British Isles

The White Cliffs of Dover: Albion

The Channel Tunnel, which opened in 1994, is 23.5 mi long and 250 feet deep at its lowest point.

A quoit, one of 100s; a remnant of an ancient burial mound, Salisbury Plain, England

Celts spread across Europe,

900 BC

Irish Christian Saints enter Cornwall, England ~ AD 500

Truro, Cornwall (Kernow) Cathedral

Eire

Old Sarum, an iron-age village, inside a Norman fortress, with a ruined cathedral footprint, Salisbury Plain

Avebury, an iron-age village with a modern village inside the earthworks. Silbury Hill at top center, the largest earthwork in Western Europe, Salisbury Plain

Avebury is older than Stone Henge

Silbury Hill, Largest earthwork in Europe, outside Avebury, England

Bath, England, western Salisbury Plain, in

Roman era, Aqua Sulis.

A brick Roman arch, Bath

Roman ruin in central London, Londinium

Londinium on the Thames (say Tims)

Anglo-Saxon Britain, the Britons were Celts

7th century Saxon church, Bradford on Avon

11th century Norman castle, Larne, Wales

Norman Castles in England and Wales

Norman Cathedrals, 1066-1174

Winchester, 1079

Wells Cathedral, Norman/Gothic period, AD 1176-1490

Glastonbury Tor is a natural feature and an ancient holy site on the Salisbury Plain. It is connected to ancient pre-Christian and Christian myths, such as the Arthurian legends and the chalice of Christ. St. Joseph Cathedral’s tower is all that remains after Henry VIII purged England of Roman Catholicism, slaughtering priests and bishops as he sought divorce and a male heir.

Oxford, a university town of 38 Colleges, 1200s to 2008

The “dreaming spires”

British Empire (after 1783)

Territorial Evolution of the British Empire

British Commonwealth of Nations

53 member states that were once part of the British Empire, organized in the mid-20th century at decolonization with idea of cooperation in trade and other endeavors.

The Industrial Revolution began in England’s Pennine Mountains, the English Mid-lands, where there was water power. It moved to London with the 1764 invention of Watt’s coal burning steam engine. The world changed.

Parliament on the Thames

House O’Lords

House of Commons

Rosetta Stone, British Museum, London

Found in Rashid, Egypt by the Napoleonic expeditions in 1788, the stone permitted the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. In three texts, a decree by King Ptolemy of Egypt dated 196 BC were carved upon it in hieroglyphics and the known scripts of ancient Greek and (Demotic) Coptic, a Greek language in the Nile Valley. When the Brits beat the French in 1801, the stone went to London.

The “Elgin” marbles, stolen by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon between 1801-1805. He sold them to the British Museum. Greece called, they want them back.

London on the Thames. A false color infrared satellite image that shows vegetation in red and urban areas in blue.

Lord Mountbatten, assassinated by the IRA in 1979, a seminal event in the Irish “Troubles,” 1968-1998.

Ireland

From the Book of Kells, one of the ways that Irish Christian Monks “saved civilization” by copying the great works of Christendom and other aspects of Western civilization after Rome fell and the “Dark Ages” ensued, preserving them for the ages.

Read Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin

Jonathan Swift-- Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal

Oscar Wilde, fox hunting is the “unspeakable in pursuit of the

inedible.”

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922), the first truly modern novel

Digging peat for fuel in the 1950s.

Famine is a political, rather than a natural phenomenon!

The Irish potato famine, 1845-1852, was a result of the Columbian Exchange and British oppression, which centuries earlier had forced most of the Irish farming population to the infertile periphery (beyond the Irish pale). Then they imported potatoes from the New World, which grew in poor soil and climates, to feed the displaced and dispossessed.

After several generations, the single variety potato crop failed as a result of blight (an airborne fungus, phytophthora infestans, ironically from England) and two million (half the population) of starving and sick Irish either died or immigrated to the New World or other refuges. Today there are more people of Irish descent in the U.S. than in Ireland.

The Irish Revolution of the early 20th century and the “Troubles” of the late 20th were directly and indirectly related to this disaster.

Irish who stayed behind after the famine.

Peace in N. Ireland, YouTube

Protestants (Loyalists)

Catholics (Republicans)

Belfast

Dublin

Dublin’s General Post Office, site of a decisive battle in the Easter Uprising, 1916 and a 1991 memorial in Belfast. The

leaders of the Rebellion were executed.

The Republic of Ireland was established in 1921

Bobby Sands, the first IRA Maze prisoner to die in the hunger strike of 1981.

The movie, Hunger, tells the excruciating story.

The Troubles, 1960s – 1998 finally ended, almost, with the “Good Friday” Agreement, accepted in a popular

vote across the island.

Catholics, Republicans, IRA Protestants, British Loyalists, Ulstermen, Orange Men

3,523 deaths on both sides

Murals in Belfast profess solidarity with other separatists groups: the Basque, the Catalonians, and the Palestinians.

Murals supporting the British Ulstermen in Belfast.

The London-based Northern Ireland government built walls to separate the Protestants from the

Catholics, 1990s.

This has continued.Belfast Peace Walls, 2014

IRA 9/23/15