. Worldview synthesis leaps well-ahead of formal science in ambition and vision, but the trade-off is that the risks of error, error often exacerbated by hubris, vested interest and tribal factors to name but a few perturbing influences, are balanced against the promise of an epistemic gold-mine. But let me point out the irony I've noted before; it is in fact an empirically based process in as much as it attempts to join the dots of experiential data, albeit rather creatively (See links below). In short  the whole system of worldview synthesis isn't a robust process!

However, we can but try. I'm the last person to condemn attempts at sweeping worldview synthesis; if we are looking for comprehensive understandings of the world we may have little choice but to engage in this activity along with its risks; it might produce high gains in the long run. The trick, I believe, is not to do away with the mythological imagination but to be aware of its operation and above all to use it with a good measure of cautious epistemic humility in order to avoid the pitfalls of misplaced hubris and arrogant certainty. But in spite of worldview synthesis being so seat-of-the-pants it is ironic that the mythological imagination is inclined to invest in its highly attenuated constructions far more certainty than they warrant; in fact it is almost as if these constructions become more real than the basic perceptions on which they are built. Pathological examples are easy to find: the Flat Earth conspiracy, David Ike's lizard conspiracy, Alex Jones' conspiracy theories, numerous Christian fundamentalist world views, Jones Town, and fascism. It is the certainty and blinkered single mindedness with which world-views may be held that gives them the potential to be highly dangerous; much more dangerous might I add than even the problems introduced by the unbridled ambitions of status-seeking. The latter is unlikely to be so sweeping as to attempt to assimilate the whole cosmic coboodle into one seamless narrative: The realpolitik of self-centred status seeking has a limited horizon and a limited agenda in its striving for hegemony, whereas mythological fundamentalism seeks a much more thoroughgoing world take-over; one that includes the very hearts and minds of those it seeks to dominate.

In modern times scriptural fundamentalism (a subject which concerns me deeply) believes it can eliminate epistemic risk with a simple formula; Viz: God's Word says so & so, therefore so & so is absolutely certain to be true.  But this epistemic has a very serious flaw: It fails to take into account that the natural language in which scripture is couched is far from being a direct revelation of truth. (See here, and here). As I have repeatedly made the case, natural language works by connotation and as such its interpretation taps into to a bottomless reservoir of facts taken from of human social history and the human context in general. Scripture can not be read like a mathematical text book where formality strives to obviate ambiguity and limit terms of reference; reading scripture is far more akin to the process of interpreting the natural linguistic output of other minds. Scriptural fundamentalists seek the security of certainty and authority; they cannot accept that there is a huge fallible human link in the chain when it comes to interpreting scripture. This fallible link is evidenced by the many contradictory forms that fundamentalism can take. See here, here and here.

Selfish human ambitions which seek after high status without regard to the welfare of society as a whole are potentially toxic, but things can be worse. The empires of status seekers are not quite so comprehensive as the ambitions of fundamentalist idealists who seek a mental empire of believers which they wish to draw in and submit to the narrative constructed in fundamentalist minds. So, on balance I fear the dogmatic worldview builders more than those with plain and simple social status ambitions and whose scope of operation is likely to only go as far as realpolitik. 

Human beings have an incredible ability to read imaginatively behind the scenes; we only have think of theoretical geniuses like Newton and Einstein who have scored big in this area. But against that we must set the many whose theories have failed and been forgotten (which probably includes my own!).
The theoretical imagination, especially when extended to vagaries of worldview synthesis, comes with risks.  This is not to say we should avoid braving the deep waters of worldview synthesis - far from it - we just need to proceed with a little cautious epistemic humility - that and a little faith. We work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

Epistemology links: 
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/epistemic-notes_14.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/the-great-epistemic-tradeoff.html

More pictures from Northumberland

The rain shrouded and ancient Cheviot hills convey a mood apposite to the mysteries of the meaning of creation.

To the uninitiated the highly asymmetrical ruins of Lindisfarne priory would present a mystery as deep as Duddo stone circle.

Weathering of the stones of the priory has created forms just as fantastic as the stones at Duddo.

The view from Ford church; It conjures up thoughts of ancient origins, beauty, light, colour and the truncation of death. These thoughts mingle prompting the  feeling it must all mean something, thereby fueling the mythological imagination. 

To the unknown god: A flower offering (?)  found in one of the erosion channels of the Duddo stones. The offering instinct goes deep. 

This isn't Northumberland but the Chinese "shrine" at Kew Gardens, where the floor has become covered in coin "offerings". Ornamental ponds often attract the same behavior. What's at the bottom of these token "offerings"?  Is it carried out instinctively or is it done with the conscious intention of  hedging bets and attempting a communion with unknown spiritual forces?

Holiday in Southern Ireland

The wife and I recently had a holiday in Southern Ireland, county Wicklow in fact.  Here are some of the places we visited:

Wicklow Gaol: This was our first visit of the week. Wicklow Goal is now museum. I anticipated before we went in that it would likely be a monument to British oppression of the Irish people. (Unfortunately for Ireland much of its history is covered by the history of British rule). I was right about this but I was glad to see that the story was told without any bitterness on the part of the Irish; one came out feeling the Irish still want to be friends with their somewhat larger neighbour. And a good thing too; we need friends like that! As an aside: We neither felt nor saw any of the many ghosts that are supposed to inhabit this building!

Glendalough: This is the ruins of a once busy monastic town. It is actually located in a glacial valley and as I looked around me I could see the high walls of the U-shaped profile of glacial action. The inhabitants of that town would no doubt have unconsciously viewed the landscape around them as ancillary and incidental to the cutting edge of creation; namely Man’s dealings with God.  Today, however, we find such a vision much more difficult to take for granted.  Changes in our perspective of time and space tempts us to view humanity as the ancillary objects, almost like inconsequential insects crawling around in the corners of the huge vista of a cosmic stage. When one understands something of geological history the setting of Glendalough, it only reinforces this tempting thought: This epic landscape with its huge space-time dimensions dwarfs human activity. It is easy to appreciate why Christian fundamentalists fail to come to terms with the cosmic perspective and can only cope with it by shrinking the cosmic backdrop to pre-scientific time scales and sometimes even returning to geocentric and flat earth cosmologies.

The central tower of Glendalough is its most notable feature: In the heyday of the monastic town it is thought to have served as a bell tower dividing up the day into its devotional segments; it was in fact the sacred equivalent of the city clock towers necessary for the marking out of secular time with a clock and bell before cheap mass produced time pieces were available to all.

Glendalough is now a town of the dead; It is still regarded as sacred and much of it covered by a grave yard that is in use today. I find some of the funerary paraphernalia that goes together with death full of pathos, a cathartic and apparently futile gesture in the face of the inevitability of termination. (See also here)

Aughrim: On the last day we walked round the small town of Aughrim not far from where we were staying. We had lunch by the gently chattering stream that passes through Aughrim. I reflected on the fact that this beautiful country with its neat well-kept shire-like feel is nothing short of a rural idyll. And yet southern Ireland is remarkably under-populated. There is in fact a very large Irish diaspora which dwarfs the 4.6 million inhabitants of Ireland. Sometimes an idyll can seem like heaven, a place where one wants to be for eternity.  But in this world it is difficult to tame the ambitious human spirit even with a mock paradise, a spirit that so often is looking for more. Sitting by a gently chattering stream is a solace and balm, but if you are ambitious you eventually get bored and have to move on. Many Irish people have done just that to the benefit of the world as a whole I would have thought!

Aughrim's quiet waters, but the allure of pastures new is always there.

The Hemlock Stone

The Hemlock Stone

I recently visited this interesting place: The Hemlock Stone just outside Nottingham. It is a peculiar and singular formation, which like an old decayed tooth stands proud of the otherwise toothless gums of the eroded Triassic sandstone hills of Nottingham.  There is nothing else in the vicinity like it and one wonders why it too hasn't long since been eroded. According to the geological blurb the sandstone at this spot is more strongly cemented than the surroundings and hence its resilience to erosion; however there is apparently some disagreement as to whether human quarrying activity might also have been involved. The Hemlock stone therefore presents similar doubts about its origins that the Cheesewring on Bodmin moor might once have done. For my blog post on the Cheesewring see here: 

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2006/10/contingency-conjecture.html

According to Geologists the 400 metre thick pebbly sandstone layer around Nottingham was deposited in Triassic times by monsoonal rains eroding an ancient mountain range to the south of Nottingham. Nottingham was a dessert region landlocked in the huge mono-continent of Pangaea. In some places water rounded pebbles are seen half embedded in the sandstone floor and can be removed with a bit of effort. I  took one as a souvenir.

The Pebbly Sandstone of Nottingham

The likely depth of time occupied by the sequence of events  needed to generate this Nottinghamshire landscape is, as is so often the case with geological sequences, breath taking: Those ancient mountains may well have started their life as ancient rock layers themselves. They were then uplifted and eroded by rains and rivers which deposited them as silicate grains and pebbles.  As Pangaea broke up advancing and retreating seas deposited further layers of rock hundreds of metres thick on top of the sandstone. Over long periods of time all these layers were uplifted, folded and in turn eroded down to the basement sandstone  rock, eventually producing the the landscape we see today.

Like the Cheesewring the Hemlock Stone's singularity probably attracted the attention of man's sense of the numinous and it has therefore been the place of religious ritual. Not surprisingly its conspicuous form strikes a sense of awe even in those whose reaction is not necessarily spiritual:

Thou petrified enigma.....what tempest sculptured thee?   (Henry S Sutton, 1848)

Similar awe has been expressed by antiquarians about the Cheesewring:

If a man dreamt of a great pile of stones he would dream such a pile as the Cheesewring

...this wonderful pile of stones...but whether the work of nature or not I know not.

The Cheesewring. Bodmin Moor: Granite, not sandstaone

Rock of Ages

Perched Granite Boulder, Lands-end, UK

During a recent holiday on the Pernwith peninsula (near Land’s End in Cornwall, England) I took a set of photographs of the coastal scenery and rock. These photographs can be seen in this Facebook album. For comparison I have also added some photos I took in 2006 on Bodmin Moor. (Also in Cornwall)

Both Bodmin moor and the Penwith peninsula are the eroded remains of huge granitic intrusions. Granite is melted and re-solidified Earth’s crust, although the exact mechanisms of both the intrusion and the subsequent production of exfoliation joints in the granite by erosion is still the subject of academic debate according to this wiki article.

Whenever I’m confronted with scenes of cliffs, valley’s and rock pinnacles such as we see at Penwith, the deep time needed to generate this “rock of ages” landscape feels very real. In this particular connection crustal melting caused by plate collisions that built mountains was followed by the slow cooling of rock deep underground. This slow cooling is evidenced by the large crystals of Penwith’s coarse grained granite. (See the large white feldspar crystals in one of my photos). All this was followed by an extremely slow process of grain by grain erosion. In fact when one beholds a rock pinnacle of granite and imagines that it was once underground and surrounded by an extensive apron of extremely hard igneous rock one senses that the length of time needed to leave this isolated outlier must be immerse, let alone first erode the mountain of rock above it.

As far as Cornwall is concerned both Bodmin Moor and the Penwith peninsula have the greatest concentration of Neolithic and Bronze Age stone monuments.  This may be simply because these granite landscapes provided a ready supply of very durable stone. Or, and this is a speculation, did these ancient people, seeing the marvellous rock formations around them desire to ape whatever agency they believed created them?  We have, of course, no idea what these prehistoric communities believed about a cosmos whose workings on the grand-scale was utterly mysterious to them. Extrapolating from what we know today of preliterate societies it is quite likely that prehistoric communities understood their surroundings in terms of the operation of background sentience. To them, therefore, the landscape was full of awareness and sacredness. Today, however, with our mechanical paradigm, we understand how insentient processes have generated these remarkable forms; we see these processes as being utterly unaware of us and themselves, with no power of empathy; in effect they are psychopathic! No surprise, then, that an atheist, when he saw the frightening and awesome spectacle of the recent meteor entering the atmosphere over Russia, should say “Nature doesn't care about us!”

Today we have to dig a bit deeper, quite a bit deeper in fact, before we find sacredness. But then we know a lot more than those simple Neolithic societies; a lot, lot more. So where we lose we also gain. We know today that conscious sentience is not to be found at the low level of the bit, byte, particle, or boulder but at the high level of the grand organization of the world . (See also here)

The Cheesewring, Bodmin Moor, UK. Perched pillows of granite.

Note: 
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2006/10/contingency-conjecture.html